New Arrivals

Well June has gotten started and the weather for my bee's has not been real cooperative.  We've had 80+ days, just to have them followed by 20 degree days for May.  With this crazy up and down in temperature I ended up losing the Peach hive, from what I could tell they broke cluster and during one of the freak chills they clustered in two small separate balls and then went downhill from there.

Cherry Blossom is still kicking but, we've have so many days of rain I started to worry they may fall too far behind.  This past weekend I was able to get in and take a look at the bee's.  I couldn't do a full inspection as it wasn't as warm as I would like.  They seem to be doing ok but they're refusing to move up or down in the hive.  This was the only hive to use deeps and I'd like to get them to move to mediums because the deeps are just a pain.  This highlights one of the things I've hated about the deeps while using them for the brood chamber might be great, I can't easily interchange the frame to open the brood chamber.  I had thought they would fill the deep and then the queen would move up or down and start laying then I could use a queen excluder to keep her out of the deep, but so far I haven't been that lucky.

The other downside to our terrific midwest weather, its delayed the arrival of my new bee's.  Here it is the June 10th and my nuc's haven't arrived.  I can't fault the vendor because they're working with livestock and unless the weather cooperates there's nothing they can do.  I could have picked up some packages but I missed that window because I was dealing with the arrival of my new chicks.  So now I'll wait for my nuc's they'll be behind but at least they'll be semi local bee's.

These little guys arrived 2 weeks earlier than expected and their chicken coop remodel wasn't done so they ended up spending two weeks in the horse trailer.  It took a bit longer to get the chicken coop back to a stage we could let the chicks in but we've finally got them in.
Now we just have a few walls to finish up and the ceiling and the chicks will be all set.

The last couple weeks of June I'm hoping things calm down a bit, and I can get my new bee's.  I also need to get a couple batches of wine and beer in the fermenters because July is just around the corner and I'd like to have some home brew ready for the summer bash.

Winter Recap

So we're into March already, and I've gone all winter without an update.  I'll try much better this year to keep this up to date.  This has been a rather rough winter for my livestock, not just my bee's but my horses, chickens, dogs, and saltwater fish.

I lost my 10 year old chocolate lab, he was my best friend but considering the vet said he wouldn't live past 3, the additional 7 years of life he had made him an extremely pampered puppy.

He was never one to hold still for a picture but here's the kids hoarding the bed leaving me wondering where I'd get to sleep.  The two labs at the back are his kids, Princess (black) and Dusty (Yellow), Wrangler is the blue healer they were good buddies.  Comanche will be missed greatly but he's moved on to a better place.





I've kept a small flock of chickens for a few years and always just let nature take its course to get a few new hens each year.  Except this year it went all haywire.  I went into October thinking I had 7 new hens, plus the 4 original and the rooster.  Turns out the roosters were just extremely late bloomers.  So well into winter when they're cooped up having 6 roosters and 5 hens is a terrible mess.  I ended up loosing 2 hens to the roosters fighting and then the cold took out another 2 hens and a rooster.  So we decided to just finish off the rest of this batch and I've placed an order for 17 buff Brahmas, 5 White Brahmas and 3 Amerucana's to start fresh.  They'll be arriving the first week of April hopefully.  If not it'll just mean buying store bought eggs this summer.

I have 2 saltwater aquariums a 55 gallon, and a 90 gallon, which took their fair share of losses this year. I've always ordered my saltwater livestock online because I usually get a decent price and I can get my hands on aquacultured pieces instead of things ripped from the reef.  Well with the crazy weather somehow one of my orders got messed up in shipping and arrived frozen solid 2 weeks late, the company took good care of me and replaced the order but I hate loosing livestock to shipping errors.  We also experienced a couple days of no power and a -10 degree windchill.  The battery backups I had lasted for the first day but didn't make it through the second day.  I ended up loosing the male of my breeding pair of Maroon clowns, and two small coral colonies.  Its next to impossible to re-pair maroon clowns because they are incredibly aggressive so I'm not sure what I have planned for her at the moment.

My horses while they didn't fair as badly as the rest of the livestock are extremely grumpy.  We had a fairly severe drought last year so the horses were a bit hard on the pasture.  To give the pastures a good chance to recover we pulled the horses up to what was a nice dry dock.  Unfortunately by the end of December the dry dock had pretty much turned into a mud pit which has steadily gotten worse leaving them confined to the barn and put them in a cranky mood.  Then February has brought tons of rain and snow and now the barn is starting to turn into a mud pit leaving me with a great deal of work come spring.  To keep the horses from having to stand in water too much when we get the gushes of rain they've been force to stand in the horse trailer as its really getting to be the last dry spot around.

Now for the bee report which is what this blog was supposed to be for.  As you remember I went into winter with 2 full size hives which I'm going to name Cherry Blossom and Peach to give them an official name, and 2 nuc's.  The nuc's did really well until January when we had a period of extremely warm moist weather (53F) followed that evening by some bitter cold (-4).  By the weekend when I could check on them they no longer had the slight hum of a cluster when I pressed my ear up to the hive.  The Peach hive has the queen from the original nuc's I bought last year and going into winter I wasn't feeling extremely strong about it.  The hive had built up some and had a fair amount of stores I still didn't think it was as strong as it could have been, that queen had been wacky not laying for a couple weeks off and on through out the summer.  I've fed it a couple times with sugar disks and its still going I have no idea how strong it is but at least it's still alive.  Cherry blossom is the hive that swarmed and re-queened itself with a locally mated queen.  I had the highest hopes for this hive it had 1 - deep body full of honey and a good sized amount of bee's and a second deep of brood.  It didn't need any feed in December or January, but by February the bee's were starting to cluster at the top so I gave it some sugar discs.  Now we're into March I've been able to peek in on it and I'm not sure if its dead or alive.  The bee's started on the sugar disc's but have gone back down into the hive bodies, and when I knock I only hear the faintest hum of a cluster.  So only time will tell whether it will make it to the dandelion bloom.

I had planned on coming into spring with 4 hives but since I lost 2 and possibly a third I went ahead and placed an order for some nuc's from Long Lane Honey farms.  They're about 3 hours east of me and they raise their queen's locally so they should have a better chance in this climate instead of Georgia raised queens.  Unfortunately they don't arrive until May which by then a big portion of our spring flow is well under way so they'll have enough time to build up but will most likely only produce a small amount of excess honey.

My plans for this spring are to try and get my apiary up to 6 hives, so hopefully Cherry blossom survived because that hive built up very strong and it would be great to get some splits off of it.  I've got new chicks coming next month and I think they're going to get a new hen house because the old hen house has had numerous problems and it'll be better to get things tightened up for them.  We have a ton of spring barn work to prevent future barn floods so that'll mean lots of concrete work.  Then there's the saltwater tanks  I think it may be time to consolidate down to a single tank and if I do it'll mean a minor upgrade to a 6' 240 gallon tank and we'll retire the 55 & 90 to the basement for coral grow-out/ oversize refugium.

Also as side hobby I've taken up making wine and beer.  Wine seems much more simple than beer and I've bottled 2 batches of wine the first batch a rose Zinfandel seen to the left here.  I ran out of new bottles and had to put a bit in reused bottles which was fine it was still tasty.  The second batch was more of a merlot and beyond potent.  I mixed up my math somewhere and ended up being close to 26% alcohol content.  One glass is more than plenty, and thankfully it only amounted to about 18 bottles I've put a few away in the cellar to try it after its aged a year.  Right now I've got 6 gallons of mead fermenting which will get bottled in 2 more weeks, and another 4 gallons of wine from grapes out of my grandparents backyard when I sampled it earlier I wasn't sure what to think of it.

My beer brewing hasn't been so successful.  The first batch had to be dumped down the drain as it was horrid.  It was either contamination from a blow up fermentation, or I screwed up the sparging.  Beer is super complicated compared to wine.  It takes like 8 hours to make where wine takes less than an hour before its fermenting.  The second batch was ok but rather bland.  I've held off on anymore beer as its a really short turn around and I'm out of bottles, and my 12 week diet and work out plan doesn't allow for beer.  Only 8 weeks left then I can give beer another go.

I know the start of this made it sound incredibly depressing as much has gone wrong but, I have high hopes for this year.  The bee's will flourish and the new chicks will be a nice addition, and we'll get the horses out of the muck, and with luck the tanks condensed.  I haven't thought about a new dog, I'm content with Comanche's kids for now.  I do swoon over pictures of chocolate lab puppies, however I think I have enough going on in my "zoo".

October Followup

So as you can tell I wasn't very good at keeping this up to date and now I'm doing bunch postings based off my notebooks.  October was not the best month for me and the bees sadly.  I kept up my feeding regimen even though I would have preferred to let them forage naturally, but we really didn't have a fall flow.

For winter prep I added top insulation, closed all my bottom entrances and prepped some fencing for wind blocks.  I live out in the middle of a corn field and the wind whips through here in the winter so  I thought it best to give them some assortment of wind break.

Hive recaps:

Hive 1:  Going strong, weighs a ton (had to move the hive to the concrete slab)  (Native bred queen)
Hive 2:  I'm not too worried about this hive it feels pretty heavy and should winter fine. (Carnelian from original nuc)

Hive 3: Robbed, but still has a fair amount of stores, downsized to a nuc box with 10 frames
Hive 4: Robbed blind over a weekend while I was gone lost the queen and a fair number of bee's to starvation -- remainder combined with hive 3

Nuc 1: (Hive 3&4 combine) seems to be doing alright after the combine, need to build a top entrance and add insulation still.
Nuc 2: Strong for a nuc, added insulation and a top entrance will hope it survives the winter.

Since its October 30th I doubt there's much more I can do for these bee's.  I do have the candy boards for later in the season and we'll see how they fair.  I'll keep a bi weekly check knocking on them to make sure they're still going and will probably add candy boards to them in a couple weeks.

I'm really wanting to ensure Nuc 2 survives so they may get moved to an observation hive that resides in my dining room for the winter.  However my better half is very leery of this idea so its taking a lot of sweet talking I just have to make him decide by this weekend because it's the last time it'll have enough semblance of warmth to move them to the observation hive and bring them in the house.

Late posting for September

To bring you up to speed after my last post I ended up ordering a Zia queen as one of the swarms didn't fare so well.  The Zia queen was incredible but also very wierd.  I put her in and let them be for a week, when I finally decided to peek in on them she was laying wonderfully.  So I figured I'd just feed them a bit and they'd build up great for winter, however thats not how it worked out.  After about 2 weeks I checked in on the new queen to discover 3 queen cells and no queen, I decided maybe she just didn't like my hives and left things alone.  Much to my suprise she had taken up residence two hives over.  I know it had to be her because I only had 1 marked queen and I found her and the hives original queen.  This completely befuddled me because everything I've read says 2 queens won't leave others alone, which I guess is mostly true because she ended up in one of the other nuc's and I was fine with that because that was another naturally mated queen that was doing so-so...

Fast forward to the start of September and this was my layout:

Hive 1: Originally from a nuc, swarmed and produced an incredible queen very heavy with winter stores, good bee population

Hive 2: Originally from a nuc, had build up issues and the bee bread mystery, was visited by the Zia queen, light on stores needed heavy feeding, has an ok bee population

• I tried feeding this hive with heavy sryup 5:3 but they really didn't want to take it till the end of sept
• Failure on my part to do a full tear down inspection -- feels like about 80 lbs
• Made up some sugar boards to feed later in the winter

Hive 3: First swarm from hive 1, iffy queen possible drone layer, possibly laying worker, very very light on stores. Small worker population.

• Found the queen and set her aside -- Did a full hive shake out on the other side of my 6 acres
• this hive was eating about a gallon of 5:3 syrup every 3-5 days
• Did a follow up inspection at the end of sept laying patter much better stores much better

Hive 4: Afterswarm from hive 1, queen never spotted, after 30 days no queen sign found, installed Zia queen, 1 full medium super of honey, fair bee population

• Did feed a small amount
• Seems to be doing ok
• Zia queen left queen cells behind

Nuc 1 & 2 were were just attempts at producing queens nuc 1 was a complete failure.  Nuc 2 produced queens but they didn't mate well, but was overtaken by the Zia queen who likes to run amok.

• Nuc 1 combined with Nuc 2
• Nuc 2 Ignoring all feed
• Mid september inspection Zia queen missing, 3 new queen cells... (WTF is up with this zia queen)

So all in all half my hives aren't as promising for winter stores as I would like but my Zia queen has gotten around and we'll see how her daughters fair.

Bee Bread Mystery

So I did my inspection a day early I should have waited but I felt like being outdoors.  I also went gloveless today which I probably wasn't ready to do... I started with my two main hives, unfortunately after a few photos I took a stinger to the thumb which made me jump and take a stinger to the next 3 fingers.  Most of the time a sting just hurts but today all 4 fingers swelled and became too stiff to operate the camera.

The hive with just medium boxes was concerning me the most, last time I was in there I saw 5 or 6 queen cups like they were thinking about swarming.  Digging through the box they didn't appear to be honey bound but I think they may have bound themselves with bee bread/pollen.

  

The bottom hive body had 6 of 10 frames filled like that on both sides, the next one up had 3 frames filled both sides with the other 7 frames having a spattering of brood and nectar.  I went frame by frame and started to get a little worried that the queen had taken a swarm and left.  When I finally found her up in the honey super laying in whatever cell she could find. They've only drawn 4 of 10 frames in the honey super so I haven't been real eager to add another just yet. I did do some re-arranging of empty s with bee bread down below which is probably why I got stung.  Hopefully the queen will get to laying again and they'll give up on swarming.


The hive that swarmed had one hive body with 5 of 10 frames full of bee bread and maybe that's why they swarmed.  That hive was done with deeps and has now became the bane of my inspections.  Both of the  deeps will be cut down come spring and if I could figure out a way to do it now and let them keep their stores I would.  I didn't see the queen or any sign that they have a queen. I found where she hatched and she chewed out the other cells but I'm starting to wonder if she didn't make it back from her mating session.8 more day's will be a month since that hive swarmed so I'll wait till next Friday before I give in and order a queen.


Swarm 1:

Seems to be doing all right building comb like crazy and they're doing a pretty good job of it no wild and crooked combs.  This is the one where I got shots of the queen returning from her mating flight on Saturday. I would hope she'll start laying by end of week.

Swarm 2:

Isn't doing as well it's not drawing out comb all that quickly and I saw the open queen cell but I haven't seen her in the nuc.

The nuc I started off the extra queen cells well they built up comb but the queen's didn't hatch, this will get combined with swarm 2 next week.  Which makes sure swarm 2 has plenty of time for the queen to go out and mate and come back before I adjust their housing.  If I don't see egg signs by next Friday I may end up combining both with swarm 1, but if I have to order a queen maybe I'll just get two... but I don't think they'll build up enough to survive the winter so it's iffy.

Blast...

I popped in to see if I had comments and realized I forgot to publish my last few blogs.  Sorry about that.

First week of August

While its been 2 weeks since my last inspection, I just wasn't feeling up to tearing into the hives.  My party drained me and its taking a bit to bounce back.  Also cleanup is much less fun than the party.  I did walk by and see plenty of activity from the hives so I wan't incredibly worried.  Also to make me feel alot better Swarm 1 made me feel incredibly encouraged.  Take a look at who's returning from her mating flight, she missed the door but at least I know this swarm has a queen, now to wait and see if she's well mated or if they supersede her.

