Our (Mostly) Happy Apiary

For the last week or so, we’ve been keeping an anxious watch on the weather forecast, hoping for a day when it would be warm enough and clear enough to peek into the hives.

We were in New York last week — the state, not the city — and it was too cold out to open the colonies before we left to make sure they had enough food for when we were gone. When we got home, the temperatures continued to hover in the upper 20s and 30s F.

The weather finally cleared yesterday, with temps climbing to the mid 40s, still a little cool to pop the top. Thus, we were quite relieved to see bees flying from all five hives.

Today, as predicted, we got sunshine and 50s and were finally able to peek in to check the food situation, add bits of pollen patties (to supplement the limited amount coming in), and treat the bees with DFM (honey bee probiotics).

Even better, we managed to find brood in all but one hive.

To remind you of our set-up, imagine the two pictures below side by side with the top photo on the right and the bottom one on the left. That’s what our apiary looks like — three hives on one hive stand, and two on the other. (Or you can go to this blog post for the full picture.) We refer to them by number, 1-5, with 1 being the far right one (pink lid with black wrap) and 5 being the one in the greenish-grey insulation box.

It’s quite easy to get into the hives inside the foam insulation boxes because the foam is basically a larger box around the hive, and can simply be lifted off. The hives in the black wraps are a little more complicated, especially the middle black-wrapped one.

That one is actually wrapped with a foam-backed plastic, held together with tape and tacks. The other two black ones are “Bee Cozies,” an improved version of the wrap. The cozies are basically a tube of foam-backed plastic that you scootch down over the hives. They are slightly easier to work with than the ones that truly require actual wrapping.

We were able to find brood in four of our five hives today, most in the medium box on top (often referred to as a honey super), although one had it in the top deep box.

The outlier was #2, the middle black hive — wrapped in the original style hive wrap. Still, the population seems to be increasing — which can’t happen without new bees — and when we looked into the top deep box, there were a lot of bees on the frames. So, most likely the brood is in that deep, which right now we can’t get into because of the way the hive is winterized.

The colony that most concerns us is #3. There are only about two frames of bees, with not much brood, though there is some. So, they’re still queen right. They’re also foraging, and have plenty of food supplies.

I think their problems started because the hive was too moist, and that’s my fault. Initially we were going to use home-made sugar patties as back-up winter food, and my second batch never dried properly. Our mistake was to use them anyway. (For most of the hives, we used the “mountain camp” feeding method.)

When will I learn my lesson?! Moisture kills bees!! I know better than to give them wet food, but we did it anyway, and that hive is paying the price.

Mea culpa.

And yet, I believe there’s still hope for a recovery. If they can hang in just a little longer until it’s warm enough to do full hive checks, I think we’ll be able to steal a frame of brood from one (or more) of the other hives to give #3 a little boost.

This would also help us to prevent an early swarm from one (or more) of the hives that are already thriving. A win all around.

I knew you’d all want pictures (admit it!), so I took a few just for you!

This is #5 — lots of bees on the inner cover and top of the frames.

Also #5. Can you see the lovely capped brood?

This girl’s been working hard. Look at all that pollen!

Not all the bees were bringing in pollen, but if you look closely, you’ll see three different types, a greenish yellow, a bright yellow, and an orangish yellow. (Also hive #5.)

Even more exciting (at least to us), we (i.e., The Engineer) spotted #1’s queen. By now, you should certainly be able to find her in the picture above. And do you see the difference in the fuzziness of the bees?
The younger the bee, the more fuzz they have.

If you found Mother Bee in the previous picture, see if you can find her here. It’s a little harder because she’s hidden by her daughters, but look for that big bald thorax, and you’ll find her.

For the moment, we have a mostly happy apiary, but of course, that will change. It always does. 🙂

In other apiary news, we got a phone call with a horizontal hive estimate from Mr. Yoder this morning. He was ready to go ahead on our Long Langstroth hive and expects it to be completed either this week or next. So exciting!

And on the mother front, Mom has graduated to a “mechanical” soft food diet, which apparently means anything that can be mashed with a fork. She seems a bit happier, although I can’t say whether or not it’s due to the diet change. I’m just happy that she’s more content, at least for now.

Also, I wanted to share this picture. My friend and I saw this by the trailside when we walked this morning. It’s silly, but I love when people do things like this. It makes me smile, and I hope it does the same for you.

