Bee Crazy

Trick or Treat

2011-11-07T12:32:00.000-08:00

From Halloween till now every so often the weather warms up a bit and the sun comes out then my bees will fly around a bit, this picture was taken the day before halloween (hive #5), if you look closely you can see a drone poking around outside, this surprised me since last year the girls didn't let any of them hang around, maybe they have enough stores and are warm enough to tolerate those loafers. Today I noticed one bee bringing in full pollen baskets once it warmed up enough for her to fly!

Not much happens for beekeepers from now until april aside from working on equipment.

Catching up

2011-10-01T07:33:00.000-07:00

Isn't it beautiful? on September 8th I managed to harvest a single box from number 5, fighting wasps the whole time. I figure one of my warre boxs full would net about 37lb's of honey and wax, each box weighs 10lb's with frames, so a full box would weigh about 47lb, depending on the density of wood and completeness of fill ect. Looking at the picture I can see a mixture of wet and dry cell capings. This is all 100% natural honey comb no foundation no treatments only a starter strip at the top. What's kinda of funny is the bees ignored my starter strips (and in some cases chewed them off completely for the wax in a few boxs, other boxs they drew out laser straight, I'm using wood instead of cardboard next time) and built comb 90deg perpendicular to them, I figure they were trying to improve ventilation since I had the hives warm ways for most of the summer, turning them cold ways really helped with ventilation there wasn't nearly as much fanning afterwards.

On September 10th I noticed #2 was in trouble, they were being robed, since I knew they were trying to make a new queen I was not sure if they were worth saving. If they had a good queen but were just to small to get through our winter I could bring them inside. I checked in the evening to see if they had a queen, but I could not find her so I assumed they had failed.
On the 19th of September I was insulating/winterizing my remaining six hives, I could still see a few bees working on hive #2 so I just had to check them one last time. I saw a queen this time they were very small and almost dead with starvation so I closed them up and brought them inside to feed.

From watching them going in and out in this clear pipe I was able to see them slowly start gathering pollen hopefully this is to feed new worker bees not more drones, this means I have a laying queen and they might make it to spring, I don't mind helping a good colony through a bad situation, but helping a bad colony (bad and or weak genetics) through normal circumstances is asking for trouble down the road. This isn't an ideal observation hive but maybe in the spring I can move them into a real indoor observation hive, this would be a lot of fun.

Drowning In Beer

2011-09-07T10:35:00.000-07:00

Man I hate wasps, I consider myself a nature lover, but all things in balance! One day I go out to do a visual inspection of my hives (something I do almost every day) I find my smallest hive crawling with wasps. Not by the entrance, rather all those wasps were getting very exited about a tiny leak in my feeder. I must have crushed twenty or thirty of the nasty little things with a brick before giving up on manual control.
I did two things immediately, I closed down the hive entrance with my entrance reducer, the next thing I did was empty the one side of my feeder and put all the sugar water in the other "non-leaky" side.
That was a few days ago and the wasp numbers are slowly coming down, I'm not sure if they are giving up or I have actually killed that many.
I also put up a few home-made wasp traps, we had a can of beer it the cupboard for a couple years now so I tried this as a wasp lure, works fairly well no bees are in the traps I guess they are puritans, wasps like getting drunk though. My trap design isn't very efficient though so I'll pick up some traps at the hardware store and see if they fair better. So far my bees are able to keep the wasps out. Next year I'm leaving traps up all year long, maybe reduce the number of queens making more wasps. Can you imagine how much trouble an open sugar feeder bucket would cause! Well I found an actual productive use for beer, it kills stuff, slugs too.

On another note I think my bees are getting ready for cooler weather, there is a lot of cappings under a few entrances, it looks like drone capping, usually the queen stops laying drones and workers kill all the baby drones, clean the cells, repurpose them as honey storage then some time later they start kicking out the adult drones. This actually gave hive #2 enough time to get their new queen mated if everything went well, they seem to be picking up a bit now, taking feed ect, so fingers crossed.

She Moved!

2011-08-30T20:02:00.000-07:00

This title needs a story otherwise one might get the wrong impression about just what or whom she refers to.

To begin I will give you some background on the system I had come up with based on warre methodology. In the spring I would under super (place an empty box under the colony) so the broodnest could expand onto new comb, this facilitates yearly comb renewal without breaking or disturbing the broodnest structure. Through the flowing seasons I would "ideally" remove some comb from a couple boxes above the broodnest this will let the bees harvest and store more honey without the need to fill a whole box (checker-boarding). I would keep the hives at four boxes tall with progressive harvests.

The images you see on the left are my box lifter and an escape board based on a design I found online.
Today I was planning on harvesting the top box from hive number five, so I placed the escape board under it and above the rest of the hive, this lets the bees travel downwards while preventing them from traversing upwards, then the idea was I could just remove the now bee devoid empty box of honey. I waited an hour and checked but the bees were still there, so I concluded that my escape had not worked, Ok I said time for plan B.
Plan B involved removing individual comb and brushing all the bees off one at a time, this went surprisingly well. As I removed the first comb (drawn out perfectly straight) I was impressed with its beauty, It would have made the most gorgeous honey comb. The second comb was just as impressive, the third at first glance was more of the same until I noticed some brood! So I checked a bit further and sure enough the queen was laying a nice pattern of brood in all this wonderfully new wax. This is why the escape board hadn't been working the bees did not want to "escape" they wanted to be in this box.

I was very excited about this discovery even though it meant I have to wait a couple more days to harvest. You see the top box on number five had previously been under the box that all this hives brood was in, this in turn means when I moved this box to the top thinking the queen had not moved down into it I was unknowingly moving the queen as well. This proves she will move down onto new wax just like warre says, only I find she moves much to slowly to always under super. I think under supering should be done once in the spring for broodnest expansion then on top for honey harvest.

Dwindling Summer

2011-08-26T07:05:00.000-07:00

Almost September, fortunately we are getting some rain now, this should help our goldenrod flow. I have been busy getting my hives ready for the winter, all three "italian" hives are being fed plus #1 (ronna's hive).

#1 is now showing no signs of chalk brood this is great news, they also have a stellar brood pattern another possible indicator that they are feral (feral mated queens often have a much better laying pattern then "bred" queens).

#2 (one if the italian hives) is not doing well, they obviously have queen problems showing signs of apathy from the queen, low brood count. I noticed a queen cell when I inspected on the 24th it was ready to emerge with a papery cap, she should have enough time to get mated if we continue to have nice weather with lots of drones flying, I don't know how many brood cycles she can lay before winter though, time will tell.

One reason I feed light hives at this time of year even with a flow on is because I don't want to break the bees natural cycle, most breeds of bees will reduce their numbers in preparation for oncoming winter, I do not want the bees thinking their is a flow that then suddenly stops, most often flows wont drop off suddenly like this.

I found out why I was getting so much bearding with my warre hives, I was running warm way (comb parallel to entrance), when I turned the hives to run cold way (comb perpendicular to entrance) the bearding virtually vanished, this means they can move air much better, I think this would also increase honey harvest, at least I know for next year. I am putting two 1/2" holes in each box on the entrance side for winter entrances and more air movement during the summer. I can plug all the holes except the ones in the top box, then when a new box becomes the "top box" I just unplug those holes. I wanted an upper entrance for the winter because bottom entrances often get clogged with dead bees during this season, I wanted the holes small enough for the bees to close if they wanted but big enough for use as an entrance, a minimum size for bees is about 1/4" but then they can only pass either in or out 1/2" should let inwards traffic pass outbound traffic and should be small enough for them to close with propolis if they so desire.

I also finished and tested my bee lift, works very well, no more lifting! Pictures coming soon.

Wax Production

2011-08-15T09:14:00.000-07:00

I have been looking for a chance to photograph a bee actually producing wax, on the left you can see the one bee that is "belly up" giving you a chance to see two wax flakes being produced under scales on its abdomen. Wax makers probably hang out near the honey stores because I often see them at this kind of feeder. I built some feeders for placement on top of a hive stack.
A short box is divided in half by two boards spaced 1/4" apart the two halves are sealed with wax, this allows the bees to crawl up between those two boards and down into the two reservoirs, I placed a screen set off of where I want the bees to travel by 1/4" this prevents nearly all bee drowning problems since they can't be anywhere without touching a walking surface.

Seasons

2011-08-11T11:58:00.000-07:00

August and the weather so far seems too be cooling off, and in-line with seasonal. This season our nights have been very cool with blistering hot days.
The above picture is one of my "Italian hives", sometimes with cool night weather the bees will stay put until the sun comes out then they go crazy with hundreds all flying around at once, I see this a lot if we had rain the day before.

So far all seven hives are doing well, I have yet to check on the smaller ones, those I will feed if their numbers or stores are low to get them ready for the coming winter. Hive number one is still displaying signs of chalk brood, the season is too late for raising a new queen though so I will try to get them though the winter. If number one survives I have a few options, one would be pinch the queen and let them raise another, or I could buy a new queen, I could also take a queen from one of my stronger hives and let that hive raise a new queen for themselves. I do not like propagating poor genetics so "number one" making their own queen is out.

So far our forage has been good with the exception of a late spring and an offset clover flow, that offset set back the clover since it didn't have time to flower before most farmers took their first cutting, so we are getting some clover flow now. I should be able to get some harvest this year, this is exiting since it would be my first real harvest since I started beekeeping.

Number 5 Progress

2011-08-01T07:16:00.000-07:00

I finally inspected number 5 yesterday, I wanted to see if they had moved their brood nest downwards yet. The short answer for this is they haven't moved at all. I put them in the larger red box you can see in the above picture when I moved them out of their TBH. This taller box has about half its hight taken up with broodnest with the rest being honey stores. This tells me two things, under supering is possibly limited to an early season event, assuming they move downwards when they expand in the spring. The second thing is the relative size they need for their broodnest, would be between 200 and 250 high in a 300 x 300 mm box, so my new box sizes will fill this need fairly well.

I am sure I can get at least one full box from this hive this year since we still have about one and a half month more of viable forage before our winter begins to catch up with us.

I also got the chance yesterday to test out my hive lift system, I wont post about it because I feel it was a failure, on to the next design! This time much simpler..

More Hot Then Not

2011-07-21T14:54:00.000-07:00

Hot humid and hot, did I mention its hot? I have been watching the weather network online, my region is supposed to be 35c feels like 46c! I can't imagine working in a bee suit on a week like this in full sun, that would be getting dangerous.
I had to move my last tbh into a warre today so I got up before the sun and finished before eight am, even small colonies do not like being woken before the sun rises, they get cranky and take it out on the cause of their vexation.

This weather does give me the opportunity to do a simple photo experiment on warre hive bearding. I will post the results in a few weeks.

Finally my apiary is converted into warre I have seven now, three were queenless in spring so I requeened them with italians from california the last and least of which I moved into a warre today. One is a new colony from Ronnas house, three are survivors from last year.

I am currently working on a lift / dolly, I got the idea from a german site that sells these things professionally built. Its a very simple device that looks like a dolly with a block and tackle, a sled on rails and a single wheel for load stability. Its powered by a cordless drill so one can raise and lower the sled without letting go of the handles, leave it to the Germans. :) I think every beekeeper needs one of these lift devices even if you only have three hives. Why lift dead weight that most unions would consider much too heavy for a safe working environment.

Bee careful and work safe!

