Category: Nucs

Do You Have a Nuc?

I am a firm believer that every beekeeper who has had a hive live through one Winter should have a Nuc – 12 months out of the year. Over the past 6 weeks, I have run into maybe a dozen or more beekeepers (personally) that could have used one, but didn’t have one available.

Everyone is familiar with the early Spring Nuc’s. Many folks start their beekeeping career by purchasing one from another Nuc. I sell many Nuc’s for this exact purpose. So, if you have no inclination to ‘sell Spring Nuc’s’, why would you need the daggone thing?! Because ‘selling Nuc’s’ is not the real reason that folks raise Nuc’s. The real reason is to create a Sustainable Beekeeping program.

If you are in your first year as a beekeeper, you will hopefully have little need of a Nuc. In addition, your main goal is to get your new hives built up – taking a few frames from this new, growing hive is not a good idea. Your goal is to get your hives through the Winter. If you do that successfully, you’ll begin a part of your beekeeping career that will be rivaled by little else. The last thing you want to do is to put this wonderful experience at risk. So, this post does not apply to the first year beekeepers.

So, what’s this stuff about ‘sustainable beekeeping’? It focuses on one simple fact – using your own resources (bees) you build an apiary (or multiple apiaries) that enable you to meet all ‘bee’ needs that you have with your own bees. If you want to add a few hives, you build them from your own hives. If something goes wrong, you fix it with resources from your own hives. Many folks believe that the only way to do this is if you have a few dozen hives. But, that is wrong. You only need 2 hives and one Nuc.

So, how is it that you would have a Nuc on every day of the year and why?

It all begins with the Spring Nuc. As your bees come out of Winter, you will have at least one hive that is doing well. They have moved up into the top box (by that, I mean that the queen has started laying up there) and the bottom box is full of brood coming on. At this time, you take 2 frames of brood and 1 of honey. The brood frames need to have pollen in them, otherwise you’ll need to add a frame with pollen. One of the brood frames must have forager eggs. When you transfer the bees, a bunch will come with them, but you still need to shake a frame or two of bees into the Nuc box. Nurse bees have never flown before and will simply call the new Nuc their home. Nurse bees are also critical in the raising of a new queen, so you want to take frames with brood (uncapped is best) and shake them hard into your Nuc, getting as many bees as you can into it. Of course, you must identify and set your queen (the frame she is on) asside (yet another good reason to mark you queens) first, as you do not want to shake her into the Nuc. I put foundation for the rest of the frames. I always do this with March/April Nucs, as it gives the bees something to do as they wait for the new queen to hatch, mate and finally start laying.

At this point, you have created your Bank. You put bees in and can take them out in the future, if you need them. The bees will create a new queen that will hatch in around 16 days. I typically go into the hive on Day 21 (it’s always a factor of 7 because I have to do my day job during the weekdays!) and make sure I find an open queen cell. Once found, I leave them alone (I am not looking for the queen, yet…) for another 2 weeks. At that point, I expect to find eggs and larvae. If I don’t, I give the Nuc ANOTHER frame with capped brood and eggs (eggs being the key.) This time, I shake the bees off into the parent hive – I am not trying to bring more bees to my Nuc. If they have a queen that is simply taking a while to lay or maybe I missed the eggs with my old eyes, they’ll raise the brood and simply add it to their force. BUT, if the queen was eaten by a dragon fly or otherwise perished, they’ll raise a new queen from these eggs. I start the process over again (wait 3, and then 2, weeks). If you miss these checks and the queen didn’t make it, you’ll end up with a Nuc that has laying workers, an entirely other problem.

So, now you have your Spring Nuc. Since you’re not raising them to sell, you do not feed them and let them build on their own. They’ll do just fine. They may even swarm, which is not a problem (they’re just your bank). The main thing you need to do with them is to check them for a queen every 3 to 4 weeks. That’s it. In truth, just look for capped brood. The second you don’t see capped brood, drop a frame of eggs in her! Done!

So, why do this? It’s not a lot of work, but why do it at all? For one, you have a mated queen (local, to boot) ready to go if one of your main hives has a problem. Queenless? You have an answer with your mated Nuc queen. Did a main hive swarm and you aren’t sure if the new queen made it back? Give them a frame of eggs from the Bank Nuc. Do you need to bolster a colony because of some mishap? Give them a frame of capped brood from the Bank Nuc. You have now taken the first step towards ‘sustainability’. You need no outside resources to keep your hives going during the Summer.

So, July comes along and you have this Nuc on your hands. You can sell the thing (a little to offset the cost of beekeeping), let them have a go of it  through the Winter or you can start an Overwintered Nuc. An overwintered Nuc for me is a way to cull my hives of underperformers and its an insurance policy against Winter loss. The Overwintered Nuc is an Insurance Policy (not a bank). Strictly speaking, you want a Nuc that is lead by a Queen that was born in late July (in our area – around Richmond, Virginia). I break up my weak hives to create them, but if you have your Bank going, you can simply pinch your current queen and turn the Bank into an Insurance Policy. I am a firm believer in Overwintered Nucs. They have a brand new queen that really never gets to pour it on before Winter Prep starts. She has to downshift almost immediately and stay mostly idle through the Winter. I can assure you that queens like this come out of Winter like no other. One of my best Overwintered Nucs from last Winter has two drawn deeps, 2 mediums of capped honey and a 3rd medium that they just started to draw before the Nectar flow became a dribble. By creating an Overwintering Nuc, you have an insurance policy against the loss of a main hive over the Winter. If things go well, you can sell it for a premium to a new beekeeper (I think that 150% normal Nuc rates is very reasonable – Overwintered Nucs have huge value) and then start your Bank the next day (the Spring Nuc.)

So, that’s my rant on Nucs. Every beekeeper should have two hives and a Nuc. That’s how to be successful and it also is a great way to help the bees by having local bees as your bank/insurance policy.

Nuc Build-up Progressing Well

In normal years, I would be checking on some of my early Nuc’s now, looking for eggs (or the queen) and seeing about scheduling some pick-up’s over the next couple of weeks. But, this year I am already into my 3rd round of Nucs with a bunch already out the door! I actually believe that I will get everyone on my primary list at least 1 Nuc before the first week in May (crossing fingers for at least a little rain – we are very dry in Richmond, Va these days…)

My Deep Nuc’s have been nearly 100% successful. I kept one of my February Nuc’s (and it was the weakest one), just to watch how it does. So far, so good – I am confident that it will finish filling out the Deep well before the end of April. Brood pattern looks great, but I have to wonder if it is possible that a poorly mated queen can still have a good brood pattern, but run ‘dry’ much earlier than normal. We’ll see.

As to the Medium Nuc’s, I have had a huge struggle here. I am very confident (which probably isn’t a good thing – confident beekeepers, in my experience, typically have major issues all of the time!) that I have the ‘early’ Deep Nuc plan down to a science. But, that plan simply doesn’t work with the ‘early’ Medium’s. I think my success rate on those is a little over 60%. Currently, I think the problem was that I needed to shake more nurse bees in those small boxes. Shaking two Medium frames of Nurse bees simply is not the same thing as shaking two Deep frames of Nurse bees into a Nuc. You just get fewer bees. I’m not sure why that didn’t occur to my dense brain at the time, but most of my failures definitely centered around bee populations. The other possibility is that you just don’t have as much capped brood on a Medium frame as you do a Deep. Maybe I need to put more frames of capped brood in (which would lead me to charge more for them next year!) I have never been a fan of the ‘all Medium’ set-up and this experience is only firming that belief (wrong or right) in my mind.

The other big learning experience was with the queen rearing. I will be starting another round this weekend and hope to benefit from my earlier experiences. The key with Queen Rearing is (in my opinion) the Starting and Finishing hive(s). You have to get that right and monkeying around with it is a sure fire path to problems.

In closing, I have to pat myself on the back about this year being the ‘Year of the Swarm’. I have collected more quality swarms this year, so far, than all of last year. With much less enthusiasm, I must admit that (year to date) I have also had more hives swarms this year than I had swarm all of last year… Heh. With great rewards comes great sacrifices! Interestingly enough, about half of my swarmers already have a super of honey and are well into the second super. I have surely lost out on honey production, but this year’s crop is looking to be so good that I am hoping I won’t miss it.

 

Queen Bonanza & Queen Sounding

We had a nasty bit of beekeeping weather the last couple of days in Richmond, Va, temps dropping to near freezing. It’s no sweat for the established hives, but it can be very tough on the little guys (aka Nucs) coming along. I had only created one Nuc over the weekend, primarily due to the VSBA Spring Conference. I stocked her with nurse bees, so I do not have much doubts. I am a firm believer (I should translate this – I do not have a ton of experience doing this, but it is my current beliefs based on my knowledge of bees and successes (and failures) last year) that March Nucs in Richmond, Va (especially early ones) actually need a bit more nurse bees and frames of brood then late March or April Nucs.

In March, it can get really cold (we’ve really only had a couple of days like that this year), so the bees need to be able to create some kind of cluster. Drop one frame of eggs and some resources into a Nuc and you reduce your chances of a good queen, in my opinion. Later, in April, I start most of my Nucs with only 3 frames from a hive and they do great. But, I’ve had some failures with 3 frames of Nucs in March (specifically in 2011). The other benefit of taking a bunch of bees from a strong, full grown hive, in March is that it acts like swarm prevention (in my opinion). It frees up the space in the hive without setting it back very much. Usually, they can recover in a couple of weeks (brood-wise). Based on my inspections today, it looks like it paid off.

Of my 3 February Nucs, 2 raised their own queen and I gave a queen cell from Nuc 2 to Nuc 1. I think the problem with Nuc 1 was that I didn’t confirm eggs – I only confirmed 1 Day old larva. That was a good lesson, as I didn’t know what one day old larva really looked like (now that I have used the Nicot system, I am certain what they look like.) I think that Nuc ended up with 2 and 3 day old larva and simply never tried to start a queen. But, they took care of that queen cell and I found her walking on the frames today. In two of the Nucs, I can already see a nice pattern (eggs and larva – nothing capped). I am not ‘sold’ on them yet, but all signs point to green at the moment. I’ll check again in a week and hope to find 3 solid Nucs, ready to go.

I finally went back to the ‘cut out’ that I did from the old hive a few weeks back. I had decided to put in SHB traps (hangers that you put oil in). I do not have a ton of faith in them, but I figured every bit could help. The hive appeared full of the things. To my surprise, I found very few SHB on the inspection. I do not see them in my other hives, but only time will tell. I did find where a new queen had hatched. I am not so sure that I killed the old queen, as they had capped cells when I moved them (which I squashed under my foot by accident, like an idiot!) I think they had swarmed the day before I picked them up. A few frames later, I found the little queen. She was amped up, like a typical young queen, and bouncing around the frame. The really cool thing about this was what happened next. As I moved to put the frame back in, she let out the queen bugle! She was issuing a challenge! Of the dozens and dozens of new queens that I have seen, I had never heard this call before. It was really cool. But, it also got me to wondering ‘who is she challenging?’ Three and Found frames later and I found out – 2 more capped queen cells! I both frames and put into one of my queen breeders. They will need another frame of brood/nurse bees, but I didn’t have time to go get one. I’ll probably do it tomorrow or Friday.

So, I have around 25 Nucs started and I haven’t even gotten going good yet! Good times. I am really wondering what I am going to find in my queen rearing system this weekend. I am going to have to construct some more queen mating boxes asap!

20 Day Queen Emergence?

No matter how prepared that I think I am for Spring in the Apiary, I always seem to bee beehind! To date, I have created 22 Nucs, which is quite a number given it is only March 17! I have also supered a large number of my hives around Richmond, Va and actually had a queen hatch in my hand (I wonder if I’ll EVER see that again…)

The hives are healthy, period. Many folks have been warning that the bees will have eaten up all of their stores. I had two problem hives (one at Westover and one at Sherwood Forest), but both went into the Winter with low stores. So, warm or cold Winter, these gals were going to have a problem (both made it with a little help). But, not a single one of my other hives came close to eating all of their stores. Instead, I would say that I have to PULL frames of honey on most hives just to give the queen space to lay! The bottom line is that I will probably ignore the warnings that ‘a warm Winter means they eat more stores’ going forward. It probably is a worry to the folks that take so much honey that they have to feed in the Fall/Winter, but it appears to me that my strategy already deals with this possible obstacle (although I doubt we’ll see another warm Winter like this for some time).

On that note, I created a Nuc off of a strong hive last Sunday (3/11/2012). This time of year, I create the Nucs in the same yard as the hive. My hives are building up so quickly, they they seem to be able to give 2 to 3 frames of brood without missing a beat. Add a shake of Nurse bees, and the Nucs come out strong. Well, the one from last Sunday wasn’t acting right. It usually takes 2 to 3 days to begin seeing a forager or two and I wasn’t seeing sqat. So, I took a peak. Somehow, I must have mostly shaken out foragers into the Nuc, as there were VERY few bees. I decided to go back into the original hive and shake again. All three frames of foundation, from last Sunday, were 75% drawn and 30%+ full of nectar as of Thursday! These were Medium frames, but that’s a huge build up in my opinion. I had no idea this amount of nectar was coming in. What was the takeaway? I needed to get supers on all hives, which I have pretty much done as of today.

