Growing Apiary

Just did a quick check in on my new baby hive that I started on 2/14, they are doing amazing! I definitely moved the queen from the Yellow hive into this new hive, there are eggs and young larvae everywhere. It takes about a month or a month and a half to start seeing activity like that when a hive has raised a new queen. Here is a great picture of some nurse bees in the baby hive feeding young larvae (and a lot of bee bread and nectar in the bottom right):

The new hive was so packed with eggs and larvae that I added another medium hive body with all just foundation in there (no drawn comb). Those bees shouldn't have a problem filling that box in the next few weeks.

This also means I shouldn't open the Yellow hive until at least 3/14 because they are the ones raising the new queen.

In addition to checking out the new baby hive (which I will probably paint pink eventually, since I made it on Valentine's day) I took a look at Green. This is the first time I've checked out Green this year. When I opened the hive - it was a freakin' disaster. I had thrown some supers on about a month earlier (without checking the state of the hive) and when I opened the hive today, there was brood in the super! The top super was the 6th box on the hive, typically you should only see brood in boxes 2 and 3, maybe 1 and 4. Definitely not box 6.

When I started going deeper in the hive - box 5 was all capped honey, so was box 4. Box 2 and 3 were about 50% honey and 50% brood. Box 1 was mostly empty, but also a lot of pollen. When the brood laying space is that full of honey, it is referred to as "honey bound". It is the same concept as "root bound" for a plant. There is no space for the queen to lay eggs because the brood nest is filled with honey. This can seriously stunt the size of the hive if not addressed quickly.

I reorganized the hive by putting all of the brood in boxes 2 and 3, then giving them some extra empty frames in those boxes as well. I also put a 7th box on the hive (all just empty frames with just foundation) so that they would have a place for more nectar.

I managed to find enough eggs and capped brood to create ANOTHER little hive out of the Green hive. Here is what the apiary looks like now:

Royal Jelly & Honey Update

I did a quick check on the hives this morning to see if honey production was picking up. So far I have only harvested 50 pounds this year, which is 30% of what I would have expected from all three hives.

The purple hive was doing very well and looked to have quite a lot of capped or ready to be capped honey. Additionally, it looks like the bees have started drawing comb in the Ross Round frames (which they haven't touched until now). I actually ended up putting another super on the purple hive.

The green hive was doing alright, the supers didn't seem to have a whole lot of capped honey, and a lot of the frames in the top super were looking very empty.

Yellow hive appeared to be re-queening itself, I found some queen cups with some royal jelly in them. Here is a pretty good shot (the white substance is royal jelly):

I'm not exactly sure why they would be re-queening themselves at this time of year, whether something happened to the old queen, or perhaps they have swarmed again. In any case, it means we probably won't be seeing very much more honey from this hive this season.

Split Success!

Hooray! Today I checked in on the little split, and they have brood, eggs and larvae! Check it out:

I'm so happy this little hive has successfully raised its own queen. Since I didn't remove half of the bees, it seems like the yellow hive still swarmed, but it's good to know that I gave this little hive enough resources to produce their own queen. I didn't feed the split sugar water at all during the entire process, which was probably a bit of a gamble since we are in such a drought year. I did provide them with capped honey from the original hive though.

These guys have about 4 drawn frames right now, I bet I have about a month before I need to add another box. I never intended to keep this hive, so I'll need to sell them in the next month before they get too big to transport.

Anyone looking to buy a beehive? :)

Little Visitors

Today I had my littlest visitors! Brynn and Cavan (along with their parents/our friends Tiffany and Justin) came over to take a peek at the bees.

Tiffany suited up to help me lift supers and inspect the hives. We ended up seeing a lot of honey and a little bit of capped brood. I suspect that all three hives may have swarmed at some point in the last two months, so there were no baby bees to be seen.

I took a gamble and opened the new little hive to see if there were any eggs yet. The little white hive is the hive that I split from the yellow hive, these bees will have to raise their own queen now. There were no eggs yet, but lots of pollen and nectar coming in. There were no queen cells, and no eggs or larvae. This is not a bad sign yet - if this new little hive has successfully raised their own queen, she would have hatched by now, hence no queen cells. However it is still very early for the queen to be laying eggs, so I'll have to check again in the next few weeks.

Drone Culling, Orientation Flights, and Split Update

Tonight I attended a Beekeepers' Guild of San Mateo monthly meeting where Serge Labesque was speaking. Serge is a great speaker, and even though I've been beekeeping for 3+ years now, I always learn so much whenever I attend his lectures.

On March 30th, I noticed that there were dead drones and drone larvae in front of the green (Mint) hive:

This was only in front of the Mint hive, none of the others... I wasn't sure what to think because there were no real signs of illness. During Serge's talk, he mentioned that during times of derth (little to no honey flow), the bees will kill the drones. We've been experiencing a drought over the past few years, this year is looking even worse than last year. I harvested the most honey from this hive a little over a week ago, so perhaps I created a food shortage for this hive.

Another thing that I was a little alarmed by was the unusually high activity in the afternoon:

It's not a very long video, nor is it very close (because of the high activity). I put on my suit and also snapped a few pictures:

Serge said that this sort of activity could be an "Orientation Flight", when young bees go outside and hover. This is how they get their bearings before going out into the world.

My last update is about the split. I think I may have done it a little wrong. I should have taken about 50% of the brood/bees from the yellow hive and moved it into the new hive. This will trick them into thinking that they swarmed. I moved 25% of the brood and bees at best. I also should have checked in at the 4-6 day mark to check that the new hive was building queen cells. Right now I'm at about the 12 day mark. At 16 days, the new queen will hatch. I should probably wait 2 more weeks before checking on the new hive.

Honey Harvest and Splits!

Today we had some folks come over to help us harvest honey! We were only able to snag 11 full frames, but the yield was fantastic: 23 pounds of honey! I was expecting to get about 40 frames harvested, but with all of the recent activity we weren't able to take quite as much as expected. 

Here is the result - pretty dark since we mostly harvested honey that had been in the hive through winter, you can see that there is some spring honey towards the bottom of the jar (it's much lighter):

Here is happy helper, Cara, uncapping some fresh spring honey:

Thistle (purple hive) recently swarmed, so the honey supers were mostly emptied. We got about 4 good frames of honey harvested from Thistle.

Mint (green hive) didn't yield quite as much honey because there was a lot of brood mixed into they honey supers. I haven't been using queen excluders, and it hasn't really been a problem until now. I put a queen excluder on both Thistle and Mint. We got 6 good frames from Mint. Here is happy helper, Evan, taking a look at one of the frames we found in the supers in Mint (you can see that the center is filled with brood, the edges have beautiful capped honey from spring):

On the bright side of having a lot of brood in the supers: we got to see some baby bees hatching! This was definitely a highlight for folks (she is in the middle of the picture, just starting to chew through the wax capping of her cell):

Buttercup (yellow hive) didn't have an escape board on it (one of the boards that drains the bees from the honey supers and had similar issues with brood mixed in with the honey. I took 1 frame of honey from them but then left them the rest.

I figured that Buttercup had the highest likelihood of swarming at this point (having come from a swarm last year and coming out of the winter as one of the stronger, well-balanced hives). So I attempted to do a split. I took frames with eggs, pollen, nectar, honey, larvae, and capped brood and transferred them into a fourth hive (about 5 frames total). There were no queen cells, so I hope that the bees will be able to select an egg to raise into an emergency queen, we'll see in the next 16 days or so what happens (it takes a queen 16 days to hatch from the day it was laid). Here is happy helper, Wyatt, helping select frames to put into the new hive:

Adding Supers

It is only February and I am already throwing on all of my honey supers! This year has been very warm so far (with very little rain). This might be a strange season for honey...

This year I am trying to switch over to RiteCell frames - these are very sturdy, inflexible plastic frames. Before I had used foundation with a very thin flexible sheet of plastic coated in wax. It holds up pretty well, but I wanted to try these RiteCell frames:

During my last inspection, I threw on supers filled with RiteCell frames. Green hive is doing an amazing job filling them up with honey and brood, here is a RiteCell frame that I put in the hive about a month ago:

Purple hive seemed to be honey-bound... meaning I didn't see a whole lot of brood in there, mostly just honey and nectar. I threw another super on top so they had a spot to put nectar, hopefully that helps. I did start to see some drone cells, so maybe I can split these hive soon. Splitting is when you take frames with eggs and larve and move them into a fresh hive, this will turn one hive into two. I don't have a whole lot more space for hives, so I will probably sell the new hives if I am successful.

Here are the three hives! I'm almost out of supers! Time to order some more:

First Checkin

Due to the freakishly warm weather we've been having lately (in the 70s and 80s), I decided to check in on the bees to see how they were faring. There was a ton of activity in front of all three hives:

I only had enough time to inspect Yellow and Green. Purple over-wintered with 4 boxes, Green had 3 and Yellow had 2 and a feeder. I figured Purple was the lowest priority because they probably had enough space to start taking in nectar for a few more weeks.

When I opened up the Yellow hive, they were definitely running out of space. In this picture the bees are building burr comb through the inner cover of the Yellow hive:

Other than that, Yellow seemed to be doing ok for laying space, so I threw an empty super on top, making Yellow 3 boxes high. Almost every single time I have opened Yellow, I have seen the queen. Here she is again:

Green hive was also running out of space and had a ton of burr comb everywhere. It looked like they had no space to lay eggs, so I threw on an empty super below the top-most super, making Green 4 boxes high. Here is the burr comb in the Green hive:

The Green hive also seemed to have a lot of pests on the bottom board. Hopefully they are doing ok. I did notice some curled up wings in the Yellow hive - that is a sign that they have a high mite load. Here is the bottom board of Green, you can see a hive beetle and many mites (the little red circles) amongst the wax crumbs. 

Last Minute Checking

This is probably the last chance I'm going to get to check in on the bees this season. It's probably going to start getting chilly, it's barely reaching the mid 60s in the afternoon. If it gets much colder, it would be risky to open the hives.

I wanted to checkin on the yellow hive after my robbing disaster last month. Looks like the queen is still alive and well! I can't believe I found her again, I can rarely spot my unmarked queens. I usually have to look for other evidence that they are well (looking for eggs and young larve). Here is the yellow hive queen:

Though I found the queen, I also saw that the yellow hive has nearly cleared out their honey stash already! Rather than bringing in nectar, they seem to have just been eating the frames of honey I gave them last month. I was able to clear out 10 empty frames and reduce the hive to only two hive bodies. I also put on a feeder to try to help them through the winter... it's not looking good for this hive.

Even though the bees don't seem to be bringing in much nectar, there is certainly a lot of pollen is still coming in, check out this great shot of the bees carrying pollen:

While checking in on the hives, I found this ridiculous frame of honey! I must have forgotten to put foundation on a frame next to this one, because the bees just kept building it up. I have no idea how I'm going to harvest this:

Swarm Confirmation and Supersedure

Well, I think I've got a confirmation that the Thistle hive swarmed. Earlier this week I was talking to our backyard neighbor, he had said there was extremely high bee activity happening on our property line around June 4th. It was only for a day, so I assume that about half of the Thistle hive took off with the queen. Usually a swarm will leave the hive and regroup within 50 feet of their hive, then they'll send out scouts to look for a permanent location. I assume my bees hung out around the fence and then moved on.

A new queen only takes about 16 days to hatch, since I saw queen cells around the end of May, I figured it was ok to take a peek inside of the Thistle hive to see if she had started laying eggs yet. If she hasn't it's no big deal, it's still early. A new queen hatches, then kills any other younger queens that didn't hatch (eliminating the competition). After that she goes on a mating flight where she mates with several drones, then she returns to the hive to start laying eggs. That whole process is probably not complete quite yet.

Inside of the Thistle hive, there were a lot of empty cells and a lot of capped brood. No larvae and no eggs. Worker bee larvae gets capped with wax around 9 days after a queen lays an egg, then hatches 21 days after the egg has been laid. That means that the queen must have been in the hive between June 2nd and June 14th, but then she left - so our neighbors account of a ton of bees swarming on the 4th lines up exactly with what is happening inside the hive. I actually didn't see any queen cells, but perhaps the bees have cleaned them up by now. I'll check for eggs in the next few weeks just to make sure everything is going well with the new queen.

