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:

Moving Day

It is finally time to move my little hive! I created this hive by splitting it from the Yellow hive around the end of March. I verified that there is a laying queen and the bees are nice and healthy, so it's time for them to move to their new home.

Last night around 9:00PM, we installed a migratory cover. This is a nifty little mesh screen that keeps the bees in the hive while allowing for some air circulation. We put it on at night so that all of the field bees would be inside the hive. Here they are this morning:

Around 11:30AM, we popped them into the trunk of the car. Bye bees!

Their new home is only 5 miles away from their old one, so once we placed the bees in their new home, we opened the two flaps on the migratory cover to make sure the bees left slowly. Altering the entrance by placing something in the way (like sticks/grass) makes the bees pay more attention while leaving and theoretically you suffer fewer losses.

Here they are in their new home:

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: