We Have Eggs!

Purchased a new camera and it's frustrating to have come out of the apiary with blurry photos! I hope it is just my technique as I get used to using a new camera. But I'm super excited to report that both queens are laying!

Catherine Queen

The Catherine hive is about a day or two ahead of the Alexandria have since she was out of the cage sooner. I also had alternated some empty frames between the drawn ones last time and they're going gang-busters drawing them out.

Larvae in the Catherine Hive

The bees are busy storing the syrup so there isn't much room for the queen to lay right now but I was happy to find a small patch of larvae. There are nearly 8 drawn frames so added the second box to ensure they have plenty of room to grow. Will check on them in a couple weeks but until them I'll keep the feed on. They still had half a gallon left so they've slowed down slightly in their consumption of it.

Eggs in the Alexandra Hive

It was easy to spot the eggs in the Alexandra hive but also noted that the bees are filling much of the cells with syrup just as in the other hive, so added alternate empty frames between the drawn comb to get these bees busy drawing them out. It's really evident at this point how the hive is behind the other but I know they'll even out soon enough. The queen isn't as dark as the other but she's still quite lovely!

Alexandra Queen

Will check on their progress later in the week to see if they've drawn out the frames are are ready for another box.

First Inspection of 2015

The bees have been busy taking just over a half gallon of syrup a day so have been busy bees! Checked in to ensure the queens were released and it's a good thing I did as the bees were busy building burr comb in the space where a frame is removed to accommodate the queen cage. Since it is after work and getting towards dusk, I placed the removed comb at the entrance of the hive so the bees could walk back in for the night.

Catherine Queen

The Catherine Queen is lovely and dark, but still rather small. She had already made her way out of the hive but I didn't bother looking for eggs just yet. (The light is bad this time of day to see them....)

Alexandra Queen

The Alexandra Queen needed a bit of assistance to get our of her cage and what a difference that makes in the disposition of a hive! The Alexandra hive was so docile I could have been in them with out gloves or veil, even when digging round to extract the burr comb. But the Catherine hive was a bit fiesty! Those bees are ready to defend their home and their queen. I'll leave them to do their thing and check in on them in a few days, hoping to find brood. I'll need to keep feeding them most of the summer until they build up a honey super full to get them through the winter, but they seem to be on their way!

New Hives for 2015

Newly installed hives

I'm surprised at how excited I am that the bees have finally arrived! The timing is later in the spring than I had hoped but I'm confident we'll be able to build up enough food stores through constant feeding till fall that they'll make it through the winter. I am able to provide each new hive with 5+ frames of comb already drawn out so that they're not starting completely from scratch!

They are Russian queens again with one very being dark and the other mostly dark, which is one characteristic I enjoy with the Russian bees.

Sugared bees

Since this is later in the season for installing bees, I am feeding fumagillin b for the first two gallons of syrup as a best practice against noseama.  I also took the precaution of sugaring for varroa mites, sifting 10X powdered sugar over the bees which allows for them to remove the mites as they clean off the sugar. They look like ghost-bees when covered with sugar. I had temporarily inserted a bottom board to check the amount of mites present but was hard pressed to find one. That's a good sign the bees came from strong hives.

I'll leave them to do their thing for a few days before checking to see if the queen has been released. I enjoyed watching them them as they got right down to taking orientation flights. I'm so glad to have bees back in the yard again!

Demise of the Beagle Hive

I was worried about this hive not having capped honey as we came into December so was monitoring their intake of the honey I was feeding back using an entrance feeder. I noticed as the month moved on that the bees were taking less than before. This was their third quart of honey so, without opening up the hive to check, not wanting to unglue all the seams the bees worked so hard to close up for winter, I assumed the bees knew they had enough stores for now...

Christmas day was sunny in warm with temps in the mid-50s. The bees from the Dmitry hive were buzzing about but there were only two bees flying from the Beagle hive, which just isn't right!

Peaking in through the hole in the inner cover I didn't see any bees. Removing the inner cover and peering down through the frames, I didn't see any bees. The top box was heavy with pollen and uncapped nectar. (Why aren't the bees making honey and capping it??)

Between two frames of the second box were a handful of dead bees still standing on the honeycomb and I could see all the way through the bottom box to the covering of dead bees on the bottom screen.

I spent a lot of time looking at the frames, the few bees still moving, etc. trying to figure out what happened.

Was there any capped honey? Any brood? Any pests present or other visible reason for dead bees?

I found the queen in the second box - still standing and surrounded by her dead attendants as though frozen in time...

My guess is that the original Queen either swarmed late summer or was killed early fall and this replacement queen never mated. As the population of the hive naturally died off, the bees were less interested in storing food and with no brood, eventually there were too few bees to keep the hive warm. Our few cold snaps with overnight temps below freezing, killed the last of the bees.

There's always the possibility that it was something else that killed the bees, so it's a good idea to send a bunch of bees to the Bees Research Lab at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Beltsville, MD. Free of charge, they perform a diagnostics checking for bacterial and fungal diseases as well as for parasitic mites and other pests harmful to honey bees. Results may take weeks and I'll be sure to report back any findings.

Catching Up On a Routine Summer of Beekeeping

Incorporating Two Hives
Into One Using Newspaper.

A week after my last post, I incorporated what was left of the Datsuyk hive into the Beagle hive by placing the box on top of the others with a sheet of newspaper in between. Had I moved the bees without a barrier, the stronger Beagle hive would have considered the Datsuyk bees intruders and they would have all been killed. Placing a barrier of a single sheet of newspaper allows the bees to get to know one another as they work to remove it.

If you look closely at the hive in the photo, you'll notice a medium box is in place below two deep hive bodies. Normally, that's not a big deal. I installed the bees into a medium box with frames of comb already drawn out figuring the bees would begin to work drawing out comb on the deep frames.

Serious Burr Comb

However, these silly bees decided they needed more space below for the queen to lay and you remember bee space, right? Bees will fill any space grater than 3/8" with comb and that's just what they did in the space between the bottom of the medium frames and the screened bottom board. I left it in place until the bees moved up to the deeps and were no longer using the bottom box.

The rest of the summer was very routine with nothing much to report in the way of challenges. Both the Dmitry hive and the new Beagle hive were doing everything bees should be doing. In early July we harvested 18 frames of honey, leaving the rest for the bees.

By September though, worry began to creep in. Both hives had nearly 17 medium frames of nectar but neither hive had much in the way of capped honey. A check on the hives couple of weeks later showed the Dmitry hive was well on it's way to capping honey but the Beagle hive still had open nectar.

Dmitry Hive's Capped Honey

And this is the way it remained for October and into November. A peek between the frames today shows the Dmitry hive has 5 frames about 1/4 capped. That's nowhere near the amount of capped honey I would like them to have by now.

And what the heck is going on in the Beagle hive that they are not capping their honey at all? In November I started to feed back some honey using front feeders. This way, the honey only needs to be stored and capped but they continue to have open cells! Besides the worry of not having long-term stores of food to get them through winter, uncapped cells mean more moisture in the hive which can be harmful to a hive in cold, cold weather.

I added a front feeder of honey to the Dmitry hive today to help them get a jump on storing honey instead of needed to convert the nectar they have to honey before storing it. Our temps fluctuate between the 30's to the 60's so the bees don't remain clustered for long and between the nectar in the hives and the honey feeders there is plenty for them to eat. But if January and February are as wintry as predicted, I especially need the Beagle hive to have some stores built up or I may risk loosing it.