Hot and Hot

2011-07-16T18:37:00.000-07:00

On the fourteenth I moved two of my "Italian queen" top bar hives into warre hives, since the morning and evening weren't too hot I was able to get two of the stronger ones moved over, the last one will get moved in a week, this should give them enough time to prepare for winter if not I will feed them in late august.

The picture above is of "Hive Number One's" queen, she is laying and still acting the part even though I chased her all over Ronnas log house. She isn't marked and is producing mixed offspring so even if she isn't ferrel she probably isn't from a breeder I love her colors though such a nice shade of amber.

One Italian queen hive moved with the "quilt" propped back to allow the bees to find their new home. I put all the brood and comb in the top box so it was easier for them to fan at this location, once they had settled down I closed up the top leaving the bottom entrance open of course.

Picture of my new Californian Italians fanning at the new hive location.

It was Soooo hot today, supposed too be worse tomorrow, bees will clump outside their hive when the temperatures are this high especially if there is a good flow. The warre system seems to work much better then some other hive systems, I have noticed they only beard when it is very hot and humid, my tbh's would beard like crazy even when it was cool with what looked like the entire hive, I even found some comb under the lid last year from this excessive bearding, they also wouldn't go back inside at night when the temperatures receded like my warre's are doing. The bearding is from humidity inside the hive, one cause is simply climate another is harvest. If the bees have a nice harvest they have to dehydrate the nectar into honey, this causes a climb in interior humidity levels, if it happens to be hot and humid outside as well then they can't keep the hive cool since their evaporative cooling system isn't as efficient, this causes some of them to wait outside for the temperatures to decline inside. I'm convinced a bottom entrance vertical hive is better for climate control then a horizontal hive system, I'm also convinced the square hive boxs are making a difference with better temperature control, but as they say the proof is in the pudding, production and wintering, will be the proofs.

New Italians

2011-07-10T16:54:00.000-07:00

Look my thirty day old Italian bees are starting to forage! I couldn't believe it, foraging age is supposed to be about forty days this makes these girls ten days early. I put the new queens in on june eleventh since it is now july tenth that's about twenty-nine days. I'm very pleased with this since they should be ready for winter when it arrives.

Number one (aka Ronna's hive) is already removing the string I used to tie comb onto my frames, I can't wait to see what they have been up to.

Hello Welcome Bees!

2011-07-09T06:39:00.000-07:00

This is a swarm moving into Ronna's nice log house, she managed to get a picture of this event in progress. They where uninvited though so she called me to evict them.

This is a before picture, eg. before the cutting, prying, tearing and general smashing.

This is what I saw once all the demo was done. The swarm was only six days old and already they have built almost a square foot's worth of comb, bees in swarm mode are very fast comb builders.

About a swarms worth of bees in my bee vacuum's inner cage.

These bees are getting the VIP treatment, here I am levelling their hive stand (needed for foundation-less hives if you want straight comb)

Gathering all the parts for assembly.

Place both hive bodies on the stand (plus base). Also before I place the quilt and outer cover on I release the queen since there are already a lot of bees inside.

I have tried a few different methods for getting bees from my vacuum cage into their new hive but this works the best, I open the base of the cage and lean it against the new hive's entrance so that there is a clear path for the bees to walk inside, the queen and more bees are already inside the hive, so the rest of the bees in the vacuum cage smell this and start marching in, really cool to watch. It can take a few hours though.

Hive number One, formerly know as Lazerus hive, is now host to Ronna's bees, the only thing they share now is the number.

Number one's neighbours, number one is the second from the right.

You can read more from Ronna's side of the story from her blog

Bye Bye Bees

Warre Progress

2011-07-06T11:45:00.000-07:00

I looked into my warre hives yesterday just for a progress update, #5 is moving down into their new box (shown on the left), their old box is probably almost three quarters full of honey. When I removed the fabric cover I saw honey comb and drones, a sure sign that they are storing honey in the upper box (drones love to hang out around honey comb), the frames were hard to move so I don't know how far they have moved their broodnest, this box was the deeper kind so the frames are harder to manipulate. This proves that bees will move down if given room bellow, I believe they move whatever way is open but they prefer storing honey above their brood, I also observed virtually no bearding during our plus thirty days with the hive in full sun all day and with humidity close too eighty percent, even the smallest top bar hive I had last year would beard to the point it looked like all of the bees were outside, I think a bottom entrance helps the bees cool their hives better, this plus the way my outer lids are designed gives an air space below the wood and above the quilt.

When I started building warre hives I didn't want to cut frame shoulders so I use set screws, an unintended side effect of this is the frames get less glued together since the screws are the only parts of the frame that touch. With my new frames I started pre-drilling the set screw holes in each frame to give a uniform placement, in the above picture you can see all the screws are placed in the same position. I place the set screws in the side of each top bar at the ends where the "bee-space" between the frame and the hive body wall are. This prevents the problem of screws gouging comb when removing frames, it also allows the bees to crawl under the screw into the rabbet between frames, so nothing can hide there eg, wax moth or hive beetle. The picture above is with the new set-screw placement and the one bellow is with the old placement.

Hopefully all this doesn't sound like bragging, I am just pleased that this system is working so well, I love innovative simple ideas especially if they mimic nature at her finest!

Shown right is the old brood box getting filled with honey, notice the comb is closer together then brood comb, this is very similar to what you would see in a feral hive. There is hope for a honey harvest this year!

Uknown

2011-06-30T11:12:00.000-07:00

Anyone know what this flower is? I found it in a shady spot the bees love it. It grows in low shrubby form.

PS. This plant has been IDed as "Spreading Dogbane". Thank you "The Bee House"

Flowers Of June

2011-06-28T16:09:00.000-07:00

This is Common Vipers Bugloss "Echium vulgare", I love the colors on this plant, it has a semi-thistle like fuzz that can irritate some one who is sensitive. The pollen from this plant is blue!

Sumac, bees love this stuff, not sure of the species, apparently their are many including poison ivy.

Common Milkweed, "Asclepias syriaca".

White Clover, "Trifolium repens", stuff is everywhere.

Alsike Clover, "Trifolium hybridum", apparently this is NOT a hybrid, its name is derived from a town in Sweden, according to wikipedia.com.

Red Clover, "Trifolium pratense".

Sweet White clover, "Melilotus albus", this isn't a true clover, its a legume.

Birds Vetch, "Vicia cracca", stunning purple flowers!

Bird's-Foot Trefoil, "Lotus corniculatus", also known as Bird's-Foot Deervetch.

Lost and Found

2011-06-26T18:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had a bit of a scare, I found a dead queen bee outside hive #8, the workers probably hauled her corpse outside while cleaning. I checked today and found open brood and capped brood, AND a jet black queen, now I'm scratching my head wondering what happened. When I saw the queen I put everything back and closed up the hive. So I don't know if there were eggs, this hive had been progressing much slower then the smaller hive right next to it so I thought maybe they had superseded their queen but the math doesn't work out, open brood puts new eggs under eight days ago, a queen from just hatched egg is about fourteen days. If I am mistaken and didn't seen open brood just caped brood and the queen I saw was new and un-mated, this might work since worker brood is twenty days to emerge, with the queen being sixteen days. At any rate I have a queen, I hope it was a supersedure then this hive might pick up the pace, basically the bees are re-queening themselves because the old one was used up.

Boxy Boxs

2011-06-17T06:51:00.000-07:00

I started making more boxs since I still need thirty for my ten hives, probably more, gota start somewhere though. This time I am making them 257mm tall (about 10") since I can get boards that are 11-12" wide I wont have to make boards, and I am box jointing the corners. My butt joints are not holding up to well, I think the wood I bought wasn't dry enough so it started to warp a bit, plus the box joints are prettier. I'm glad I didn't make thirty of the larger size right off the bat, also the shorter boxs will be a bit lighter when full of honey and the frames will be easier to manipulate since they are shorter. Each frame now has an area of about 11" by 9" inside still a lot deeper then deep langstroth frames. I think this should be deep enough for the bees to build nice natural brood comb.

Hive #5 was almost drawing comb in the second box when I replaced it with this shorter one, just in time.

Miscellanea

2011-06-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

Here you can see one of my foundation-less warre frames from hive #5, this one was blank when I moved them into this hive from a tbh on the 5th, most of the nine frames are drawn out now, not bad for ten days.

Some birds vetch I found in my "Bee Garden"

My patch of sweet yellow clover I planted late last year is going to flower this year!

A close up of sweet yellow clover buds.

My Life Without Zombies

2011-06-15T05:49:00.000-07:00

Zombies no more! All three queens I put in are laying and fat and hopefully happy, I checked yesterday to make sure they were laying even though all three seemed to be accepted sometimes the bees change their minds.

#5 has yet to move into its new box they are however crawling all over it, it hasn't been very long since I added this box though and they still have another frame to draw out in the first box.

Our clover is in full swing, its hard to see below the grass, it's defiantly there though, the girls are bringing back loads of muddy green pollen (clover), my sweet yellow clover has buds so it will bloom soon as well. Sweet clover seems late this year.

Let Them Eat Cake!

2011-06-11T19:14:00.000-07:00

Well royal jelly at least, I let my three queens out of their cages today, their new sisters seemed very happy since they had been working on this ever since I put the cages in. The first one was kinda slow and hungry looking, I hope she makes it, the second was nicely fed and lively and the last queen was a bit thin but went to work right away as though nothing happened. I will check them again in a few days to see if they are laying eggs, I am planning on moving them into warre hives in a couple weeks tops.

I also checked up on hive #5 since they were close to full when I moved them on the 5th, I was surprised to see they had drawn out one whole frame from empty in only a couple days, they also seem to have filled out all of the frame space left over from changing over from the TBH, this means about one third of each frame, thats about 4 frames plus reorienting too their new environment all in about six days. I'm excited about this kind of speed since it seems faster then my old tb hives.

Before I closed up I added a box to the bottom of this hive for expansion, this is supposed to allow them to keep raising brood without cooling off since they are already at the top of their space. In a natural colony bees will build from top down and move their brood nest to new comb as brood hatches, this is how warre hives are run. I plan to run them in a hybrid way, increasing from the bottom for comb renewal and managing their honey space instead of harvesting whole boxs.

I finished building ten lids, bases, stands and quilts, I also fixed an issue I found out about when I was trying to place the inside square of cloth directly on top of the hive. So I'm almost done this part of my bee project, ten hives doesn't look like much on paper but it sure seems to take a lot of work to build, fortunately I love building them, I have even started thinking about building a few hives to sell.

We Three Queens

2011-06-10T19:50:00.000-07:00

Well these queens have really put the miles on their odometers, they came all the way from California? Some where south of the border where the bee season is longer, they came to me for the express purpose of resurrecting my three zombie hives. A fellow beek kindly delivered them on his way to his own apiary. We put them in yesterday, all three colonies appeared to have at one point had a drone layer, whether a queen or laying worker only the bees know. All three colonies seemed very exited to see the new queens in their little cages, they moved over to her as soon as we placed her cage on one of the top bars. I was advised that one might be able to tell if they would accept her just by watching how they react to her from this brief contact, from the looks of things they will get along just fine. Tomorrow I will check in on them and release the queens if they haven't been released by their new subjects already.

Transubstantiation

2011-06-07T12:41:00.000-07:00

NEWS FROM THE FRONT

The last of the living colonies have been successfully moved into their new hive system.

They seem to be settling in well, I put a feeder on and poured about 1.5l of sugar water into one of the reservoirs, unfortunately it started leaking evidenced by sugar puddles under the hive, they will be fine though since they didn't have much open brood and it isn't raining.