I did watch her for about 20 minutes and she finally decided she'd had enough hanging around and high tailed it indoors.  For as big as she is she can really move, I tried to get photos of her moving inside but when she decided it was time to go bam she was off and before I could get her in focus she was inside.

On the 8th I'll do a full inspection of all 3 hives and the 2 nucs with photos of each.  Plus that'll give me some time to get the hardware put together and painted.

July 20th Swarm Followup

Well I probably should have waited long to check in on my swarms but I needed to know what was going on so a quick check aught to give me some idea.

Swarm 1 (the original, originally larger than a basketball):

When I popped open this box I realized it had shrunk by an incredible amount of bee's.  Best estimation now was I was down to about a large grapefruit sized swarm.  That worried me that there'd be no queen left behind.  I didn't have any frames of egg's that matched up to the hive body size so I went to the hive they swarmed from and cutout two of the queen cells they were too close together to only get one.  I sat it between two frames at the top and crossed my fingers.  If there was a queen these poor ladies were probably going to be killed but I wanted to be sure a queen was there.  I also had 16 queen cells in the hive they swarmed from all capped and good to go.

Swarm 2 (originally baseballish sized):

This one seemed to be doing quite well I had given them a frame of nectar, 1 foundation, 1 foundation-less, and 1 capped honey.  While probably not the best for this swarm I'm kicking myself left and right for not just sticking with 1 size hive bodies.  Next spring I will only have mediums these deeps are ticking me off.  I didn't observe any eggs but it had only been 4 days since swarming.  However to be on the safe side I gave them 2 queen cells as well.


It's not real promising that these are going to result to much being so late in the year but we shall see I may start feeding to help them out.  I'm a tad hesitant to feed after reading more of Michael Bush's work but to get these guys through the winter I may not have a choice especially with the drought we've had.

I got my new equipment 15 new mediums and frames, overkill maybe but I'd rather be prepared next year instead of run out of equipment.  I also picked up 4 nuc hive body's so I could move the ladies out of the plastic home that probably isn't all the best for them.  They seem to be doing all right but we'll get them moved around soon.

Also since I had the extra nuc bodies I decided to take a frame of honey and some partially drawn frames plus a queen cell frame from the hive that swarmed and drop them into the nuc.  I figure this way with 4 hives sending out queens hopefully at least 2 of them will mate properly and start building up then I can combine any of the failures.

All the ladies will get a 2 week reprieve from my intrusions since next week I have a house party and will have too many guest to be stirring up the queen-less hives.

The unexpected Swarm

So I wish I would have taken better pictures but I came home to find something I really hadn't expected.  My poor peach tree leaning over from the weight of a crap ton of bee's.  This picture doesn't do it justice but when you have this many bee's escaping a camera isn't the first thing that comes to mind.

Both of those boxes were crammed full of bee's and the wall there were the ones debating on going inside.  This was also shot after I had done my best attempt at catching a swarm of bee's.  I laid out a blanket because I didn't really have a sheet to spare, i put an empty super under the basket ball size chunk of bee's then gave the tree 2 good shakes and plop, most of the bee's landed in the box.

The first attempt went very poorly I rushed too much didn't get things laid out right and when I gave the tree a good shake the queen didn't come down. So within 15 minutes all the bee's were back in the tree...  The second attempt was much more relaxed and my shake of the tree a bit more forceful.

Now after what seemed like a successful swarm catch, I went in the house and figured I'd wait and check on them at sunset because it was 100+ that day and my bee suit was not something I wanted to spend a lot of time in.  Even though I got a really nice ultra breeze suit its still rather warm to be wearing when its 100.  My brother showed up about 2 hours later and we opted to go swimming. After about 30 minutes in the pool there was an unmistakable buzz in the air and this giant cloud of bee's came floating overhead.  Now any rational person would have probably just ducked down in the pool and said that's neat but no I go darting in the house to grab my car keys throw a cardboard box in the trunk and start following the cloud.... It took them all of 10 minutes to disappear into the corn field which was really disappointing to me, that I was going to loose that many bee's.  While I know its good to help nature repopulate this is my first year and I wanted no escapees.  So I drove around the block for a bit only to give up and head home.  Much to my surprise as I pulled into the drive way the cloud was coming out of the corn field and landing on some poison sumac across the road from me.

Now here is where I probably made another newbie mistake, I gave them about an hour to finish landing it was roughly 5pm which had I done my home work I would have known that they weren't going to go anywhere else that night. The smart thing to have done would have been to wait until the last few rays of daylight and try re-catching them then.  It would have been a lot cooler and I probably would have had more success as they would have been in a tighter ball.

I after the majority of them had stopped flying I setup my catching equipment again with a slight adjustment 1 hive body and no frames.


Here's me cutting down the plant they landed on.

And here I realize crap... they landed on two plants so I'll shake one then the other.

Here's after I've shaken the second plant and realize there still another chunk on a small bush.

 Here's after all the bushes have been shaken, and the bee's are refusing to use the door they just want to hang out on the outside.

