Been another winter, not much happens during the winter really, so I thought I would post an update, still no pictures, only thing I could photograph is more bee poop. I have seven hives alive at the moment, we still have over a foot of snow on the ground and the weather is still hitting -10c at night. But the days are getting longer!

Of the hives I lost (had 15 to start the winter) one was already dead and robed out, another was also dead but not totally empty, 3 others were either light on stores or barely hanging on from the previous year. That leaves two that died for reasons I do not know yet.

Both of my favorite hives survived, one being the daughter of my favorite hive number 5 I think, my nasty Italian hive made it and a few of its daughters. One of my bait hives did survive the other was the robed out one that didn't.
This year I am planning to make small nucs from my best hives like I did last year with number 5, but this year I will have number 5, 2 and possibly another to make nucs with.

(non-bee related)
I have been spending a lot more time working on my buckle business these days and am close to getting a new buckle design into production!
You can check my work out at
www.bronzesmithdesigns.com
and at
www.bronzesmithdesigns.etsy.com

I made a few interesting observations this year since I have more hives then last year. 

Drones, This year I had oodles of drones during may, then after the swarming hives swarmed I noticed a severe drop in drone numbers across all my hives, I even saw some workers kicking out living drones. During July there was hardly a drone to be seen, fortunately all my hives were queen right so the lack of drones wasn't an issue. In June I began weighting my four box hives every week, most of them hardly put any weight on at all, this had me worried, all though June and July the honey income was anemic even my best hive seem to have stalled, I was beginning to wonder if something was wrong with my scale. Then the last week of July and the first of August we started to get some rain, I am starting to see a few drones plus hive number 5 put on 8kg in 10 days, number 5 is roaring with activity, its daughter (number 2 nuc I made in may) has almost a full box of honey now.

My conclusion is we must have had a dearth, it was very dry this year too, some places had drought conditions. I also suspect our early year resulted in a very low clover flow, since farmers had to cut their hay early then we had a long dry period the white and alsike clover didn't get a chance to flower.

Another thing I have noticed is some of my hives are booming and others seem content to stay small (nearly one box) I'm wondering if the bees from many of my hives think they only have a single box. Next year I will try moving a couple filled frames down when I under super, this might encourage more development, one of my hives even swarmed three times from only one box I figure they didn't get the memo, it might have something to do with the frame bottoms acting like a floor (pure speculation). I also plan to try extracting the honey from my frames to preserve the comb, I want to see if this will improve production. Most folks don't like comb honey, so if I can improve production by saving the comb I would prefer this. I plan to label each frame so they go back into the same hives, I'm not sure if this is necessary though since I'm not swapping broodnest (possible cross infection of hives). Ideas?

Just a quick update, bees are doing very well, all my two box hives are needing another box each so I'm working on frames (already have the boxs ready). Number One still has chalk brood problems, I'm going to try an odd remedy Anita told me about, it seems to already be working on the other hive I have with chalk brood problems. You peel a banana and place the peel under the lid inside the hive on top of the frames, then you eat the banana, very strange but it does indeed seem to work. Number one will be a good test since they have had trouble ever since I put them in this hive, I remember giving them an old comb, I think this was the vector. Comb is best kept to a hive and not traded around unless the mother hive is free of problems.

Not much to talk about went on in June, here are a few notes from my "journal"

On the June 16th I checked all my new hives for progress and queen rightness, everything is going well, all the new hives are healthy and working / laying. I also started to weight my larger hives.

On the June 19th I killed number ones queen on purpose, mostly as a natural form of selection, they had whats called chalkbrood, this can be and is controllable with genetics, only number one and maybe one of the bait hive catches has a problem with this disease.

On July 2nd I moved the bottom box on number 5 (was empty) to just under the top box. This is to see if the bees will put up more honey if they have empty space above themselves, up to this point my largest hives hadn't put on any weight at all so I was getting worried. I left some the way they were for a contrast in production.

On July 7th all my hives started putting on weight, even the small ones. I added a box to Number 2 (nuc I made from #5) they had filled their whole box, my baby is growing up!

On July 11th, Today I checked number one for a queen, I was going to just add a frame of brood from a healthy hive (just in case they were not able to produce a queen) but when I saw that little virgin queen crawling around I closed everything back up to let them do their thing. Now I watch for pollen to start going into this hive, nature rocks! All hives continue to put on weight, I'm assuming this is a seasonal thing since last year this same thing happened, they don't seem to do much producing in the spring up to the end of june, then the summer is about production.

To the left I have a picture of a feral bee tree, these gals are nicely tucked into a rather large tree next to a driveway. I have never seen one of these in person. Most of the feral bees I deal with are in some guys walls, very cool.

Some updates on my apiary. Number #8 swarmed last week, they are a feral hive I had from last year mostly black European bees (in appearance), It was a real treat to deal with such a calm swarm for once, this hive was well stocked so maybe the bees were calm because they were full. The real kicker was in moving / convincing the swarm to move into my hive body I found three queens! One was a nice fat looking one that I found and caught, I placed her in one of my little queen cages to convince the swarm that they wanted to move in, I then placed her inside my hive body (which was right next to the swarm cluster on the ground). Then I started gently combing bees off the cluster using my hand (gloved) and shaking them onto the ground in front of the entrance, once there were enough bees fanning they all started moving into the hive. During this process I found at least two more queens, jet black one and a smaller orange one. The next day I released the trapped queen so she could get to work, when I opened the hive there was the small orange queen on a frame all alone in the far corner away from the cluster of bees. My guess is that this swarm took along a few virgin queens that ended up being rejected.

So far only two of my hives have swarmed (to my knowledge). It was so early it might not even impact the harvest.

Clover is blooming here as well as Trifoil and Birds Vetch, as well as a load of other flowers, clover is the big thing though since we live in cow and grass country.

Number 5 is queen right (took an early nuc from her in may) as well as my bait hives. Both bait hives are doing well, all three of my swarm hives are queen right (from evidence of pollen, in one case and eggs in other two) even number 7 is starting to collect pollen (was a nuc from number 8) all they had was a few swarm cells a couple frames of brood and bees. Altogether this brings the number to 15, I have an extra stand just in case though. Now I just need to finish making a few things lids, quilts, frames ect.

I finally uploaded the video I was able to take from swarm n3-h3, It has some sound of a queen piping, what I think was cool is that the workers would stop and listen when she piped. The mother hive was actually piping for several days, with progressively fewer pipers to be heard, I know queens will actually pipe from inside their cells before they emerge, I think they sound different since I was able to hear one distinct piper plus several others that sounded the same as each other but different from that one distinct individual.

Swarm n3-h3 is swarm number 3 from hive number 3 or hive number 3's third swarm. Thats the aggressive italian have btw. This one was also very mean for a swarm, once they were in a box they are alright, if you look closely at the image you can just make out the queen in the bottom left part of the cluster. They all went into a box with some open brood (they stayed put I think) the funny part was the queen kept climbing out of the hive into the box I had shook all the bees into, so I kept picking her up and putting her at the entrance (at this point she would climb into the hive body), this went on for about ten minutes. That was the first time I have ever even seen a queen in a swarm. The next time my italians swarm I'm letting them go. The new queens that this hive is producing will be open mated with my other hives drones though so they will be just as feral as the rest of them in a while.