Strangely I have three other colonies I thought were dead still active so I checked them out on the 5th, they all have caped queen cells and some caped drone cells. One of two things could be happening here, one is they have a laying worker trying to make queens from un-fertilised male eggs, or they had a queen at the beginning of the season that was becoming infertile. I am inclined to think the later option is true since I have never seen bees try to make a queen from male eggs and there is no evidence of a laying worker (multiple eggs in brood cells). At any rate I ordered three queens from a friend of mine just in case, if these other queens turn out to be queens and not drones I will make three nuces with the purchased ones.

This week I, as always, put together some more hive parts mainly frames, so many frames... The pictures below show first the freshly cut parts then the jig I use to assemble them square, the next picture is the pile of ninety-seven frames ready for starter strips and spacing screws. If you have any questions you can always E-mail me using the address at the bottom of this blog, I can't always see the E-mail address of commenters.

Second Conversion

2011-06-02T10:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was able to move my second colony into their new home. This hive was a bit larger then the first I was still a little disappointed with its size, only about three bars had brood. I'm not going to complain to hard though since they are queen right having survived my missteps. They had some honey stores from our resent dandelion flow that I had to remove (honey comb is much to soft and heavy to fix safely on a frame that is to tall) so in the evening I put one of my feeders on with a litre of sugar, just to get them through our current dearth, and to compensate them for my abuse of their home. Robbing activity was sky high, I figure the dandelions quit all at once.
Two days ago it was hot and I needed to work in my workshop I left the windows open, this time I removed the screens to let the occasional bee out, when I come back I find a crazy buzzing frenzy all over the shop! You see I have been storing some mostly empty comb in the shop until I could render it down, you would think they had found Valhalla from the looks of things. Anyway big mistake so I put the screens back on, propped at a slight angle to let the bees wanting out find the open crack, the ones wanting in can't figure this out as quick, they keep trying to fly through the screen. This removed 98% of the paradise seeking cuties then I shook of the screens for the last 2%, problem solved, I also moved the comb inside.

Conversion

2011-05-31T19:34:00.000-07:00

I finally was able to move my first colony into their new home today. It was so hot I had to wait until the evening to do anything outside, the part I like the least about beekeeping is the suit especially when it's above 30 degrees in the sun.

To make the conversion I rigged up some clips that slide into holes drilled into the sides of my frames. This pins comb inside each new frame, since I have never tried this before I hope they hold up. I don't like changing hive formates because I end up having to remove most of their stores simply because honeycomb is to soft and heavy to attach to a frame if it doesn't reach all the way to the bottom.

What you see in the picture is two of my warre hives, the blond one has a feeder above the single box, warre hives are square whereas langstroth are rectangular, I built my warre boxes a bit deeper then warre calls for so that their dimensions are closer to cubes, the beauty of a modular system is that if these taller boxes are troublesome for me in some unforeseen way I can just make shorter ones.

Shocking Developments

2011-05-28T18:37:00.000-07:00

Well this week I was finally able to get into my remaining hives for a spring inspection. I checked the first two, small but alive, it looked like a portion of the colony died separated from the rest during the winter, I had heard of this problem with top bar hives before, I was trying an idea I had called a queen discourager it was meant to act like a queen excluder that only discourages the queen from moving into the brood section instead of preventing said moment.
Long story short I thought this might have caused a cluster split mid winter. I closed up both hives and left for the day. The following day I inspected the next two hives, both of them had bees but no queen, the same split was observed, either the queen didn't choose the winning side or she wasn't mated properly the previous year. What surprised me was hive activity, what bees were left were raising a few drones making the hive appear alive from the outside. The last two I inspected also had no queen but this time there was no queen discourager. This leaves me with three living hives out of ten, needless to say I was disappointed, at least though I know the cause, mid winter cluster split.
All of this evidence leads me to the conclusion that at least this design of Top Bar Hive is not viable for our climate, I surmise that bees can and will move horizontally as shown in many feral colonies, what I missed was the direction the comb was oriented. It seems bees will often build along the longest axis, so in a horizontal hive they would often choose to build comb along the hive instead of across it, this makes sense since during winter the queen must move towards the honey stores this means she must travel to the coldest part of the hive "the walls" to move towards her stores, and she must do this many times with axially perpendicular comb arrangement, whereas with axially parallel comb arrangement she can stay nearly centered in the hive while moving towards her stores. In virtical hives this is a natural arrangement since comb is always drawn plumb, and especially in a warre hive since the dimensions are so close to an average cluster size and square. At least this year I won't be starting from scratch like last year, needless to say I will be moving all my reaming hives into warre systems, I do not feel like this was a total loss since I learned something from it.

Signs and Portants

2011-05-24T21:25:00.000-07:00

Its late so I will just post a quick update, today I saw a couple drones flying around a few hive entrances, this is important because it indicates breeding viability, I could probably make some "splits" now since it takes about thirty days for a new queen to be raised mated and start laying this would put it in July. I don't like forcing nature by doing splits or feeding outside of natural rhythms, eg. spliting before swarm season or re-queening as a matter of routine to name some.
The apple trees are finally blooming, so my bees have plenty of forage if the weather cooperates.
I'm almost finished building all my warre hives for this year, I can't wait to get some bees into them.

Dandelion Bonanza

2011-05-19T18:00:00.000-07:00

The weather finally broke somewhat today, it became nice and warm. With all this rain the dandelions are really pushing hard, I could even smell them when I was standing in the right spot, smells sweet. We need a few weeks of warm sunny weather too make up for lost time, or at least no more rain for a while. The bees certainly have no lack of forage as long as the weather permits.

More Crudy Weather

2011-05-18T08:11:00.000-07:00

This is turning into a nightmare of a year for beekeeping, all of April and now most of May have been cold and wet, last year the apple trees were almost done blooming by now, this year they haven't even started yet, we are probably two to three weeks behind the seasonal norm. I decided to start feeding my bees so yesterday I installed and filled all of their feeders, hopefully I'm not to late, I probably should have done this on the last week of April.

I have been using the extra time to build more warre hives, hopefully I will get a chance to use them this year, I know the swarm season will be short if we even get one, it will probably not start until the middle of June at the earliest. So I have a bit more time to get ready.

On the right is a picture of my new workspace, I modified a table I had for use as a work table it measures four feet square, I bolted my drill press onto one corner, it's nice to not keep hauling that thing up onto a tiny workbench. You can see the crown jewel of my workshop under a pile of 6mm frame slates, a delta contractors 10 inch table saw with a cast iron top. I really like having the wide solid table to cut things on, the fence system is nice. I bought a nice freud ripping blade for it, quality blades are always worth the money, now I can get about +-0.05mm accuracy with a nice pine board very nice! I also built a zero clearance insert out of 1/2 inch mdf, this makes ripping slates a breeze, worlds safer too.

A tower of seventy + frames all assembled

Dandelion Flow

2011-05-08T17:00:00.000-07:00

Well our dandelion flow finally started, It has been raining for weeks in a lot of places including ours, I figure the dandelions are about two weeks late this year. Our willow trees are in bloom as well, I spent the extra time setting up my workshop for building hives, I bought a nice table saw, since I am building so many hives I figured it would be worthwhile to buy some nice tools. My three favourite tools would have to be the table saw, drill press and drill (for screws). I will have to write an entry about my tools some time.
This week I will be able to start spring inspections. Basically I just check stores, quickly inspect and add some empty bars next to the broodnest for progressive comb renewal. Another couple weeks and I should have all my bait hives in place, hopefully.

Flowers Of April

2011-04-30T15:32:00.000-07:00

In early April we have Colts Foot and some willows blooming, depending on the weather around the middle of April we also have dandelions and our big weeping willow trees in bloom. If nothing else is available bees will try violets and ornamental maples just to name a few. We also have this stuff shown on the left I'm not sure what it is but it will bloom all year.

Warre Hive Construction IV

2011-04-27T16:55:00.000-07:00

Underside of the base, base is 354mm x 354mm about 4mm shorter both ways then the boxes, this allows for less water leakage from the boxs above, the landing board is protruding about 20mm with a 120mm x 15mm slot cut above it into the main base board, I placed a matching support board behind the landing board between the side supports, in hopes that the weight of the hive would be more evenly distributed.

Levelling the stand, since I am not using foundation I need the hives as level as possible so here I pre-drilled the legs (I'm using #8 2.5" deck screws) and then clamped all four legs to the stand, then I jimy tap and measure until the stand is level with a flat surface, tighten the clamps, check level again, then drive the screws. The stand is comprised of 8 lengths of raw un-dressed cedar 2x4's measuring 2x 570mm, 2x 280mm, 4x 250mm, for the outer sides, inner supports and legs respectively. Last but not least I will cover building frames from scratch.

Warre Hive Construction III

2011-04-25T06:16:00.000-07:00

The finished product should look something like this. I modified a design I found online, warres original design used an all wood sloped roof. This design incorporates a screened vent for exhausting excess moisture without drilling any complex sloped holes too keep the rain out.

The box is cut out and assembled first, 410mm x 410mm x 160mm. The the roof pieces are cut out fitted and marked for placement, slates are 450mm x 140mm, the small one is a bit of left over from making wide boards. The box is placed upside down on the slats then they are adjusted until 20mm is protruding on all sides and center slat is in the center, then mark the box position inside and out. This gives you a drilling guide and allows you to clamp the slats into the exact position you set them up in.

After drilling the slats clamp them to the box and drive screws in, I use deck screws #8 1-3/4" they are cheaper and hold better in soft woods. Do NOT glue boards down just use screws.

All the wooden parts are assembled.

The reason I didn't use glue is so I can run some window screening under and around the slats like so. Just back up the screws for the main two slats and remove the small middle one. This is to screen the space between lid and quilt as well as outside.

Now cut a square of galvanised steel 496mm x 496mm

Clamp and center the sheet of steel.

Once the sheet is centered tighten clamps and bend one side down. Now measure and punch a hole in the center with a nail then drive a screw through this hole I used #8 5/8 dome head screws for this. Starting from the center of the lid work your way towards the ends screwing down the steel.

When you get to a corner cut so that you can fold one side over the other to make a nice safe corner. After this is done you are finished your new lid! Next time I will show you how to build the base and stand.

Warre Hive Construction II

2011-04-24T06:03:00.000-07:00

Warre hive quilt box, 351mm x 351mm x 140mm slightly smaller then the box sizes, remember to account for the thickness of the wood you are using by making the inside walls shorter for thicker stock or longer for thinner stock.

Warre hive quilts use two pieces of cloth one is attached to the quilt bottom the other is loose covering the top bars, I put a screen between them to prevent the bees from chewing all the way through into the sawdust. I inset the screen to get the quilt as close to flush with the top box as possible.

The second cloth is loosely tacked inside to prevent the sawdust from escaping.

Filled with sawdust, needs topping up, I might need to mix with cedar shavings, this is just from cutting the wood for this hive, nothing is wasted!

Next time I will show the construction of the lid for this hive. Happy Easter everyone!

Warre Hive Construction

2011-04-20T17:46:00.000-07:00

A basket of designs, screws, pencils and some safety gear.

Gluing up boards for the five boxes in my hive unit.

Boards all cut out, 10x (312mm x 306mm), 10x (356mmx306mm)

Setting up the saw for cutting 10mmx10mm rabbets.

Cutting the rabbets, watch the digits, remember to count them before and after each cut!

All the rabbets cut.

All five boxs, my design is closer to a box then warres original is, I added 46mm to the original hight.