So I thought I had caught the swarm a second time and that they'd stick around.  We watched them for a couple hours and they seemed to be content.  I finally decided it was time to head to bed but I was still worried they'd take off again and I really didn't want to loose that many bee's.

Fast forward to the next morning and I had a softball size swarm hanging from my car.... bee's just don't care what you want they do whatever they feel like.  I got those little buggers hived in one of my cardboard/plastic nuc's.  With this being a smaller swarm I wasn't sure if this was an afterswarm or if the ones I had caught had decided to split up.

I didn't want to go digging around in the swarm box because I didn't want anyone to abscond because I was interfering too much.

So I decided to let things alone go order more equipment since I had nothing left no honey supers or anything.  Being my first year I thought 2 deeps and 8 mediums would suffice for 2 hives, boy was I wrong.

The Merging

So I've been a tad lax on keeping the blog up to date.  So to bring you up to date, the last 4 weeks have been a little on the boring side.  Which is part of the reason I hadn't posted anything.  The two hives have been moving along slowly, solid brood patterns and decent nectar retrieval.  I've also been working on implementing my plan to have one hive of mediums and one hive of the standard setup.  So I had been swapping out deep frames that had nothing other than a bit of pollen with medium frames with spacers.

They went in looking like this:

 And came out nicely filled in:

Now last weeks inspection made me a bit nervous, I noticed as the little workers were hatching they were back filling with nectar and leaving no where for the queen to lay.  Which I wondered about since they hadn't really started working on their second boxes.  They had filled in maybe 3 frames and instead of building more comb they were being lazy and back filling.  Which at made me think this would be the perfect time to accomplish the great merge.  90% of the deep frames were turned into honey and some of the mediums had some decent brood.  So I made preparations to make the switch over today.

I started with the hive that would be running in just mediums and moved all the filler frames over without their spacers of course. They really didn't mind their move except when I cut a 2 of the wires I got honey everywhere.  They still didn't mind much they just went to work cleaning up my mess.  That left the nurse bee's on the 4 deep frames, that's when it got interesting and I completely forgot that I had the camera.  I felt it would be best to leave the nurse bee's in their hive, so I tried shaking them, smoking them and neither succeeded, so I broke out the bee brush.

I started brushing the little gals down and it was sudden insanity bee's everywhere on the second frame I found the queen, I tried to gently move her to a frame back in the hive and she had other plans, she wandered off to the edge of the hive then fell into the grass...  That made me so nervous I stripped my gloves so I could pick her up without damaging her, and then set her on a medium frame back in the hive.  As I was lowering her down into the hive, I had workers crawling all over my hand trying to get to her which is a weird feeling, as soon as I sat her down they led her deeper into the hive away from me.  I managed to get a couple stings after that before I could get my gloves back on.

The next frame I got to see the neatest thing, drones being born.  If you click on it you can see 4 heads chewing their way out.

The rest of the move was fairly smooth, I filled in the 4 missing frames with foundationless frames, and gave them an extra super.  The extra space may have been too much too soon, but I'll be gone for two weeks and don't want to take a chance on any swarming.

There were a few left over bees maybe 500ish in the deep so I decided I'd just move the deep over and do a newspaper combine.  Which started out as a great idea....but when I filled in the missing frames, I forgot about the frame with the massive honey burr.  When you smash those it makes quite the mess.  I'd already stirred things up too much to try and repair it.  So I decided to leave it be and hope for the best.  As long as the queen doesn't get honey rained on her I think they'll be fine.

I also gave the deeps a honey super which may have been a bit much but this hive had only 1 hive body all this time so their main hive body was erupting with bee's.  As soon as they can get along with the upstairs neighbors I think they'll be moving right up into the honey supers.

Also the other reason I hadn't been keeping up with my posts, is I had to build a watering hole for the bee's to keep them out of the pool and it turned out something like this:

I need to get a newer picture one that actually has the flowers we put in.  The pond isn't quite finished it needs some rocks and a few more flowers.

Anyway that's a wrap for today hopefully everyone will settle in while I'm off to the west coast.

Sunday's Inspection

I couldn't wait to get in and check on the girls they've been zipping in and out with quite a bit of pollen.  Which surprises me because I haven't seen much in bloom a bit of sweet clover in the ditch, and a yellow weed here and there but nothing that I thought would be bringing in that much pollen.  There's got to be at least 3 things in bloom as they've been bringing in a bright yellow, a dark orange, and this weird whitish gray pollen.

Anyway getting into the hives, Itsy as you can see isn't very lively yet but they're slowly getting there:

They've got two new frames partially drawn out and as you can tell they're not following the pattern very well.  What can you do, they've got better plans than what the foundation says apparently.

Looks like I'm going to have some drones mixed in with some workers, and a few unknown cells since they aren't full sized.  I'm starting to think I should have just made both hives foundationless.  As the one that is foundationless is going to town and has all normal cells, instead of the craziness of foundation drawing.

Now the rest of the hive was a bit concerning for a new keeper.  The brood pattern is rather spotty on 2 of the 4 frames from the nuc, and there isn't much nectar/sugar water stored.  I've been feeding 1:1 sugar water with a bit of honey b healthy in it and they've been out gathering so I'm not quite sure what they're up to.  I did see some of my pollen patty stored in the edges.  I'm almost starting to wonder if I should have left these guys in the nuc for a while longer.  It would have been easier for them to heat/cool the nuc at least until there was a bit more population.

