I never learn

Being a pop, a gardener, a beekeeper, a blogger and an employee of Dominion pretty much requires about 40 hours a day. These 24 hour days are not working for me. Regardless, I have been juggling it about and keeping on top of  my bees (I should probably say ‘abreast of my bees’, as I am rarely on top of everything that is going on with them.)

As to my last post, I did lose both the Apple Orchard Nuc and the Blue Cottage Nuc. The first Nuc came from a July swarm (and it was definitely not worth a fly). The second Nuc was one of the Nuc’s that I purchased this past Spring. It was a ‘Nuc purchasing’ lesson for me, as it came with 1.5 frames of bees/honey/pollen. I gave it some capped brood from my other hives, but it simply never could get a leg up. I am confident that the problem was with the queen. I have seen this time and time again. A weak hive simply never thrives as it has a weak queen. This may not be the holy grail (i.e. I am sure there are exceptions), but it has held true enough for me that I will not sweat a weak Nuc going forward.

The combine with Moe and Apache worked like a champ. I think that queen went into a laying frenzy after the combine, but I have no hard data to prove it. I definitely found a ton of eggs that had been recently laid and do not recall seeing that when she was in the Nuc. I put an entrance reducer on the hive anyway, as it definitely is on the border of having too much honey to protect at the moment. I’ve been back a few times and it is all looking good.

I also moved the Berkeley Hive down to my Apiary at Haupt Store. Here is the meaning of the title of this post. I moved a strong hive down to an apiary with nothing but Nuc’s. You’d think even my small brain would work sometimes. Well, needless to say, I came back 24 hours later and found that hive attacking all of my Nuc’s. I couldn’t  believe it. I blocked off the entrance and took them all down to my pop’s back fields and  left them. As of yesterday, they all looked good, but I was unable to find queen or eggs in the Albo Nuc. I did find pupae, but no queen. I am hopeful she was just being her normal wiley self. I’ll check again later.

What’s the big lesson? I have been whining all Summer about the problems of having your young Nuc’s in a yard with established hives (especially once June gets here – even more importantly when you live the the desert that we call Varina.) I was able to finally give my Nuc’s some peace by getting them to a new apiary at a general store down in Charles City. But, it only takes a few months for me to forget my lessons, apparently. Taking Berkeley down to that Apiary was a bad call. I now know that you (well, maybe not you, but definitely me) really need to have what some call a Nuc Yard if you want to play with Nuc’s. They are a dream when you only have to worry about how well the queen is doing and how fast they are building up. When you have to worry about invaders, it literally becomes something that is on your mind when you go to sleep and when you are at work. Starting in the Spring of ’11, I will always have a dedicated Nuc yard.

But, this whole ‘dedicated’ business also creates a bit of a quandary. I have strong hives that I would like to breed, so to speak. When a Virgin goes off to breed (in a new Nuc, for example), you have no way of knowing who she will choose when she is 50 to 100 feet up in the air with a bunch of drones. But, you can increase the chances of good breeding by having good stock around. So, you want your strongest hives nearby when the Nuc’s send out their virgins. But, you do not want them to rob the little Nuc’s. My current plan is to try the ‘1 Mile’ theory. Drones will definitely go out several miles to mate. But, can an established hive mount a strong attack force when their home base is a mile from the destination? My experience so far is that they cannot. I have had Nuc’s on my family farm that were a half mile or three-quarters of a mile from an established hive and they had no problems. But, when put near one of these established hives, it became a nightmare.

I think that the close proximity (within 100 or 200 yards) creates the opportunity for a gang of bees to hit a small Nuc all at once. The Nuc cannot handle a gang. It does just fine when one or two come nosing around, but send in 100 and the Nuc is immediately overwhelmed.

Well, we’ll see. I have a cut out to do this Friday and it should be interesting. The key will be to save enough of their honey to help them through the Winter. The other key will be to keep them away from my established hives while they get situated during this past month…

The Bee Adventure Continues

I have finally had a few moments to devote to my bees and there is much to record.