Next time I will show you the construction of the base and stand, and later the quilt and outer cover and frames (I use frames but NOT foundation, warre used both frames and just top bars, either are possible without modifying the box). The handles are just 312mm x 32mm blocks glued and screwed onto the box sides.

First signs of Pollen

2011-04-10T13:39:00.000-07:00

Well the long range forecast is looking kind of glum rain wise but the temperatures are nice, lows above zero and highs around 10-15c nice spring weather.
I closed up the entrances a bit from 2 holes to one since the bees were in robbing mode.
I also did a bit of spring cleaning, cleaned out hive #12 (this hive starved) whats nice though is they used everything, no honey was left some was probably robed, I'm sure they didn't have time to get it all. This hive was a late starter I probably should have fed it more for longer, anyway they made it through 3/4 of the winter before dying. I'm impressed with this since they only had about 1/2 of the hive full of comb, I'm not sure what their stores looked like before, from what I saw they didn't look like much. There was almost no mould, the hive was almost dry. They seem to get by with much less stored up then I previously thought, I don't know if this is because of the shape of the hive or because of the bees themselves, they are feral bees after all on their own comb sizes.
I was told by several people that my hives wouldn't make it through the winter for several reasons one was that they were on legs, this is obviously not true. I did however make some hive wraps for all my hives, when I removed one wrap to feed a weak hive I noticed I could feel the clusters heat coming through the top bars.

First Blooms

2011-04-06T12:36:00.000-07:00

I was out for a walk today and this is what I saw! Its called colts foot, the flowers appear first without any leaves then the leaves follow later in the season, this is the first thing that blooms in our area (that bees like) as near as I can tell. Always exciting the weather looks nice for this week.

Still in the design stage

2011-04-06T07:18:00.000-07:00

I am still reworking warre hive designs, its fairly straight forward, I like to think about all the possible problems with a design before building the first prototype. I read most of the book warre published "Beekeeping For All" you can download it for free from http://warre.biobees.com in his book he talks about different hive designs of the day, he ran 350 hives and dozens of different designs, his observations on colony success are invaluable, some of the entomological observations are wrong though.

Thats the beauty of proper science, even if the person preforming and recording experiments has incorrect ideas about things their data is still accurate. One example is as follows, warre believes that wax is bee sweat and since comb building was highest during a heavy flow workers were producing more wax because of their hard labour.

We know that wax is produced by pre-foraging age bees from special glands on their abdomens (I have seen this myself) and if you have a screened bottom board you will notice little flakes of wax looking almost like dandruff. Foraging age bees have scaled over their wax glands, at any rate this does not diminish warre's finding on hive design since they are supported by recorded proofs and not opinions.

I recently came up with a neet idea to hold starter strips, very simple and fast to build, using cereal box cardboard dipped in wax. To fix a 1cm starter strip onto a top bar I cut a single saw kref along the length then cut a 16ga wire (you can buy 1/4mile lengths for electric fencing) to the length of your starter strip, place the strip (un-waxed side down) into the saw kref then press the wire into the kref next to the strip, I was amazed that this system held so well, you really have to tug on the strip to remove it. This makes inserting the strips easy and reduces wax usage.
I assemble the frames with butt joints glue and 1" 18ga brad nails a 1cm x 22cm wide space is cut on each end of the top bar.
Then the 6mm (1/4") side of the frame is fixed to this with 2 nails though the side into the top bar, then I put 2 nails through the top bar into the end grain of the side, this prevents wobbling since the nails are from the side and the top.
Then I attach the bottom of the frame between the walls.
This turns into a very sturdy frame with minimal machining I only used a table saw. I use 22mm wide frames without spacing shoulders, I might install nails to space frames apart (drive a nail into the side of a top bar with 10mm protruding thus preventing them from moving closer to each other.
The last picture is of my home built silent fridge compressor driven compressor system, runs 80-110 psi no problem, cfm is a bit low but I can live with that it is as silent as any fridge.
I will post more design steps to my new hive when I have them.

Pooping

2011-03-31T12:23:00.000-07:00

Yup bees poop too thing is during the winter they hold it in for months, on the 29th (day before yesterday) I noticed hive #2 was really hoping. It looked like a mad rush for the bathroom. When it was all over, the scraps of snow around the hive were covered in little brown dots. I was worried because this hive was the only one out, I thought maybe this was a sign that they were going to die. Then the next day hives #8, #4, #1, #3, #9 and #2 were doing the exact same thing, #5 was the only exception they might be smaller then the others. I was very pleased to see that Lazarus (#1) had survived even though its daughter didn't.
I think because of the longer days and warmer nights the colonies are slowly coming out of hibernation, I didn't see this during the winter when it warmed up to almost +10c, smart little girls!

I have been doing some research into warre hive design, this design looks interesting since I will be building my own frames I'm not locked into using langstroth standards, warre doesn't use frames, it uses top bars and manipulate boxs instead of individual comb. This is problematic for me since our laws (Canada) requires one to have movable comb. An easy fix for this is to make warre frames, same thing as langstroth but different shape, I will make the warre boxs 1" wider on the one dimension to accommodate the extra wood from a frame and a bit taller. Using all boxs the same size is very useful since I'm planing to employ the warre style of comb renewal. This wouldn't be possible with two deeps and four shallows because they are not the same size, shallows are too shallow to use as brood boxs and deeps are too heavy for supers, I think a nice balance is using a smaller taller box, this is what warre boxs are like (although I will be building them 2" taller)

A warre system adds one new box below the broodnest at the bottom of the hive every year, the bees then build down and inhabit this new space filling the old space with honey. I think this is a neat idea because one doesn't have to loose frames from the broodnest to renew comb. In my TBH I will be adding new bars at the entrance side and moving all the bars over to accomplish the same thing with more work. I feel that comb renewal is absolutely essential to a healthy hive, most often wild bees fail after several years because they don't have any more space to add new comb and all their brood comb is so dark it becomes unusable, there is also evidence that pesticides and many diseases are more concentrated in old dark comb.

So that's what's going on, more info on the new hive construction when I have it.

Almost spring!

2011-03-15T11:50:00.000-07:00

I can't wait, really I can't, now where did I put my blow torch...

All kidding aside it won't be long now, today I saw several robins and some bugs that must have thawed out to continue on their journey as if nothing happened.

As near as I can tell I have eight hives still alive, 12 and 11 didn't make it, this is still eight out of ten, 80% wintering rate is very good. I don't know what kind of shape they are in of course, the way I found out was by listening on a really quite day at the entrance (ear right up to it) you can hear something that sounds similar to what you hear when listening to sea shells, for some of the hives others were to quite so I taped the side a couple time. Now I wonder how much honey they used over the winter?

Honestly where did I put my blowtorch? There is still snow to melt!

Winter check-in

2011-02-27T09:31:00.000-08:00

This is a picture taken from mid winter when it was cold! You can see frost forming around their entrances, it doesn't do this with the two dead hives I have so I know this frost is related to living bees, last week on a nice warm day (+10c) I went outside to check on my hives, I couldn't see anything outside so I put my ear right up to the entrance and gave a solid rap to the hive body, the result was a satisfying "Wrrr" sound. From what I can tell I have about nine hives still alive I knew I lost two in the fall from general hive weakness I also knew I might loose another since it was refusing to take a queen, so if I don't loose any more due to starvation then I will be in great shape.

I finally got myself a domain name SamsWildBees so you can use this now, there are still some issues with it, eventually the original url will redirect you to my new one but for now it wont.

This year I will be building some langstroth hives to use with my feral bees, the only real difference is in the box, I still wont use any foundation, my preliminary research indicates they are cheaper to build by almost half if you cut-out and build all of your own frames, also the comb isn't as tricky to handle, and they are much more portable. This is important since I hope to set up an out-yard this year too. The only thing I will have to watch is how much lifting is involved, there are some things I can do to minimise this, one is frequent harvests instead of waiting until the end of the season and dealing with huge stacks of supers all at once.

House Cleaning

2010-11-18T06:38:00.000-08:00

Lazarus At Work

So far I know ten hives still live, the weather is working towards cold where I live, usually Jan and Feb are the worst months, during a warm spell (+8c and sunny) one can watch the girls working outside their cozy hive, on a little house cleaning, they have chores to do as soon as they can. They will irreverently hull out corpses of there sisters disposing of them as quickly as possible, some will mill around for a little while looking for nectar. One hive I thought was a goner looks alive I'm not sure how alive yet, I will know in the spring, this is very encouraging for me though, last year I don't remember seeing them work at all after the cold weather started, so hopefully I have fixed the humidity issues.

Strange Beehaviour

2010-11-02T18:01:00.000-07:00

I have to say this is a new one on me for our climate, this photo is of an open air bee colony, you might see this closer to the equator but at our latitude it becomes much more unusual. A neighbour called me over to take a look, I was sceptical since most of the time people will confuse wasps for bees especially once I head her description of the hive. She said she saw a swarm pass by coming from the direction of my house in late July or August. Unfortunately since it is November now I can't save them, I was tempted to try putting them in a box inside our house, whole, then feeding them, this might work, the only problem is in getting the nest down without breaking comb off, since it gets fairly fragile in cool weather. They were still alive when this picture was taken, although I couldn't see any food stores, this is remarkable since we have been without a nectar flow for almost a month now and the weather is cold wet and windy. I was wondering if this is one of the hives that absconded on me this year, I had two swarms do that after installation into new hive bodies. It always saddens me to see such hardy creatures die out of poor luck, this is part of what makes them so adaptable though. They don't always pick a good location, if enough swarms are produced eventually they will find a good spot, they do not often fail in real estate scouting.

On a side note I know nine of my twelve hives are still alright, it seems I have beat the humidity issue so far, all that might happen now is starvation. Of the three that didn't make it two were queenless, the last one might have been as well, I won't open them until the spring though so hard answers might have to wait.

Bee Cozy

2010-09-17T20:24:00.000-07:00

Wow, she actually found a lot of pollen for this time of year, seems to me it is from alfalfa or some kind of clover, that pollen looks muddy green brown. Its comforting to me that they can still forage on something this time of year. This month I am building "Bee Cozys" for the winter, I'm almost positive they would be fine without them but if it helps keep condensation down and keeps the wind off the walls, then they winter better with less stores used, that of course means more honey for me at the end of the season.
I love watching them work on a sunny day, its hypnotic, almost like watching embers from a fire drift around in the night air. I happened to walked by while listening to my mp3 player when "wrong foot forward, by Flook" started to play. Its almost as if I couldn't hear the music they were dancing to until that moment, floating and drifting all in an amazing cosmic swirl so orderly, so ethereal.

On to more earthly matters, for now at any rate. The following depicts what I call my Bee Cozy's, all filled with cedar shavings, the side panels are sew from some two sided indoor garden plastic I had leftover from another project and landscaping cloth, the cloth is against the hive surface to wick away any moisture that may cometh.

The top is a 3" box that fits inside my lids and rests on the hives top bars filled with shavings, I use the same landscape fabric to cover both open sides of this box, this should provide some insulation plus deal with any moisture from the hive.

This year I expect to loose two hives, I probably have already lost those two since they were queen less at the begining of September, what I find interesting is they are the ones having trouble with robing, my other hives have no perceivable issues with this problem. I wouldn't be surprised if bees look for a week "smelling" hive to rob when the nectar flow is slow, this of course would be the most efficient way to determine the risk involved in such an enterprise without exposing the forager to this same risk. I could still be surprised of course but I wont be disappointed if those hives fail, I want strong bees well adapted to our local environment, plus one of those hives produced a swarm that is doing very well.

I often hear the worry from bee keepers that by catching swarms and letting the bees breed their way you will get swarmy bees. (begin rant) I think this argument is rather amusing since swarming is the species reproductive cycle all bees are from "swarms" whether its a division or an actual swarm doesn't matter. From what I can tell as long as bees have work to do they will do it, that's why you need to rotate empty supers under full ones, so the bees will think they don't have enough stores and keep working, otherwise they would focus more attention on swarming (reproducing). With top bar hives you just make sure they don't have a packed honey section, then the occasional swarm doesn't have a big impact on productivity and in fact would be extremely hard to prevent.

Breading out the swarming instinct is at best (in my opinion) short sighted and at worst damaging. It would be like breading cows that couldn't reproduce on their own, imagine a species so dependant on humans that it can't even reproduce? In most organisms the reproductive cycle is well protected, how do you know you arn't breading out something else as well as swarming? Assuming we know better then God is very short sighted indeed, remember once the world was flat, just because we now know it isn't does not change the fact that we thought it was... (end of rant) Thank you for listening!

September, Winter ready?

2010-09-02T10:51:00.000-07:00

During the last week of august I have been feeding my "light" hives in preparation for winter, I want to stop feeding before the second week of September. The idea is to give them food for the winter but NOT extend their brood cycle past when they would normally start slowing down for winter. Since golden-rod is our last major crop the first week in September is a good time to stop feeding (in my opinion).

Best case I should only loose two hives this year, #7 and #6, they both have some problems with chalk brood, and are NOT QR, I'm not sure if those issues are related, regardless death is part of the cycle of all living organisms. I don't want genetically week bees anyway, as long as I don't loose bees as a result of something I did I'm fine with some losses. My best hives are the ones I caught as swarms, either in bait hives or swarms, they seem to be the most organised, and productive.

I finished building my last three hive bodies for this year, I only needed one so I will have a couple extra for next years inevitable increasing.

#11 (nicknamed: School house bees) Is being very obstinate, I'm hoping this will translate into hardiness. They must have raised two or three queens by now but they rejected all of them, I had to remove a laying worker, then I tried merging a small nuc with this hive, I was hoping they would accept this new queen. Well no. They didn't, the next time I checked they had several queen cells, they might be able to mate a queen before winter makes this imposable though.

One thing I have learned this year is how to manage top bar hives. My goal was/is to produce honey, for this purpose (and others) you need the broodnest at the entrance end of your hive with the honey at the other, every year you will also need to introduce new empty bars so the bees can continue to build new comb (comb renewal) this process is vital for the health and ultimately survival of any colony. This comb renewal dovetails well with my first objective, bees will most often (depending on the season, and if QR) use new comb space for brood, so by adding space near the entrance of each hive during the build-up season you will have your broodnest focused at that end, with honey at the other.

My last harvest for this season was again from hive #3, I wasn't expecting much honey this year since I started all my hives from virtually nothing.
When I harvest honey three grades are usually present, comb grade is the whitest purest and best, liquid is from slightly darker comb and comb that has cured honey but isn't caped yet and cooking honey from very dark comb and the residue retrieved after heating the wax to purify and filter. I still get a lot more comb honey from my TBH then would be possible in reusable frame hives, I was thinking of trying some reusable comb for my TBH I would have to build a special extractor first though.

On the right I was able to photograph a bee hovering in front of one of our sunflowers, the left shows that even garlic is a nice forage plant!

August Already

2010-08-07T18:06:00.000-07:00

Hmm August already, even though we have about two more months of forage it feels like I'm running out of time, days are nice in the twentys nights are cool in the tens. The forage is slowly shifting from clover towards goldenrod plus some other sources joe pye-eye weed and globe thistle to name a couple.

The bees I removed from that old school house are doing well, I will feed them until fall in hopes of getting them through the winter in a nuc. They actually have a queen now! When I checked she was laying eggs happily, the time constraints prohibited raising a new laying queen from eggs so I assume I vacuumed up a virgin queen along with all those bees, she must have mated here at my home apiary then started laying eggs.
I have also started building three more hives, I will probably put both nucs (Lazarus swarm and school house nuc) into one hive body as nucs to over winter. I plan to build wraps for all my hives to keep the bitter winter wind off of their wooden walls, I hope this will do two things, reduce humidity build up inside and reduce heat losses due to wind chill.

I plan to harvest some comb from #3 soon since they should be packed by now, I might be surprised with my other hives, probably though they will just be ready for winter since they had to build hives from scratch this year, I'm hoping next year I will have a normal harvest cycle.

High Time

2010-07-25T21:17:00.000-07:00

Lets see I will recap this last two weeks then expand, this is what happened since I posted last:

Lazarus swarmed,

I harvested a small amount of honey,

I finished removing bees from an old school house,

I planted a strip of our yard with sweet yellow clover,

I tried a new swarm removal technique,

I'm testing a queen discourager.

From the beginning, #1 swarmed
It was a nice sunny day after several soggy wet days, so I was sitting outside watching my bees work, I noticed Lazarus was unusually busy she also kept getting more and more active, so I was thinking wow and she went from dead to this! Then I realized that it wasn't simple industry causing all the commotion they were swarming! So as usual (it becomes almost routine) I gathered the equipment needed to house my new swarm from my favorite hive, this time I would install them into a bait hive that already smells like bees so they will accept their new home properly.

I also tried something new this time, I attached a bucket onto the end of a fifteen foot pole. I used this to "shake" the main cluster into then pour all the bees into my box. The results were wonderful baring only one thing, everything went beautifully, bees got settled, I didn't have to climb a ladder or cut branches, the only caveat was this bucket system seems to agitate normally docile bees. They were mad! I'm lucky I had donned my vial, as it was I got stung twice in the hand. My camera operator was not so lucky, she got stung in the forehead, this of course ended up causing swelling around the eyes, If you have ever watched "star trek deep space 9" then you would understand the odo look.

Honey
This is what everyone seems to want, whenever I talk about bees people always want to know how I harvest honey, honestly why wouldn't they want to know about my bees? Honey is just the reward for housing them. I had to remove a couple combs in #3 since they were getting jammed with comb almost all the thirty bars had comb, since this hive was queen-less they had even filled some broodnest with honey, I am of the opinion that they will open space for a queen to lay when needed since otherwise colonies would always fail after swarming. As long as I give them space to put more honey, since this is what they live for. This honey is remarkably clear, it almost looks like apple juice except for the high refraction, it tastes mild but very sweet. It might be soya been honey since several fields were planted near us this year, we also have alfalfa and clover fields close by, no shortage of forage this year.

Nasty Mean Bees
The day I set out to finish removing the leftover bees from this old schoolhouse down the road from were I live, started out pleasant enough, nice weather a nice breeze. However once I removed the temporary cover I was using to keep the hive sheltered, the day got slightly less pleasant. Not until that day have I ever been chased away from a cut-out after only a few minutes of work. The bees were not just buzzing but stinging like crazy! I was fully suited mind you they found ways through non the less. So I put a jacket under my bee suit, since the jacket was bulky it would keep the suit away from my skin, and thus away from stingers , this worked like a charm, I also smoked them while I vacuumed, sadly they did not have any brood to speak of almost no capped brood. I didn't even see any queen cells caped or otherwise. I pulled a bar of brood / eggs from two of my hives, put them in two nucs then divided bees between them. when I complete some more full hives this month I will probably combine them for the winter.

Crop Of Honey

Above is bees foraging on "Bird's-Foot Trefoil"

Picture of newly germinated "sweet yellow clover" left, "purple loosestrife" right

I was so exited when I found a supplier of sweet yellow clover seeds, most places sell white clover for planting in your lawns, I needed the kind that will grow three feet tall, bees absolutely adore this stuff, an acre of this stuff can by some accounts produce one thousand pounds of honey, and given the opportunity bees prefer this to most other forage plants. Bees being pragmatic creatures will forage plants that not only produce large amounts of nectar but high quality nectar thus reducing the need for evaporation and increasing foraging efficiency!

As to the Queen discourager. It is supposed to work like the excluders used in commercial operations except it doesn't actually prevent the queen from laying eggs in your honey, all it does is form a semi division in a hive separating honey from brood, since she will keep the brood all in one place this uses her instincts to get her to keep all the brood in one side instead of spread out along the length. So far it seems to be working, I will know for sure soon, she only seems to lay drone eggs on the other side of the "QD", I have seen this phenomenon in natural feral hives before,
in this picture you can see the dark brood comb in one stud section with the lighter honey on either side separated by studs. This is how a QD works in theory.

Reflections On Perspective

2010-07-12T11:36:00.000-07:00

Temperature is still to hot for me. Fortunately the humidity is closer to normal now, I know it's cliché, it's also true, since our bodies rely on evaporation to cool us down more humid weather reduces evaporative cooling efficiency, thus making us poor northerners miserable.

Top bar hive management just like anything new takes some adjustment in perspective, I had it in my head the bees would build almost twenty bars of broodnest and only fifteen or so bars of honey, since my system uses 1-1/4" bars with 1/4" spacers for honey bars. I was envisioning needing only ten or fifteen spacers per hive, this might not be the case with the majority of my hives, many are building less then ten bars for their core worker brood nest. This also puts to rest my concern about lack of space inside my 48" hives, if they only build up to twelve bars of brood I will have plenty of room in most of my hives for a full colony, the odd colony will be super big but hopefully this will be an anomaly instead of the norm.

You can tell when they start on drone/honey comb because the comb will start to wander off the top bars center, this would get worse and worse until you have a crossed comb mess, bees will build honey comb about 1-1/2" apart so by placing a 1/4" spacer between bars I get 1-1/2" center to center. My mistake was not realising that a broodnest can be so small, I was waiting for them to get to fifteen or twenty bars, fortunately the problem did not get beyond simple repair. Since most of my hives were cut-outs they had straight comb to guide more straight comb. I only have two problem hives that I didn't check frequently enough, the broodnest on both hives is nice and straight for about five or six bars then the comb starts moving off center, after that it starts curving away from the brood at each end of a comb to form a C. Standard tbh 101 is to check comb building twice a week until the colony is well into honey production to prevent problems with cross comb. They seem to always start exactly on center though. Last year I had trouble with cross combing from the start with one hive due to an under represented comb guide (wax line in a saw kref) this year I built everything with nice 7/8" deep triangles, the comb is much more solid and the bees nearly always start exactly on center.

A strange thing happened with hive #11 (school house cut-out), When I installed it I knew I didn't have the queen there were a few eggs but I thought since #7 had so many QC's I may as well give them a head start since from egg to emergence a queen takes about sixteen days. Anyway I did an inspection today (July 12th) and found young brood, but no eggs, I also saw capped queen cells. The way I figure it given ideal conditions the queen emerged, mated (in the minimum time) started to lay eggs, then for some reason the bees ether killed her, she swarmed or she died. I asked them why they didn't like her but they only stared at me and buzzed.

Two of the swarms I caught this year decided to find other accommodations, I found their hives empty (this is not uncommon with swarms / package bees), both were installed into my new hive bodies, so I was thinking next time I should rub some beeswax on the inside to make the interior smell better to them.

All my hives are full thanks too one swarm, one nuc, two bait hives and seven cut-outs. Most of those hives have queens. Next year I wont do cut-outs after the first week of june, since hives are too big to manage after this time. I want to place more bait hives since it was a very exiting way to get bees.