Now to the Mint hive - there has been extremely low activity in front of the Mint hive. During the middle of the day, when there should be peak activity in front of the hive, there are only 2 or 3 bees coming in or out of the hive:

The Thisle hive, even after swarming, looks more like this (these pictures were both taken within minutes of each other):

So something definitely seems wrong with the Mint hive. When I opened up the hive, there were extremely few bees, and supersedure cells everywhere. Supersedure cells are cells used for growing queens. When a hive wants to swarm, they build swarm cells - also used for growing queens. The only difference between the two is that swarm cells are usually built along the bottom of the frame, the existing queen will take half the bees and leave, and a queen that hatches from a swarm cell will take over. Supersedure cells are built all over the frame and are used to replace a failing or non-existent queen, when the new queens hatch they will kill the old queen. The long cells are supersedure cells that have hatched (well, only one of them hatched, then that queen went around to all the un-hatched cells, opened them, and "took care" of the competition):

So it looks like either A) The Mint bees didn't like their queen and replaced her, or B) The Mint queen died and they replaced her. Apparently this is quite common with packages (Mint was a new package this spring). On the bright side, I saw one frame that had about 1/4 of the cells filled with eggs and 1/4 of the cells filled with larvae - so it would seem that there is currently a queen in residence.

Queen Cups

When we were taking the frames of honey to harvest off of Thistle, we found two frames of brood and A LOT of queen cups. None of them seemed to have any eggs in them, but that is probably because these frames were above the bee escape. One of them had some white waxy looking substance in it, I think it may be royal jelly, though it looks a lot more solid than I thought royal jelly would:

I suspect the bees are preparing to swarm - meaning the existing queen is preparing to leave with a large portion of the bees in the hive. They've run out of space and want to find a new home. The bees that remain in the hive would raise a new queen in one of these queen cups.

This would be the perfect time to split the hive. Splitting is essentially me swarming for the bees. Since Thistle feels like it is out of space, I would split it's resources in half and create two hives. Unfortunately I don't have the resources or time to perform a split right now. Though I have been preparing to split Thistle into a new yellow hive, I still don't have an extra bottom board or inner cover - so I have no where for a new hive to go. This means I'll probably end up losing my queen, which is too bad since she is obviously doing an amazing job since her hive is so strong.

First Spring Inspection

The weather has been getting up to 70 degrees during the day, so time to do the first spring inspection! There has been a lot of activity in front of the hive, so I was very excited to take a peek inside.

At a first glance, it looks like the bees have been doing a bit of spring cleaning. There was a lot of moldy/dusty looking pollen being thown out in front of the hive.

The hive still has 5 boxes on it, so I'll talk about them in the order that I took them apart. 5 will be the upper most box, 1 will be the lowest box.

Box 5 was about half filled with bees, there was mostly uncapped honey, but a little bit of capped honey.

Box 4 was similarly mostly uncapped honey, but there were eggs and larvae towards the bottom of some of the frames. So the queen may be hanging out up at the top to try to find space to lay eggs. I had left the queen excluder off of the hive for the winter so the bees could move freely wherever they wanted in order to keep warm and find food.

In between Box 4 and Box 3 there was a lot of burr comb containing larvae, unfortunately I had to break it open to move the boxes... sorry bees!

There was also one suspicious looking cell at the bottom of Box 4, it looked a bit like a queen cup since the opening was pointing downward instead of outward. The bees will build a lot of cells like this when they are preparing to swarm (leave the hive), so I decided to keep checking downward to make sure there weren't a lot of these:

 
Box 3 had a lot  of capped brood spotted with eggs, pollen and larvae. Looks like the queen doesn't have a whole lot of space to continue laying eggs. Here's a frame that has capped brood, pollen, and then honey towards the outside:

I also saw a lot of drones while peaking around, there's one walking around in the middle of the above picture. 

Box 2 was in a similar state to Box 3, lots of capped brood spotted with eggs, pollen and larvae. Down as far as box 2 it looked like there was really not a whole lot of space for the queen to lay new eggs. Each cell was already filled with something.

I was really curious to see what was in Box 1 since I had tried something odd last season. Last spring, the Thistle bees were spread out on the front of the hive a lot. One of the members of my bee guild had suggested adding an empty super on the bottom of the hive (instead of the top) so that the foraging bees had more space to land. It didn't really work as far as keeping the bees inside the hive more, and now that I've taken a look inside after winter, I'll definitely never do that again. Box 1 was mostly undrawn, and what was drawn was blackened or dusty like the bees hadn't been cleaning if very well.

I reorganized Box 2 and Box 1, putting half of the capped brood from Box 2 into Box 1. In both boxes, I put the brood into the center of the box, then filled the outsides with extracted honey frames. I took all of the undrawn comb out of Box 1 and I'm just storing it now. Hopefully this will coax the queen back down to the lower boxes to lay more eggs.