Thanks for reading.

Her Egg-cellency

Being retired means not having to check all our hives in one afternoon, which sometimes felt like a marathon. Also, we only know the location of two queens, which means there are only two hives we are willing to disturb by doing a full hive check.

This is because we didn’t spot the queen in one of the hives we split last week, so we don’t know which of the resulting colonies is queen right and which is (hopefully) making a new queen. Erring on the side of caution, we’ll leave both alone.

Thus, our beekeeping duties felt light this week. We looked through one hive on Friday and one today.

I should admit right now I’ve given up on trying to think of clever names for our hives. With all the combinations and splits and iterations of colonies in our beeyard, it’s become impossible to keep up the practice.

For lack of a better idea, we’ve begun referring to them as “The Palace,” or “The Eight Frame,” “The Palace split,” “The Nuc,” “The Hive 2nd from the Right,” and “The Hive on the Right.”

Catchy, right? But, together, they form the OH Honey Apiary.

As you can see, graphic design is not my forte.

Anyway, The Palace was up first, called that because it’s our new eight-frame hive, freshly painted and beautiful. It’s the one on the left.

We’ve been feeding this hive because, although it has the queen, it is to the left of the location of the original hive. When you split a hive, the foragers tend to return to the original location, and we wanted to be sure The Palace had plenty of food to tide them over until new brood was reared to replace the nurse bees who then would become foragers.

It’s true they used much of the food provided, but we also noticed foragers returning to this hive almost immediately. Through the week, the number increased, and we decided they would be fine without the supplemental food.

We removed the jar, which was housed in the top two boxes, and left one super filled with frames for them to use for honey storage. Two of those frames were the ones we removed last week because they were filled with drone brood. In theory, the workers should clean out those cells and use them for honey.

That’s what we hope, anyway.

Also, since we (The Engineer) spotted the queen on another frame, we were able to move the final super frame with brood up into the super box. There, the workers can care for the brood, but the queen excluder will keep the queen from laying any more eggs in the honey super.

No bees aren’t usually quite that fuzzy. It’s my less than stellar camerawork. (And if you think this is bad, you should see the video I took of the queen — about 2 seconds of her back and then a quick upside-down view of our yard culminating in about 10 seconds of my finger).

The girls had made some beautiful comb on the bottom of that last super frame, which we scraped off.

Comb is a marvel of engineering, I think.

We removed the comb because the last time we tried to save comb our bees made, they used it for drone brood, which is a magnet for Varroa. So, it’s not that we don’t want drones. We just don’t want a whole hive full because that would mean we likely had a whole hive full of Varroa as well.

Sadly, this piece of comb also some new eggs in it as well (which you might see if you look closely).

At least now that hive is set up with the queen downstairs where she has space to lay eggs that won’t be all drones.

We hope.

There’s a lot of hoping involved in beekeeping.

Today, we inspected the hive we considered the weakest of the three that made it through the winter and were pleasantly surprised.

It was full of bees, brood, larvae, and eggs!

And I spotted the queen!

Here she is. At least here’s her abdomen: Queen bees move around very quickly laying eggs, and it can be hard to get a good photo.

Can you see her?

I’ll make it easier for you.

We also noticed a lot of queen cups, many of them clustered together.

This frame had six, all near the bottom of it, which may or may not mean they’re preparing to swarm. I kind of think they are because, although our bees always seem to like to have a queen cup or two around, they generally don’t have this many together on the bottom of a frame.

Consequently, we’ll be checking this have again in five or so days and splitting if these cups become full-fledged queen cells.

If you’re not sure of the difference, go here. There are several pictures of queen cells in the post where I explain how we learned the hard way why it’s a bad idea to scrape off queen cells, especially when you haven’t seen the queen.

Just for the record? It’s always a bad idea to scrape of queen cells. If you have a good queen, split the hive, and put the cells into the new hive [s] for the bees to raise. If you don’t want another hive, give or sell it to another beekeeper.

For now, however, we are happy beekeepers. The hives we split have calmed down now that we quit rearranging their homes, and today’s hive was so chill, we only used smoke a few times to move them off old ugly frames we were replacing with new. The dandelions are out, and the flowering trees are beginning to bloom, so there’s plenty of pollen and nectar for our girls to forage.

The Palace split was even bearding today.

Maybe warm weather is finally here.

We hope.