I figured I should probably find the queen and make sure she hadn't gotten cold and died, or flew the coop.  With only 4 frames I thought it would be a cake walk to find her.  I even took pictures of both sides of the frames and examined the photos and never did see her.  I did find freshly laid eggs and some small larva so I'm pretty sure she's still there.  I also think they'll be catching up as there were a few freshly hatched bee's.  I couldn't pick out the new ones, but I did see the newly opened caps.

Here's the nameless hive after opening they're definitely keeping busy:

This one was completely foundationless except the frames that came from the nuc and they've done a good job.  3 of the 4 frames are at least half filled in and the queen has laid in the new comb which was really exciting.

In the photo on the right I think you can just see the eggs they're so tiny.  The rest of the hive is packed really tightly which is promising for this hive.

I figured since the queen had started laying in the new foundation and they had drawn out a fair amount, its probably time to add another hive body.  Now this is where I discovered I don't like deeps.  I wanted to follow the process of adding below so they expand normally and while my deep isn't completely full it was heavier than I expected.  The other thing that's frustrating is because I had deep nuc's I had to use a deep on each hive and I had planned for one hive to be done with only mediums.  Since this was to be the medium hive I slid a medium under the deep, and included 2 frames with foundation for a ladder.  I just hope I haven't added it too soon but the bee's didn't seem to complain other than the mass confusion when I was adding the medium.

Also while adding this medium I added some concrete blocks to get the hives up off the ground as I noticed a mud print on one hive which makes me think that either a raccoon visited or a skunk.  I didn't see any other signs of the bee's being munched on but I wanted to get them up out of the grass anyway.  The plus side is with the screened bottom boards and the hives about a foot off the ground I can peek in on the boxes without having to disturb the bee's which is handy. 

The last thing I have to do is figure out when to remove the entrance reducer or to give them a bit more space to get in and out.  Anyway that wraps up this over view of my hives, since I only have two I'll have to find something to fill in with otherwise I'll be disturbing my bee's too much or start doing inspections on different days  which I may do so I can spend more time in the hives.

One other thing I hadn't thought about, water for the bee's, we live just up the hill from a creek so I assumed the bee's would make use of that.  They seem to be a bit lazy, my hose has a slow leak and was keeping the sidewalk a bit damp so they were making use of that.  As soon as I fixed it they've discovered I started opening the pool and I've had to fish a couple of the girls out of the pool.  I've given them a bucket of water with plenty of rocks in it for them to land on about 4 feet from the hive now I'll have to see if they make use of that or continue to drown themselves.  The bucket should get me by until we complete the new pond project we've decided to take on.  Once that's done maybe they'll stick to the pond and the creek and stay out of the pool.



Photo Link

While most of my photos get plugged into the Blog, not all of them do so I added a quick link on the side, and figured I'd post it here: Picasa Beekeeping Album

Check-In before my Trip

So I felt the need to peek in the hive just in case I don't have time this week.  I needed to make sure they hadn't gone over board drawing things out.  I knew they were busy and since they only have 8 of the 10 frames keeping an eye on how quickly they fill it in will be important.  The smaller hive I'm going to call Itsy because I just feel like it needs a name and lefty and righty just didn't sound right.  Anyway, Itsy is drawing foundation fairly slowly but still coming along.

It's nice white wax, and they're following the pattern for the most part the second shot is "small cell foundation" that they are drawing out.  So I feel like they're making good progress but probably won't need another deep super for a few weeks.  I could be wrong and they could really get it done sooner but I'm thinking it's going to be a while.  They are also sucking down the sugar syrup something I'll probably need to refill this weekend as they've already taken in about 1/2 a gallon which I expected for it being a new hive.

I did find something odd in Itsy, it looks like a larva they pulled early:

I was trying to see if it had a mite on it which would mean I have hygienic bee's, but my glove fingers couldn't get it picked up and one of the workers ran off with it.  So either it was a mite and the bee's wanted to prevent infection or this frame got a bit too chilly and the larva died so the bee's yanked it.  I couldn't say at the moment.

I will stay out of the hive till Saturday which will leave me wondering what caused that larva to get pulled but there isn't much I can do about it and I think the bee's know whats going on a lot better than I do.

Now for the other hive, I'm still working on a name for it but haven't come up with one.  Anywho hive two its completely foundation less and is going nice and strong.  Below are shots of all the frames they've started working on.

It's so cool to watch them make ladders to build the new combs.  They have comb on 7 of the 8 frames available to them so I have a feeling this weekend they will need to have another hive body added to them.  One thing that threw me on this hive is they've barely touched the sugar syrup they've drank about 2 inches of the syrup so  I debated on pulling it.  If they aren't using it, it means they've got enough foragers to keep the hive stocked with nectar and pollen.  After mulling it over a bit, I felt it would be best to leave it.  If any of the nectar drops off I want to make sure they've got food as they are drawing a lot of wax and will be most of the season.