All in all, there was nothing too crazy going on inside, so it looks like the bees are doing good so far :)

In addition to peaking inside the hive, I did a little bit of cleaning on the outside. The copper roof had become pretty brown over the course of the winter, so I decided to clean it with some salt and lemons. Here's what it looked like before:

And here are the results, WOW!

Mint Post Mortem

I took apart the Mint hive today, they have definitely failed :( I'll talk about them from the top down, Box 5 will be the top-most box where Box 1 will be the lowest box.

Box 5 only had three or four bees in it, there were about 7 frames of uncapped or partially capped honey. Most of it was granulated. My latest harvest in August granulated completely after a few months, that is probably what they had left in the hive. Here is what the honey looks like when it granulates inside of the cells:

Box 4 was almost completely capped honey, untouched by the bees.

Box 3 had five frames of capped honey towards the outsides, one frame of pollen and capped honey, and four frames of honey and capped brood. Usually the brood moves upward throughout the winter through the middle of the hive. The four frames of brood were close to the middle of the box, the bees probably ate the honey, then when the weather warmed up, the queen started laying eggs in those cells. Unfortunately after a bit of warm weather, the temperature cooled right back down to almost freezing every night. So those baby bees were probably abandoned because the colony couldn't keep the adult bees and the capped brood warm. Some of them were just barely hatching and had their tongues out (asking for food which they never got).

Box 2 is where I found the cluster. The cluster is literally a cluster of bees around the queen, they bunch up like this in the winter in order to keep warm. This cluster was way too small, about the size of a grapefruit, and sure enough, the queen was in the middle:

The bees are head first into the cells trying to find food. From that picture, they almost look ok, but all of them are actually dead. It was bizarre looking at them like this, it is much different from the bee-pocalypse in Oct. 2011 where all of the bees looked sick. These bees look fine, just like they stopped moving...

Box 1 had three frames of pollen, brood and empty cells, two frames of just honey and five frames of just pollen. It must have been very wet in the hive, because the pollen was getting very moldy:

Beneath Box 1, there was a pile of dead bees on the base board. This is probably from gradual attrition, but finally the bees numbers were too low to drag out the corpses:

Overall, quite sad, but nothing catastrophically wrong. These guys probably failed from a combination of things:

• Me trapping the queen in the honey supers for a few weeks, keeping her from laying eggs
• Me leaving on the honey supers over the winter, leaving much more space for the bees to keep warm. A smaller space would have been easier to heat
• This hive gets a few hours less of sun every day due to it's placement nearest to the fence.

All those things probably forced the colony into winter with a low population and a lot of space - so it was hard for them to keep warm. When the cluster isn't big enough, they cannot travel as freely through the hive to search for capped honey to eat. So these bees didn't have anything wrong with them, no pests, no diseases; they just froze/starved to death because there weren't enough of them.

At least Thistle is still going strong, it looks like they'll make it through the winter at this point.

Freezing Failure

I went to check on the bees today, it looks like Mint may have failed... for those unfamiliar with the term, that means all the Mint bees seem to have died.

I've been checking on the hives throughout the winter to make sure that there is activity in the day time. There are bees coming in an out of the Thistle entrance every few seconds, even a few are bringing in pollen:

No bees are coming in and out of the Mint hive... Thistle gets a lot more sun than Mint throughout the day, even though they are only a few feet apart. Thistle's temperament is also slightly more aggressive and they were always a bit ahead of Mint in terms of building comb and producing honey.

I'm not really prepared to break down the hive today - so I'll leave Mint's postmortem inspection for another weekend. Luckily this seems like it would just be a failure due to the very cold weather we have been having, so I should be able to re-use the Mint equipment (unlike with my first hive and the "Beepocalypse"). It usually doesn't get quite as cold as it has been over the last few weeks. The evening temperatures have been dropping to below 30 degrees Fahrenheit, and daytime temperatures have been in the mid 40s (which are approaching the record lows for Los Altos)

I'm definitely not as sad about the Mint failure as I was last October when my only hive failed; especially since Thistle still seems to be doing ok through this freezing weather. Once it gets a bit warmer I could split the Thistle hive so I have two hives again in the spring.