The easiest hives to check are obviously on the home front (the Wilton Apiary) and all were doing fine except the Little Big Horn hive which was on the verge of a major wax moth (and some SHB larvae) incursion. This hive was a  split off of Geronimo, done very late in the year. The single reason that I did it was because of finding nearly a dozen swarm cells in the hive in late July. I had been concerned about them from the start, as they never had many bees out front. I had thought this was primarily because they did not receive the foragers in the split. They have a queen, which I assume was from one of the swarm cells, but they simply never recovered. As of the latest check (within the last week), there were not enough bees to protect all of the honey and pollen (the wax mouths were not on the 3 frames that the bees occupied, but they had started on most of the rest of the frames.)

As with anything related to bees, you simply cannot draw a definitive conclusion off of one incident because of all of the variables involved (well, you can if you have a thousand hives that you can judge, which I don’t!) It does, however, reinforce my other experiences with July splits. They are not for the faint of heart, at least not when you have a drought going on. I did freeze all of the frames (except the ones that the bees protected) and still have them in the chest box now. It will be interesting to see if the bees (whatever hive I drop them on) will still use the honey. It still looked good to me, except for the webbing and moth/SHB eggs on it here and there.

The four established hives looked great, with at least 50 lbs of honey on all of them and no sign of problems with varroa. I did drop some 2:1 mix on Geronimo, as they had not finished drawing out two deep frames that I had stolen from them for a swarm in early July.

As to Mountcastle, both the Albo hive and the Westover hive looked very strong. Albo has enough honey (1.5 deeps and one medium) that I will probably be able to use some of it for emergency feeding of my Nuc’s.

The Haupt hives, all of which are Nuc’s, are a mixed bag and I am not certain whether they are strong or not. Apache is definitely strong (more on that one below), but the other three are a bit of a question mark for me. They only have five frames, so it’s not like they can have a lot of honey anyway. But, Bob and the Blue Cottage Hive both have a ton of capped brood (2.5 to 3 frames worth), so it appears that they are prepping for winter. I will probably have to feed them all winter. The Apple Orchard Hive is probably a wash and I will combine it soon.

As to combining, I have long been debating about whether to combine two weak hives or not. Many old timers tell you that combining two weak hives just creates one weak hive. It is better to pinch the queen on the weak hive and combine it with a strong hive (just to give the strong queen/hive an added boost for the Winter.) I can sort of see their point, but I will probably test it out every so often, just to see what happens.

But, when I checked the Westover Aviary yesterday, I found out that the Moe Hive was without a queen. I had not checked it since August 2, so I do not know when they went queenless. No capped brood. No eggs. Tons of honey and nectar. A medium amount of bees. Now, there is always a chance that they swarmed and the virgin queen was somewhere about. But, I never saw her and the Moe Queen was an unknown. This whole hive was a new genetic pool. On the other hand, I had a strong Nuc (Apache) with 5 full frames and a ton of bees. I decided to combine Moe with the Apache hive and hope that the Apache hive would prevail. I picked up the hive from the Haupt’s aviary and placed it on the bottom of the Moe Hive, with a single layer of newspaper between them. The Apache hive has one of the resistant queens that I picked up outside of Jetersville this past Summer, so I hope that this queen does prevail. If it does, the hive will basically be set (Moe had a deep and two shallows that were about 80% full of honey – I’d estimate a 100 lbs of honey altogether once you include what Apache had.)

I wasn’t able to check Curly, as a tree had fallen over it. The tree didn’t touch the hive, but it basically surrounded it with its limbs/leaves. Bees were all over the landing board, so I feel good about them. But, I have received permission from the Westover Plantation landowner to cut the tree up this week sometime, at which point  I’ll check on Curly.

My main plans right now, outside of the Westover tree, are to move an established hive (I am thinking Berkeley) to the Haupt’s apiary (I want a strong hive to put my double Nuc on) and to do something with the Little Big Horn bees and Apple Orchard bees (a combine of some sort)

At any rate, the beat goes on…