Perspective is relative, sometimes a better solution to a problem is to change ourselves rather then everything else, for with a different perspective we ARE the problem. Understanding is the first step towards resolution, action is the next.

Its The Humidity

2010-07-07T07:22:00.000-07:00

Doesn't it annoy you when you are happily complaining about the heat to someone when they turn around and say "its not the heat its the humidity"? In my opinion a humid cool day is tolerable so it isn't the humidity alone.
This week (July 4th onwards) looks to be very hot in excess of 35c!
On excessively hot muggy days bees will have to exit their hive to keep the inside the right temperature. Since they cool their hives by evaporation, humidity can inhibit the cooling process, that's why they hang off the front of their hives, to keep the inside a manageable temperature, since bees are cold blooded insects they cant control their blood temperature like humans, instead they ether flap their wings or vibrate their wing muscles cooling or warming the hive. On hot days they haul lots of water to the hive for evaporation cooling. On an individual scale if foraging when the temperature is to low (13c minimum) they take breaks to warm up by vibrating their wing muscles to heat up their bodies, when the temperature is to hot they will regurgitate some nectar for a bit of evaporative cooling during flight (or so I have read). Its quite a task for a cold blooded creature to stay the right temperature!

On July 4th I got a call that some one had a swarm in their tree, so I put a box in the car and took off, swarms are unpredictable, they sometimes stay for less then an hour, sometimes they stay longer up to a couple days, I was hoping they would wait long enough for me to get there. On my way to the swarm I ran into a parade and had to drive around it, why do people always have parades when I want to get somewhere? Don't they know that they are inconveniencing me? Doesn't the earth orbit me? (I looked it up the earth does indeed orbit the sun, not me!) As it turns out this swarm did wait for me, it was in an evergreen tree about twelve to fifteen feet up, I placed my little nuc box under it then cut the branch, bees fell mostly in the box mostly all over me, they started settling on another branch where the first had been so I cut this one as well with similar results, then I partially closed the box and watched to see what they would do. Well the ones on the ground started marching into my box! although they never all went inside (maby due to the heat) they did seem to have chosen a home, this notion of mine was further reinforced when the bees started getting aggressive, defending their home. So I left them for the day. In the evening I came back stapled screen over them and took them home. When I got home I moved them into a "nuc ready" hive that only has a six bar nuc at one end, so they are duplexing with my other bees, divider board in place, of cource, good fences make good neighbours after all.
While I was doing this I noticed that hive #9 was very inactive (was a small swarm with VQ) so I opened it to find out why, the answer was simple no bees! Just a small 3" by 2" comb, that is what absconding hives look like, the bees (sometimes for unknown reasons) just leave after installing a package or swarm, I'm wondering given the heat if the single hole I left for their entrance wasn't enough space for their tastes what I would realy like to know is were they went. Ahh well I had needed space for the bees I had just caught in my bait hive. Did I ever say how much I love bait hives? They are even better then swarms since all you have to do is close them up after dark and go!
Next year I am not doing cut outs, just bait hives swarms and nucs.

July 3rd, My last cut out for the year was at an old school house, I had only one space left in my home apiary so I thought this would be a nice final addition for the season. Once I get started it looked like a big hive, and as usual it seems to be in the wall between the studs, so I was thinking about three or four feet high maximum five. after about five hours of work removing boards I still haven't seen the top, probably up to the rafters. Looking at this "monster hive" for I have not myself seen one biger, I was doing a bit of math and realised they wouldn't all fit into one of my four foot long top bar hives, I would have to leave some behind. This didn't sit well with me since I have no more room in my humble apiary being at capacity with twelve hives.

If anyone wants some bees and doesn't mind doing a little work there are about two more hives worth for the taking just send me an E-mail and we can arrange something. My E-mail is at the bottom of the site.

Bees Will Be Bees

2010-07-02T17:17:00.000-07:00

Finally the rain has let up, after about three or four days of rainy dark cool weather we are looking at a solid week of sun and heat. Perfect conditions for producing nectar! This of course means if a hive wants to swarm they will do it now. I had a gut feeling that this would happen with one of my hives. As it turns out I was right, a small swarm left their hive as I was working in the home apiary inspecting all my hives. They came out of hive #7, this same hive produced a swarm on June 22nd, this gives me eleven days, between swarms what that tells me is this swarm was a virgin queen.

For a queen the maturation times are as follows: 3.5 days to hatch from an egg, cell is caped 8 days from the time it was laid (4.5 days from hatching), it emerges 16 days from being laid.

By this I know that the old queen was laying swarm eggs on the 18th of June. From looking back on my logs I noted on the 20th a large number of bees "hanging out" in the empty space at the far end of hive #7, I have seen this before with another hive just before they swarm. Next time I see this I will make a nuc with the old queen forcing an artificial swarm. I tried this with hive #3 since they to were gearing up for a swarm having laid eggs in a couple queen cups, I removed the old queen along with three bars of brood and honey, plus some extra bees effectively making a nuc. Upon inspection I found a LOT of queen cells something like eight or more, I also saw one was chewed out, and I saw a queen (probably virgin, un-mated) hopefully this means they are finished with swarming and she will continue destroying her competition until she is truly queen. What I find intriguing with these feral bees is their colony size, swarms seem to be numerous and small, instead of huge and few. I'm not sure if this factoid is dependant on weather, rationality, genetics or a combination. I have noticed that they overwinter in much smaller clusters then commercial bees. Another thing I have noticed is they don't seem to be held back very much for swarming since the swarms were on the small side. This is an interesting adaptation, swarm often but in small numbers, causing offspring to be widely distributed instead of massive numbers in few colonies.

Lazarus has to be my favourite hive, they are so determined to survive, gota love spunk. They are really taking off something like nine bars of comb now, mostly half bars. A far cry from the two too three hundred bees that looked dead when I inspected on the May 10th.

One thing I find a bit confusing with hive #2 is the presence of capped queen cells, they look like they intend to swarm but have only just moved into their new hive! Something like two to three weeks, not enough bees in my opinion to consider swarming, if the hive raises new queens and the old queen doesn't want to swarm she will kill all the new queens. It could also be a supercedure but those are usually unplanned, these cells look planed, only thing I can to is watch them to see what they decide to do.

With hive #4 (was a mean mean hive) I installed on the 21st of June, four days latter I inspected them, I found a capped queen cell! That is only four days, if they used a one day old larva that means they started a new queen the same or next day from installation, I was expecting them to take a couple days to reorient themselves.

All this swarming businesses brings my hive count to ten, this was my goal for this year, I only have room for one or two more colonies, so next year if all goes well I expect to be building more hives.

Three Days of Crazy

2010-06-22T21:58:00.000-07:00

This story begins with a simple hive inspection on Sunday June 20th, it then spirals into chaos (poetic license). My weekly cursory inspection went very well, on Sunday we had some nice weather making the inspection process a pleasant one. Since all my hives are new this year I have to watch for when they start building the section of hive used for honey storage and sometimes drone production. The reason for this is the bees will build comb in the main broodnest that is about 1-1/4" from center to center at about 7/8" thick leaving almost exactly 3/8" between combs, once the broodnest gets big enough they will start building comb that has much larger cells, this they will space about 1-1/2" apart so if I were to leave all the bars spaced 1-1/4" center to center the comb would start getting further and further off center making it hard to remove comb one bar at a time. For this reason I cut 1/4" slates and place these between top bars in the honey section of each hive, some folks use two widths of bars it really just depends on preference.

Starting from left to right: #7 hive inside, #1 hive inside, #1 hive's Queen.

As shown in the pictures above hive #7 was really booming, I was very pleased with #1 (as I call it Lazarus) since it has really grown from almost nothing to a large nuc size, I'm confident it will be big enough to winter by august.
Sometime latter that afternoon I get a call, it seems a bait hive I had hung in a nearby tree at the same location I cut the "lazy hive" out of had bees in it! This is the first time I had ever tried baiting a hive, it is really something when bees willingly move into a hive you built. I was so pleased, I like this kind of bee removal, drive over after nightfall when all the foragers are in the hive, staple screen over the entrance, remove hive and take home! Simple.

Above are pictures of the bait hive bees, In the center one you can see the queen laying eggs!

Day 2: June 21st (the madness continues)

I get up bright and early since today I have a cut-out to do at the same place as the first three. This house is a bee magnet the owner said they have had bees for thirty plus years, this is one of four locations, each location sporting multiple colonies, that I have found feral surviving bees. Bees that have wintered, are thriving throwing off swarms.

Now with this cut-out I had as (I do with every cut-out) surveyed the situation before loading up the car with my equipment, most cut-outs I do take about 5 to 8 hours total, so it isn't quick. These bees were nice enough when standing outside their hive initially. Once I started pulling off the wood they became downright nasty, now I wouldn't call them killer bees since those will chase you for miles, but they were still very unhappy with me, I had to use my smoker to keep the alarm pheromone covered up a little, I could actually smell it when I was close enough to the hive itself. It took some doing but I managed to remove brood and bees, using my bee vacuum and brush I got the brood comb into my nuc with bees to cover it, then sucked up 95% of the leftover bees. Unfortunately I failed to find the queen. Now she might have gotten sucked up into my bee vac, in which case I should have her here. If I missed her leaving her behind she will probably die. This sounds sad but realistically it's only a small setback for the colony, they will raise a new queen using eggs, then roll right along like nothing happened. I'm positive I saved some eggs, to be sure I'm going to check in three days to see if I have new eggs (in this case the queen is still here) or new queen cells (this means she isn't and the bees are fixing the problem). If I don't see ether of these things I will wait another three days and check, if needed I will add a bar of new eggs from another hive. By the way working on top of a ladder is nasty business I wouldn't recommend it. I got home installed the bees, installed the bait hive (it was just resting on the lid of a full length hive), then crashed.

Day 3: Cycle of life

Day three was turning out to be just another average Tuesday, until we noticed that hive #7 was swarming! A swarm is like nothing else, basically an entire hive is flying around, swarms are how honey bees reproduce, the old queen will decide to swarm when there are enough bees to leave behind a healthy hive and enough to take and start a new hive. She takes some (ten thousand or so, some swarms are bigger then others) bees and leaves the old hive, usually she lays eggs in several queen cups before leaving so the old colony has new queens on the way. the swarm will buzz around for a while then settle on some branch or other place until a new home can be found by scout bees, once the new home is located the swarm will take off and colonise this new location. In this way one colony becomes two. Effectively reproducing the species. All of this is OK if the swarm is a normal size and the hive is strong and healthy and swarms for normal reasons, a lot of bee-keepers hate swarms simply because their bees are leaving, as long as the bees have enough space inside the hive then they shouldn't swarm unnaturally often. At any rate once they have decided to swarm there isn't much you can do to stop them aside from artificially swarming a hive by removing the old queen and some bees/brood to start a nuc. Swarms are notoriously quick at building new colonies so if you can catch them they make exellent hives. One problem is often they will settle on a tall tree out of reach, as happened this time. Well I got a ladder and pruner (the kind that is mounted on a long pole with a rope) wiggled up the tree and cut the branch off. I had no idea what would happen when the branch fell some thirty feet to the ground, it wasn't a large branch so hopefully the bees wouldn't get damaged. It all turned out well once the branch was on the ground the bees just settled on it making it easy to pick up and shake off into one of my hive bodies, poof insta hive! I kept an eye on them for a bit to make sure they didn't leave (as they sometimes do) that was that! Three new hives in as many days.