That pretty well wraps up today's update, hopefully everything keeps speeding along while I'm tied up this week.  The good thing about the busy week is I won't have time to be tempted to peek in on the ladies.  Saturday will most likely be my next update, unless I have time to put together a general terms post as I had a few questions this morning that made me realize not everyone reading are familiar with bee keeping terms.

Keeping out of the Hive

I managed to stay out of the hive this weekend other than the 3 or 4 minutes it took me to fix the frame layout.  I would have liked to have gotten some pictures of the progress but I was on a mission to keep my invasion to a minimum.  I slid the frames around so its the frame feeder, 2 empty, 4 from the nuc, followed by 2 empty.  Since it didn't require pulling any of the nuc frames I didn't get to inspect too much.  I did see the bee's in the foundation hive have started drawing a bit of comb, and the foundation-less hive was festooning so tomorrow when my mentor arrives I'll hopefully have some shots of the newly drawn comb.

Since I wasn't supposed to be pestering my bee's this weekend I decided to try and landscape to help them.  I planted the coneflower's I started this winter and the black eyed susan's.  I've got lupine's, red hot pokers, more coneflower's, poppies and some bee balm all started in the green house.  24 of each type of plant which seems a bit excessive but my house has been flowerless for 2 years and I mean to remedy it this year.  I know the bee's will be traveling and will probably only briefly visit my flowers which I mainly started to bring in the hummingbirds I think it'll be good for both.

I have come to the conclusion this hobby will be another addiction like my saltwater tank addiction, I'm going to be torn as to which gets more money.

Spot Check

While I know I'm supposed to give my bee's some time to settle in I just couldn't resist peeking in on them.  I was also slightly worried about them I didn't close off the screened bottom board and it was quite a storm last night.  I figured I could keep myself occupied by just observing them and guessing what was going on.  As you can see there's plenty of action with the little girls zooming in and out of the hive.

I'm not sure why I didn't get a shot of the second hive other than they're running a bit behind and only had 4 girls sitting on the porch, and a goofy guy appearing to have navigation issues.  I watched him try and take off and then crash back into their little party.  Then wander around wondering where he went wrong.  After about 10 minutes he finally figured out what he was doing and flew off to the bachelor's pad to spend the day drinking and and waiting for the girls to show up.

I figured to keep myself out of the hive's I'd try stalking them for a while.  Which was quite a bit of fun.  Now I keep spotting them everywhere, on the weeds:

Also on my new flowers that I forgot I planted if I'd only remembered to turn the time stamp off this would have been a great picture.

After a while of stalking the girls I gave in and decided to take just a quick peek in the hives and I noticed everyone seems to be doing just fine.  On the small hive I decided not to pull any of the frames because they've still got a lot of work to do to catch up.  On the larger hive I pulled 2 frames because they were a lot noisier and I thought maybe I had rolled the queen yesterday in my haste to install them.  Here's a quick shot of the brood nest they're really going to town plenty of capped brood and still a few eggs around the edge and if I saw correctly just a few uncapped larva.

I found the queen on the second frame but she wouldn't co-operate for a photo shoot, there has to be a trick to holding the frame and getting photos but I don't have those skills yet.  After confirming no one suffered from last nights storm I closed them back up and will let them be except for a quick change tomorrow.

My mentor wasn't able to make it out today and pointed out I had made a slight mistake in my installation.  I must have missed this in all the videos I watched but apparently you're supposed to put the nuc frames in the center of the hive, with empty frames on either side of them.  The reason for this is they will only work on the frames closest to the brood, if you have everything on one side it will take them longer to draw out the other frames.  So tomorrow I plan to do a very quick entry and just shift the frames down so I can have undrawn foundation on either side of the brood.

Hopefully by tomorrow I can also figure out my second conundrum.  I had planned on running a foundation less hive and a hive with foundation.  The problem is I thought I was getting medium nuc's however they were deep nuc's so I've had to run both hives with foundation as both my deeps were setup to be the foundation hives.  I'll have to figure out if I'll just leave it as is and maybe pop the foundation out of the frames and just go foundation less on the deep of one or leave the foundation and see what comes of it.  Then once they have one of the hive bodies filled in and started on a second hive body I can maybe do some trickery with the queen excluder to get them swapped over to mediums and then the medium will be foundation less.

Installation of the Nucs

So today I made the trip to pickup the bee's, I must say I didn't expect to be as excited as I was.  It reminded me of being a kid on Christmas.  I may have been a tad over excited but I've been looking forward to this for such a long time.  It was so worth the wait and I'm glad they are finally got them, even if the day took longer than I really wanted.  I left at 7am and got home around 6pm a bit longer drive than I would have liked but I was also fully distracted when we arrived at Mark's and he has 40+ hives and was more than happy to share some experience that wasn't just read from a book or observed from YouTube.

He has a very nice setup at his house, a pond surrounded by his mass of hives in the middle of some decent timber and farm land.  It sucked that I managed to drive 4 hours and realized that I didn't have my camera and my phone battery was running low enough I couldn't get any shots of it.  Meeting Mark was very helpful and I wish he was closer as he would be an excellent bee mentor. 

