Beginner Frame Observations

A new beekeeper swung by to watch some of my misadventures in the bee yards and started off asking me what all the numbers on the frames were. At one end of an open hive, each frame has a number, right now ranging from 10 to 17. These numbers serve two purposes – primarily, they tell me the year that the frame went into production. “12” means that this frame “went live” in 2012. The wax is about that old and it helps me to identify which frames go to the wax melter each year (and are then filled with fresh foundation). I start removing frames in year 5 and absolutely have them recycled by year 10. The numbers also tell me the direction the frame is in – it helps me keep them oriented in the same direction they were before I started a deep inspection.

Medium Frame
A recycled frame

The next question the new beekeeper asked was about the wires that ran horizontally through the frame. That observation caused even me to pause and look at the frame. As noted back in 2012 (posted here), I have long since stopped wiring my frames. It has been so long that I never even think about it anymore (and I have long since recycled nearly all frames with this wire).

When I started beekeeping, everyone told me you had to run a wire through the frame horizontally. This would prevent the drawn wax from falling out of the frame on hot days. I dutifully (one could call it blindly:) followed their instructions and wired all of my frames, both Deeps and Mediums. All was good!

My beekeeping hives continued to expand and I was soon creating tons of new frames. This was taking a huge amount of time, so I purchased a frame jig and started using a nail gun. Bingo! Huge time savers! I experimented with different frame types and this cut even more time. Soon, the lion’s share of my time, for each frame, was spent wiring the daggone things. No matter where I looked, I found no easy (faster) solution to this. Finally, it dawned on me. Did I really need to wire these things? If ever there was something to experiment with, this was it. So, I started small – maybe 10 hives without wires. Let’s see what happened.

I am happy to report that I have not created a wired frame since 2013 and have not had a single instance of wax falling out of my frames. I do have wire embedded (vertically) in the foundation that I purchase and feel confident that this is the real reason that my drawn wax remains secure. I have only recently started to attend some of the local beekeeping association meetings again, so am unsure if “wiring” is still suggested to new beekeepers. I can only speak from my experience – wiring hives may have been a must have in the past, but they are no longer necessary for me.

I Need a Queen!

Over the last 24 hours, I have gotten a bit over an inch of much needed rain and more is in the future! Per usual, I will likely go from complaining about not enough rain to fretting about too much rain! It seems I am never satisfied with what Mother Nature dishes out:) Regardless, my Nucs are rocking and, with this rain, I am betting that I will have many very strong Nucs in 2 weeks. No doubt, I will have more than I currently have demand for and am likely to post to Craigslist soon! But, that’s a good problem to have so I am not complaining!

Over the past few days, between swarm calls, I have received a lot of calls and emails about queens. For one reason or another, folks always seem to be looking for queens this time of the year. Instead of launching into my typical spiel about sustainable beekeeping and that everyone should have at least one Nuc, I will point folks to a past spiel on that score (see http://richmondhoneybee.com/nucs/nuc.html). Today, I will talk about the supposed “queenless state”.

First, I will pass on a recent experience from a great lady out in the country where I have a very successful apiary on the James River here in Central Virginia. She began keeping bees a few years ago, purchasing a couple of Nucs from me and has been very dedicated to the hobby and doing it correctly. She was actively in her hives and noticed, in early April I believe, that one of her hives had no capped brood at all – not even drone brood. She found open queen cells, but nothing else. If you remember your bee math, this means that there has been no queen in that hive for possibly 24 days (drones hatch then). In my experience, a new queen (post swarm) is laying before all of the drones hatch, but it is possible to have a couple of days between a queen starting to lay and the last drone hatching, in cooler weather. She was fairly certain she was without a queen, so she dropped a frame of eggs (from a nearby, queen-right hive) into the troubling hive. I advised her to go back 3 weeks later to see if she had an open queen cell (the bees should raise a new queen within 14 to 16 days, if they were without one.)

Instead, she found several frames of capped brood and a thriving hive. What happened here? Even though it appeared that she did not have a queen, she actually did. The young queen was simply slow to get started and working on her own timeline, like they always do! The key here is that she had an available frame of eggs to put in the hive, just in case. It was simply insurance. It turned out she did not need it, but it was reassuring that she did.

The ability to maintain your hives under queens of local stock cannot be understated. Purchasing queens from out of state, from differing geographical regions, increases risk to your hives in my view and experience.

Wet and now Dry!

Mother Nature is definitely the most fickle lass that I know! Last year, we had a very wet Spring, coupled with a bout of freezing weather in late April that I believe was the primary culprit in the struggles of the last year. Rain washes nectar out of plants – not a good thing for bees. The freezing weather whacked both my blueberry and strawberry blooms. I have to imagine that similar things happened to many weeds out in the wilds (weeds that my bees rely on for nectar). All of this lead to a below-average honey crop and difficulty in getting new hives to build up as they normally do.

Fast forward to this Spring. The lack of rain has enabled me to create what may be a record number of Nucs. I think I have 30 out in the field, or there about. With the exception of one that I let starve (like a fool – even noted in my journal that their “resource frame was light” and that I should feed these gals…), my Nucs seem to be doing really well. But, it has been unusually dry by my reckonning. Over the last 10 days, I believe I have received 1.5 inches of rain. Not terrible for a June or July, but pretty poor for an April. They do not even forecast rain in he foreseeable future.

Although I do not think that there has been any impact yet, I do believe that I will change my tune on that score by the end of next week if we still do not have rain. But, only time will tell…

Spring Splits

This year, my main focus is increase. Due to the higher than normal losses over the past 6 months! So far, the stars have aligned nicely for this goal, as I have been able to create around 15 Nuc’s over the past couple of weeks.

It seems that many folks call a “Nuc” a Spring Split. For me, any split is dividing the frames in a mature hive evenly among two hives. I usually tackle splits (if I do ’em) in late April and early May, during a full on Flow. Regardless, this is the perfect time for me to create a Nuc (or Split!) in areas just to the east of Richmond, Va.

Bees on a Frame
What I mean by “working a frame”

Starting in March, I begin to gauge my hives – usually during the Spring clean-up (scraping frames and bottom boards, re-leveling, etc..) But, oftentimes I am simply pulling off the boxes until I get to the bottom deep and pulling a few frames in the center of the deep. My rule is to only pull a Nuc when the weather is right and the colony is at least working a few frames in the bottom deep. By gauging my hives in mid-March, I can usually tell when to next check them for possibly Nuc creation.

Once I identify the target colony, I need to find the queen. In fact, regardless of whether I take a Nuc or not, I make it an absolute must to find all queens by April 1 (and mark them). In this way, I know that any unmarked queen is last year’s queen – I have probably marked 10 white queens this Spring (the rest were either already white or even green and blue – I actually noted one Red queen, but once I realized that queen had to be from 2013, I wonder if I didn’t see some pollen or something….need to find that queen again!) I then place the frame with the queen off to the side, leaning up against the hive. It’s now work time!

The Nuc is a 5-framer. If I am creating a Deep Nuc (colony is working 5 or 6 frames), I move 3 frames to the Nuc (the remaining two are either already drawn frames or with foundation). I make sure that a frame with eggs is dead center in the Nuc. Once the frames are squared, I then shake 3 frames of bees onto the top of the Nuc frames. Lots fall on the ground, but they make their way back to the Nuc. Once done, I put the top on the Nuc and let her be for 3 weeks (it should be noted that I create all of my Nucs within 50′ of the parent hive – most times within 10′, and that’s where they stay).

For Medium Nucs, I have found that I need 4 frames from the parent hive. I also create most of them a bit later in the season (usually mid-April.) I may have 3 out there right now, but will create quite a few more in a week or two.

Once the Nuc is created, I let it sit for 3 weeks. By then, they will have raised and hatched a new queen, so I am ONLY actively looking for an open queen cell or two. If I do not see that, they receive another frame of eggs and I make a note to check again in 3 weeks. Once I see an open queen cell, I return in 2 weeks to find either evidence of a queen (eggs, larvae) or the queen herself. They get another frame of eggs if I don’t find one of these things, otherwise I note that we have a laying queen and come back 2 weeks later to mark the queen and take action on the Nuc (sell, convert to full hive, move, etc…)

These are the Split/Nuc creation basics. In some cases, I take several Nucs from the same hive. Some queens seem hell bent on growing like gangbusters. I will continue to revisit these hives, sometimes one week apart, creating a new Nuc each time. But, I never put the bees at jeopardy. I only do this with my really strong hives. They seem focused on building up to swarm, so I take advantage of this growth until they actually do.