Sunny Break

2010-06-13T17:42:00.000-07:00

We caught a sunny break in the weather so I was able to finish off inspecting my five hives. I only had two left. A full brood inspection usually takes me about an hour per hive, what I realised though is that if the bees are drawing comb on the guides and are doing well I don't have to do a full inspection just inspect the honey storage end so they don't get crowded. This would save lots of time for me.

I removed the lid for Hive #6, I always start at the far end from the entrance this is were the bees start building large cells (for storing honey and raising drones), they also space their comb further apart so it starts moving off the center of normal brood bars (1-1/4"), some people use honey bars (1-1/2") I just cut 1/4" strips and space out the brood bars in the honey part of the hive. I had a follower board at the honey end about 2 bars. Once I removed these bars I had ANTS! I don't like ants in my hives nether do the bees, they usually freak out and buzz around, this time though I actually saw a bee fight an ant. Bees can't sting humans (and other soft skinned animals) more then once, their stingers have microscopic barbs on them, causing the stingers to anchor in our skin, this then causes the lower abdomen to tear away from the bee leaving behind a poison sac attached to the stinger. This sac continues to pump poison into our skin (for a short time) unless removed. Now it is my understanding that bees can actually sting most other insects multiple times causing the death of said insect! What I saw looked exactly like this, a couple of bees actually fought the few ants that scurried under the follower board. I had previously only seen them buzz and run around, I have never seen them fight ants before. I'm not entirely sure but I think the ants and the bees that fought them all died, since this is north of the equator we don't have the really nasty kind of ants. At any rate I finished then closed up the hive without and space for the ants to hid from the bees.

Hive #6 has worried me from the moment I removed it from the wall I got it from. They seem to have a problem with "chalk brood" as I understand it chalk brood is a fungus that infects a bee larva's digestion track causing it to starve, the larva then turns into what looks like a little chip of chalk, the bees will remove it from the comb. Now if I saw lots of chalk brood in the comb itself I would be worried, I always check for it, this hive though always seems to have it on the floor never in the comb itself. It is supposed to be caused in part by damp cold weather and or a weak hive that can not tend its brood properly, hopefully they will correct this problem when the weather warms up through the summer. At any rate this hive is off my nuc list (my list of hives I want to make splits from). All my other hive are fine and ultra clean If this problem persists I will have to re-queen #6.

Now this is something I really wanted to catch on camera, in the top right photo you can see a worker bee emerging from her cell ready to start working inside the hive.

Did you know bees sleep? Well on the left you can see a couple of workers with their buts poking out of some comb, they are on their backs motionless they aren't dead trust me. Another thing in the leftmost picture are a few drones.

Grumpy Bees

2010-06-12T07:40:00.000-07:00

I set out yesterday to check my hives progress, feed levels and such. Hive #5 you can see to the left has a nice amount of comb built up already, they have only been working at it for four days! They were in swarm mode when I picked them up, swarms are renowned for comb building. You can see the white sugar like dusting below the cluster? This is new wax flakes, bees of a certain age produce wax from glands on their abdomen, wax is then removed and worked into comb by more bees. I always check for eggs when inspecting a hive, especially when the hive is brand new like this one, I saw eggs! This means the queen survived being sucked into my bee-vac just fine. For a new colony like this I also feed so I check feed levels. They had used about 3/4 of the syrup in the feeder, I would have refilled it but the bees had kind of overrun the feeder.

You can see them building comb inside? This would prevent my float from working properly. I think what happened is I placed the feeder at the entrance side of the hive, this way it was too close to the cluster so they started working inside the feeder. I moved it to the other side with one blank top bar between the last comb. They had some honey stored up so I'm not to worried about the rain forecast for the next three days.

Talk about grumpy bees! I think the upcoming weather had them extra grumpy, now keep in mind I didn't use any smoke at all, I got stung four times just opening three hives! That's more then I was expecting to from all five hives, after the fourth sting I doned my trusty nitrile gloves, the bees were still extra grumpy but at least I didn't get stung. Bees have (like all life forms) a biorhythm, sometimes they are grumpy sometimes sweet, weather plays a big role in this, overcast cold or coming rain makes them nasty. If its in the evening more old (old bees tend to be meaner) bees are inside the hive back from foraging all day, spring is usually better then fall since bees are building up in spring with foraging prospects ahead whereas in the fall they are protecting their hive from predictors getting ready for winter. If there is a heavy flow and warm (not boiling hot) weather they are usually sweet, conversely a sparse flow makes them grumpy. Like all things in nature bees are 100% predictable if you know all the variables and we can't always be sure we do, this adds mystery to bee-keeping!

Bee Bonanza

2010-06-07T20:00:00.000-07:00

The weather was a bit cool today (17c high 8c low), as this picture shows that didn't seem to slow my bees down at all, in fact they seem busier then ever, I'm sure they must be taking off (population wise). My thinking is if its cool plus there are a lot of foragers out then there must also be a lot of bees inside to cover brood. For some reason it always makes me happy when my bees are happy, I must be suffering from some kind of mental sickness. Nevertheless I would rather be nutty then live without passion.

Today I also got another hive! I put this bunch of bees in hive #5 this makes 5 hives. This latest cut out was actually a recent swarm probably swarmed 4 or 5 days ago, they didn't have any brood aside from a small comb of eggs, so I know the queen is laying. I had a hard time finding her because of the lack of a proper broodnest, she always hangs out in the center of the hive near the brood since her roll in life is laying eggs. When I cut out a hive I try to remove the surrounding comb first so she has no place to go, this makes finding her much simpler. This time I couldn't do that due to the lack of brood, I ended up removing honey comb first then vacuuming up the remaining clump of bees always watching for the queen. I almost missed her as she vanished into my bee-vac hose! So I'm freaking out a bit hoping I didn't kill her or injure her, she wont be able to lay eggs if she is damaged. Upon inspection of the bees already inside my bee-vac I saw her moving around, whew! What a relief, she didn't even look upset, but man was she small I have never seen a laying queen this small before, anyhow her size doesn't worry me, all my feral bees seem to have smallish queens as long as she is viable. So after I caught her in one of my queen clips (extremely useful little things) I got them all back to my apiary unscathed and moved them into hive #5 I hung the queen clip from a bar closed up the hive with a full feeder and let them settle down. About 5:30pm the same day I went back and released the queen, I didn't release her directly because they had no brood so I was risking them absconding if she got to agitated, so hopefully releasing her in the evening will help.

You can see the second spot where old comb was left over from the other cut out I did, bees will take over an empty hive that still has comb in it if they can. That's 5! and counting

The Birds And The Bees

2010-06-04T20:32:00.000-07:00

Today the weather was moderate cool for June (25c ish), so I was surprised when I noticed my hives elevated activity level, they usually get busy in waves, lots of bees then few bees then lots ect.. It was all day this time, then this evening they were fanning more then usual. Ever since the apples quit blooming the bees seemed slow, like they didn't want to go to work, then today that seemed to change. Clover is starting so maby the flow has improved, after the apples I couldn't see any major nectar producing plant. They were even foraging bird vetch, which they most other times ignore completely. Another thing that could have happened, ether timed too or coinciding with, is a brood explosion, this is when a lot of brood emerges at once drastically increasing a colony's available foraging population. It would be interesting to know how well timed these two events are "brood explosion" and "start of a major flow". As for myself, I am just a humble observer content to watch all my little ladies work hard all day, well almost almost all day.

I still have to get those four hives completed before I run out of hives to put bees in. I think these four hive bodies have turned out very well, best I have built so far. I used my router to add a convex curve to all the edges making them look more finished, I'm planning on posting a build along of sorts on how I build my hives.

Yes it is the begining of swarm season, or as I call it "reproductive season". I got my first indication of this exhilarating event today when a guy calls me about fifty or so bees buzzing around the inside of his window, turns out to be the same guy I got hive #7 from. He asked if he could vacuum up these fifty bees, I said yes but he could also open the screen and they would just fly away. Grateful that he wouldn't have to kill a lot of bees he hung up. As I walked away from the phone it rings again, I pick up.

Hello? Yes he says, I think I have more then fifty bees he says.

He was walking towards the window when he heard the wall buzzing, the same wall that I had cut open to get hive #7 from. He also has a lot of bees at the old hive's exterior entrance. Sounds to me like he has the lucky blessing of a new colony only two weeks after the old one was removed! So I might have hive number 5 (not designation 5 but numerical 5) if I can get these new bees out of the wall and into my box. I'm not sure what to expect, I have never removed a new swarm like this before, should bee fun!

Always Somthing New

2010-06-02T14:33:00.000-07:00

Every time I open a hive I am presented with more interesting things to photograph. The more I work with bees the more I realise how amazing they are, one thing I have noticed is the smell of a healthy hive, you can smell honey being produced, brood being raised, propolis when opening a hive. If the bees get upset with you they produce an alarm pheromone, the queen will have a particular scent, its just incredible and like most anything else in life has to be experienced!
Have you ever seen bee knot work? Nether have I. This is some leftover rubber bands they have been trying to remove, they even drug a bunch of them to the other end of the hive in an attempt to dump them!

And here you can see the same knot being worked on by the cleaning crew, comon girls heave too! We can do it!! (insert motivational speech)

Now this is an interesting example of a queens preference for newer comb, I was wondering how the cut out comb would look once they built new comb on it.

You can see the capped brood around the edge in the light new comb, but only pollen and honey in the old dark comb. Having seen this I think I will have to start cycling out the cut out comb sooner then planed.

Time Out

2010-05-30T11:19:00.000-07:00

Temp: back to normal!!

The temperatures went back to seasonal norm for my area (25c to about 12c at night) instead of the bread oven hot of 34c to 25c it was for a few days last week!! The clover is starting, I noticed some sweet yellow clover on the road yesterday along with the Alsike Clover and Bird Vetch are all pushing out flowers, of the three the sweet clover is by far the best for bees, at high season if you spot a clump, take a close look you should see many bees happily working its multi-floral spikes.

Bees also need to drink. If your climate is hot and dry you will need some clean water near your hives, even if it isn't a nearby clean water source is a very good idea, you can create a slow drip watering station by punching a pinhole in the bottom of a bucket and standing it above a board, this lets the bees drink the water on the board without drowning and keeps the water from going septic. They use water to cool their hives through evaporation and to feed brood. So armed with this venerable knowledge I set out in search of a common watering hole for my four hives, I checked along our roadside ditch and found them getting water from our well run-off, this is nice since the run-off water is actually human potable.

Wax Melter 1.0

2010-05-23T11:17:00.000-07:00

Since it is sunny and HOT today like every sunny day I pulled out my wax melter.

You can see the thermometer inside, this design doesn't work that well, it is to deep, a better design would be a black metal sheet 4 - 6 inches away from the glass, this will be change when I get around to it. It will still reach almost 100c the problem is when you pile comb inside the top layer melts then runs down to a cooler layer and freezes, so a larger flat black metal surface about 6" away from the glass should work much better.

This is a shot of some de-waxed comb, you can see the cacoons made inside each wax cell by the bee larva, once the wax is gone they just fall apart.

A Dancing Bee

2010-05-21T12:59:00.000-07:00

High 24c, low 10c

I checked out my hives today to see if they had enough stores to remove the feeders, it's been warm and suny for almost a week now so they should be putting some away for a rainy day. I feed them only if they really need it. eg. I do something like cut them out of their former hive, or I split them, or I take to much honey and they are light in the spring. So pretty much if I do something to them that removes their emergency stores, they can't forage if its raining or cold. This being said I fed my four cut-outs until they had some brood stores, I don't like feeding all season since this runs the risk of making the broodnest honeybound. Hive #7 was ready to remove my cut-out frames.

I love hive #7 it is super clean, you can see the bees trying to shove the elastic bands out the vent holes, almost all the elastic is centred around the holes, some was actually worked out through the screen!

In this shot you can see all the pollen brought in by early foragers, this was at the entrance end so it seemed like all the foragers and foraging age bees were here learning and teaching nectar locations, they were also more twitchy at this end, so I was getting a bit twitchy myself, I just had a veil on with short sleeves, no smoker! Top bar hives are nice that way you only expose two bars (one side of each) instead of exposing the whole hive at once, since the bars form the inner cover.

Here you can see one of my bees dancing to show a nectar location.

This is a video that describes what's going on. (not mine)

Bee Dance Explanation

Check Up Time!

2010-05-16T15:01:00.000-07:00

High 21c and sunny!! low 7c

The weather is superb, this of course means check-up time for my new colonies. They all have eggs, that's a good sign. I was able to remove most of my temp cut-out frames from hives #3 and #6, #1 (Lazarus) and #7 I couldn't. #1 because it is still small and #7 because they haven't completed attaching the comb yet. I was pleased that Lazarus was so clean, they removed ALL of the dead bees since May 10th, I would expect this from a larger hive but these gals are really special.

In this picture (bottom left) you can see some baby bees, they are more grey and fuzzier then adults. So cute you just want to hug them and pet them and squeeze them and love them and name them george!

I filled all the feeders again except for #3 they had some stores so they should be fine, I like to feed new cut-outs because they have a lot of brood and no reserves, this can be a problem if it happens to rain a lot the next day or week.

My wax melter wasn't a huge success, I'll bee modifying it though, never give up!

Construction Continues

2010-05-15T17:47:00.000-07:00

High 17c, low 5c

The weather seems to be getting back on track, this week is almost all sun with high temps in the 20+ range! Very nice, for both the best kind of Anthophila and the bipedal primates who love them!

I was able to get some nice pictures of bees foraging the apples and crab apples, they act very differently then when they forage on dandelions, almost hyper and twitchy, you can hear the whole tree buzzing with bees.

Lazarus seems to be doing well, I was watching it today waiting for some bee to exit carrying a dead bee, it's always fun to see them clean house, they don't just drop their garbage out the front door, often they will carry it off more then 100 meters just droping it at random spots. This can be a good sign they have enough bees in the hive to devote some time to house cleaning. I haven't checked any of my hives yet on account of the weather being crumby. Since tomorrow is supposed to be nice this is on my to-do list. I don't want them to get crowded, I also want to see what their feed looks like, if they have some capped honey I can stop feeding the larger hives.

Also on that list is a test run of my solar wax melter! Photos of the thing in action will be forthcoming I hope. I am almost at the end of my building spree for the year! Weee!

On another note today I came up with a really neat idea for making my own nucs, several challenges to overcome are, practical construction, support structure, flexibility and wintering considerations. I believe I have an answer to these demands, if I use one of my standard hives and drill entrance holes in four places along the top of both sides, two on one side and two on the other, in alternating placement. Then cut out three extra follower boards, using those I can divide the hive into four section with about nine top bars each, sections have their own entrance two on each side of the hive. This would allow me to winter four nucs in one hive body, keep down construction costs, also all I have to do to convert it back is plug the extra holes.

Enjoy some pictures of the pretty part of the apple tree

The Lazy Hive

2010-05-14T13:31:00.000-07:00

This story begins with a simple statement, I have bees...

Hmm says I, is that right? Yes there are hundreds of them, they have been there for at least three years. So I said I would take a look since the place (Alexandria) isn't that far (about 20 min) from where I'm located (Dalkeith). Upon arriving I found out the bees seemed to be in the attic, so I check the attic, crawled all over trying to find a place they would nest to no avail.

Then I got a peek into their hive through the entrance they were using, this revealed that they were in fact inside the houses wall, between the studs. So I'm thinking to myself "great people hate it when you cut up the inside of their houses". Turns out it wasn't a problem for the guy, he needed to do some exterior work and the bees were making it imposable, they don't take kindly to people messing around "their" homes. So off I go to prepare for the next day, once home I loaded up the car with my equipment for the job threw a ladder on the car and went to bed dreaming of bees....

Early the next morning (May 13th) I got up and went to work. When I arrived at 8:30 am the bees looked like they were still sleeping, no big deal this time of year they don't get started till 9:00 or 9:30.

I was a little unsure of how the bees would react with an interior cut out since I had only done exterior removals, there was a window near the hives location so I opened it and left the screen closed knowing that bees always fly towards the light to get out, so in theory they should try getting out the window and back to their hive entrance which was outside. Then I measured the wall to find the right stud at which to start cutting. I knew the studs were 2"x6" (already non standard) but I didn't find out they were also placed 24" apart until I got a nice piece of drywall cut that measured 16" x 48", no wonder the bees liked this spot! They had about 6" x 24" x 48" since the insulation was missing for the top 48" of wall! Fortunately I removed the 1/2" fiberboard that was behind the drywall carefully, some of the comb was well attached to it. I gently pried the board back and removed individual comb until the remaining comb was not moving with the board and I could safely pry the whole board off the wall.
The bees didn't seem to mind the intrusion, this is strange since most commercial beeks think feral colonies are mean, this is my 4th feral hive and I have been stung maby 3 or 4 times in all, granted it is still early in the year and they haven't finished building up yet, and I do ware nitril gloves, to prevent them thinking me a threat. I don't even smoke them since this makes the queen panic making her harder to find.

The process I use for cut-outs is simple:

I remove the broodnest and (cutting each section so it fits my frames) place it in my frames using elastic bands to hold it still until the bees cement the comb to the frames. As I am doing this I shake / brush bees off each section of comb into my nuc, this does two things, it lets me cut the comb without squishing a zillion bees, it also moves the bees into my nuke. This is important because the brood needs bees to tend it, heat and or cool it until I install the hive at my apiary. Once I have some brood frames in my nuc the bees tend to stay put instead of flying off to search for their colony. This method works fairly well outside since all I want is the brood to be cared for, but inside it worked even better! I was surprised less then 30% flew off, big difference since maby 40% to 50% fly away with outdoor cut-outs. The actual comb removal varies from one colony to the next, this one was fairly easy, I always try to remove the honey first since it is on ether side of the broodnest, then I remove the brood leaving the center most comb until last. This makes the queen easier to find, she always runs away from trouble, since the safest place for her is the center of the colony you stand a good chance of finding her there. Sorta like a where's waldo game in the dark with a flash-light.

I vacuum up the leftover bees, since I found the queen before this stage I didn't have to watch for her while vacuuming. Can you spot the queen?

I make sure to set the bee vacuum to as low a setting that will still suck up bees as possible, less trauma, thats why one doesn't want to suck up the queen, shes one special bee!

Then all that's left is to close everything up (nuc and bee-vac) pack up and go home. Job done!

bee-vac and nuc with bees behind the bee-whisperer in front.

Here I'm moving the new colony into a new top bar hive at my home apiary. Lots of fun!

About the title, during the cut-out process I would go outside occasionally for one tool or another, I noticed the bees were not active even though it was a warm day. I thought at the time they were simply lazy bees, thinking about it latter I realized that the broodnest was right next to a stone wall! Stone stays cold a long time, no wonder they were late waking up, the stone was keeping the hive cold.

Amazing Lazerus hive!

2010-05-11T19:39:00.000-07:00

High 17c, low 0c

Since it was a nice day my bees were happy, the apples are beginning to bloom (bees absolutely adore apple blossoms) and of course loads of dandy-lions everywhere we seem to have a bumper crop this year.
I set out to clean up my poor starved dead hive #1 and check the feed levels in my other two hives #6 and #3. So I'm standing there watching robbers go in and out of my poor hive #1 and thinking to myself this was odd, I get the cover off and see some dead bees on the bottom but the "robbing" activity was still going on, bees crawling all over the three meager frames I had collected from this small hives cut-out a few days ago, so now I'm thinking man this is imposable this hive is dead, I saw dead bees covering these same frames yesterday. So I check for a queen and lo and behold you will never guess what I found! She was alive imposable! I thought they all looked dead unmoving, I have never seen this before, I'm not sure how much brood survived though.. Still, I rushed inside to get a feeder and fill it with syrup, I placed it close to the brood nest giving them only 4 top bars including the ones from the cut-out. It will be interesting to see how they build up from here, I was surprised they wintered in such a small cluster to begin with, but this Lazarus act is simply incredible. Next time I will check more closely, its a good thing I waited to clean them out! I was so exited, when I thought they were dead I felt so bad for having killed such a tough determined feral colony, they had survived a bad winter so well with so few bees, they must have been from a late swarm.

Bees are amazing!

Frustrating Weather

2010-05-10T12:49:00.000-07:00

Today's high 10c, low was 2c.

The last three or so days have been very bad for forage, wet cold and windy, mainly cold.
I was getting worried about my bees especially the smallest hive I had just installed from a cut-out on the 5th of May. Today I was able to check the feed levels inside my three hives, and unfortunately the smallest one hive #1 was indeed dead, it was a small colony to begin with, plus I'm new to feeding my bees I had placed the feeder to far back (4 or 5 top bars) from the brood nest so they could not find it.. At least that's what I think happened, it is possible they perished before then and I didn't realise, robers tend to check even empty hives making the hive appear active when in fact it isn't.
The other hives I retrieved from the most recent cut-outs #3 and #6 are doing well, #3 was the largest and was installed on may the 3rd, this is the one I removed in the rain. hive #3 had almost completed one whole comb from what I could see, I didn't do an inspection just peeked around the feeder so they probably completed two combs since I couldn't see the front and I had left an empty bar up front. Anyway lesson learned keep the feeders close to the broodnest!
It is still early in the season so I might be able to get two nukes from these hives depending on how fast they build up.

This is my custom designed bee vacuum. What I did was build a fairly standard vacuum, the clear hose deposits bees into a screened cage, the vacuum is created by a small leaf blower in reverse there is a throttle to get the vacuum speed down far enough so it wont kill bees. The whole thing is fited into a bucket by a groove I routed in the lid so that the inside chamber is nearly air tight.

Crazy Cut-out

2010-05-08T07:27:00.000-07:00

The weather has been really unpredictable so far this year, april was nice and warm early and may is starting to look cold and wet. I got a call last week about this house that has three bee hives in it, it's had bees for twenty odd years, upon inspection the bees were behind a strip of cedar trim about 24" wide at the top of brickwork walls about 15 to 20 feet up. Once I got some of the trim off you could see almost the entire width of the house had comb under that trim. You can see the sections formed by those 6" studs, each one had a colony at some time in the past.

I removed the first colony the same day I did the inspection, took me something like five hours. Then I had to wait for some good weather to do another cut-out, what I thought was nice weather came on may 4th, well the first part went alright I had moved enough broodnest and bees to keep it warm into my 2' nuc when it started to rain! So I'm scrambling to get things covered up, I ended up doing the final part of the cut-out in pouring rain. The nuc was safe under some plastic and the hive was safe under the eaves but I was cold and wet 15' up in the air on a ladder. Fortunately I brought my new bee-vac (my own design) and it was working famously so I was able to get all the bees AND the queen. Not the best day to do a cut-out but it all turned out ok.