After we enjoyed some of his homemade blackberry wine, and a specific type of honey I wish I would have caught the name it was incredibly good with a fruity blossom taste.  I ended up buying 4 lbs of it along with 4 lbs of his general honey (clover/alfalfa most likely).  Some will get turned into mead but for the most part I think it'll go on my toast and in my bread.  After that bit of fun we finally got to check out the nuc's and hives.  I think we looked at 5 different nuc's and he picked out one of the average nuc's with a decent brood pattern and a nice laying carnoilian.  The nuc was incredibly calm and easy to work with we could have handled that one without a suit or gloves and he did.  I fully suited up as I'd like my start with beekeeping to be less painful I know it'll happen eventually but minimizing the stings for my beginnings are for the best.  The second nuc he decided on was incredible so loaded with brood and nurse bee's they looked like they were could easily swarm (I could be way wrong on that) but they were packed in there so tight and the nuc was completely full of brood, with 1 frame full of capped brood and the rest of the frames full of brood in various stages one frame with eggs.  That one took a suit and gloves to handle they were a bit testy hopefully they settle down once they're in their permanent home.

We got the car started and cooled and loaded up the nuc's and started the drive home.  It was mostly pleasant we had 4 escapee's but no one decided they needed to sting which was good.  Two road in the back window and unfortunately didn't survive the four hour trip home and 2 decided to help me navigate on the dash.  I thought they had died to but I think the AC just slowed them down because when I got home and opened the windows they decided to fly off.

I went to install the bee's and noticed that my hives were a bit lopsided so I got the level out and noticed they were out of whack.  I repositioned the stepping stones I was using to lift the hives off the ground and got them leveled up with a slight incline to keep rain out of the hive.  Then I filled the feeders so my new bee's would have something to draw out the foundation.

I grabbed a nuc to put in and they still looked mostly happy.

I wanted to get more pictures of the frames and try finding the queen but, we have a sudden storm rolling in so I figured it was best to just get everyone moved over to their new home.  I gently moved the frames over to their hives but I'm not sure I got my spacing right.  The feeder takes up just a bit more space than a frame and a half.  Hopefully my coworker will be able to check them tomorrow afternoon and let me know if i got it right.  I was also a bit surprised at how quickly they had glued the frames into the nuc's as we'd only been driving 4 hours but 2 were stuck down tight.

Here's my girls in their new home, it definitely didn't take them long to find the food:

Once they were all in and I managed to get the inner cover and telescoping cover on without squishing anybody I moved on to the second nuc.

I wish I would have remembered to snag a picture when I opened it but I was a bit startled by the explosion of bee's when I opened the second nuc.  There were quite a few in my face and so much noise that I just forgot to pick up the camera and moved slowly and deliberately getting them moved over.  I did get this shot after I had the frames moved out of the nuc.

Now getting them out created quite a stir I had to smack the box and you can imagine the crazy amount of bee's in the air, but everyone made it into their new home.


Here's my two final shots this first one is of the smaller nuc but it didn't take them long to head in as the inclement weather was rolling in.

This was the larger nuc and everyone wasn't as cooperative about going inside.

That wraps up my first day as a real bee keeper, tomorrow I'll be in the hives briefly just to have my mentor double check I didn't mess anything up and the spacing is good.

Bill's Beekeeping

Before I begin I should point out I'm not the greatest writer, but I wanted to log my experience in beekeeping.

While I know everyone is doing it, and I've come across some really great blogs on beekeeping I felt like I wanted a place to record my journey into my bee's.

So after many years of procrastination I took the plunge and have started my apiary.  I'm beginning with two hives while I'd like to start with more beekeeping was a bit more expensive than I thought it would be.  Instead of starting with the standard layout of 2 deeps and mediums for honey supers I've decided to run a bit of an experiment to figure out what works the best for me in my area.

In my first hive I'm running the standard 2 deeps, and will use mediums for honey supers.  On this hive I'm also using small cell foundation in the frames, and my honey supers will also have foundation.  On the second hive I'm going to use only mediums and for foundation I've got some small cell foundation for the mediums but I'd really like to see how the bee's do without foundation.

On the note of foundation versus no foundation there is so much debate and it doesn't matter who you ask you always wind up with a different answer.  Everything I've read said that when you start it's easiest to switch between the different layouts.  So I figured do a bit of both and see what works out the best.

I'm also trying to keep in mind the health of my bee's so I figured going a more natural route with small cell foundation and foundation-less should help keep my mites down.  I'm also using a screened bottom board for pest management.

I have two outstanding decisions/alterations to figure out in my beekeeping.  One is top entrances vs bottom entrances or utilizing both.  I've read good things about both and since our weather has been so insane lately I think it will be a good idea to get added to my hives.  The other thing I've debated over is frame spacing and using a narrow frame space as recommended by Michael Bush's frame width.  This one is a bit more of a pain to implement and may be something that is done next year when I finally get to split a hive.

Tomorrow I finally get to go get my Nuc's two 5 frame nucs.  I've been waiting very impatiently for tomorrow to get here so I'll have lots of pictures for tomorrow's post.

To wrap up the majority of my equipment came from a few of the common suppliers:

• Dadant (because they are only a 2 hour drive from me)
• Mann Lake
• Brushy Mountain
• Ultra Breeze Suits (Excellent Bee Suit)

My bee's are coming from a local apiary about 120 miles from me so my will be suited for my location.