The final (and wildest, to me) bit of news came from my two early Nucs. I created both of them on Feb 26. In my mind, with the cool nights, these queens should have hatched on or around the 13th. Maybe the 14th if the cluster couldn’t keep the hive warm enough. So, I went in to check both Nucs for the first time today. The primary goal was to find open queen cells. If I spotted the queen, all the better.

Nuc 1 revealed nothing. This Nuc was a risk, as I had not found eggs but had seen 1 day old larva. I had been wondering if a Nuc could really get itself together in time to make a queen with nothing but larvae that would be too old in a day or less. The queen may have emerged and they may have torn the queen cell down, but I sort of doubted it. I would give it a few more days to be sure.

Nuc 2 revealed what I expected. Three queen cups and one of them open. After a brief span, I could see the queen prancing around the frame. Interestingly enough, I noticed two unopened queen cells – neither of them damaged (like you would see if the first hatching queen had stung her on the side). This was odd, as the Bee Math didn’t add up. This was 20 or so days after I created the Nuc! I figured that the queens were probably dead or maybe I just missed where they had been stung by the queen that hatched.

A few hours later, I got to thinking about the Nuc without any evidence of a queen and decided to take a risk. Why not cut out those two other swarm cells and put them in the Nuc? Couldn’t hurt, right? Both parent queens are good and the Nuc is ‘for sale’, so a queen offspring from either parent would be fine. So, I went back into the Nuc and cut out the two swarm cells (fortunately, both were about an inch apart) and began carrying them to the other Nuc (across my yard, maybe about 150 yards). As I looked at the small patch of wax, 3 nurse bees and two queen cells, I noticed a head poking through a small crack in one! Good lord, this queen cell not only had a living queen, but she was coming out  right now! The next part is amazing. In less then 5 seconds, she came all the way out!

So, this poor queen comes out thinking she has a new hive to rule, which turns out to be a patch of wax about 3 inches across with 3 Nurse bees and another queen cell! I doubt there are many queens who are greeted with such a small domain in the first few seconds as an adult!

At any rate, I was set on a course and I just prayed that she would keep hauling around the small wax while I made my way to the Nuc, which she did. When I set her in the hive, it was very hard to tell if they attacked her or accepted her. Several bees seemed to probe her and then she went down between the frames. I left the other cell on top of the frames, just to be safe. In retrospect, I should have taken the other cell and created a quick Nuc with her. But, so much was happening so quickly that I really didn’t have time to think (or what little thinking I did was not very efficient!)

Regardless of the outcome, that was definitely exciting.

 

Sanity

Another amazingly warm day in Richmond, Virginia afforded me the chance to have a look at another honey bee outyard. It proved extremely beneficial, as it brought me back to beekeeping reality. For the last couple of weeks, I have been seeing fairly good strength in all of the hives that I have been able to inspect. Then, over the past weekend, I found extremely strong hives in my backyard. Admittedly, a few were Nucs, but I was amazed at how quickly these bees were filling out their boxes (and, how soon!) I had gotten it into my dim-witted skull that all my hives were on the verge of swarming! It’s been a Winter like no other and who knows what to expect.

In this small outyard (I’ve yet to be extremely impressed with the results in this outyard, so I have yet to increase it beyond 3 hives), I found more what I would have expected. One hive was doing very well. Perhaps 5 Deep frames of capped bees. Several empty frames to expand into and not much nectar being stored. They actually had a deep full of honey above them (all in fairly new frames – 1 to 2 years old), so I simply did a bit of checkerboarding, placing empty, drawn frames every other slot (in 3 of them), pulling the frames full of honey for Nucs later on. I had expected to pull a Nuc out of this hive. Gentle bees, great brood pattern, second year queen. But, they were still in build-up mode (not big enough yet, to pull a Nuc.) ‘Oh well, I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.’, I thought as I moved to the next hive.

The next hive was nearly as strong, but they didn’t have extra stores at all. They had some capped honey and a lot of nectar, but nothing to spare. In addition, they were laying in the Medium and probably had 6 or 7 frames of brood. Again, still in build up mode. Plenty of space to build into. Still to early to yank a Nuc.

The final hive was a dissapointment, to be sure. Maybe 3 frames with brood, pattern spotty and brood area was small. This hive came from a swarm last year and ended the summer with an amazing brood pattern. I could see no sign of disease, but I also didn’t look for the queen. I can’t imagine that they swarmed, but I’ll give them another look on Sunday. The hive has a ton of stores (all Medium), so I need to do something if they don’t take care of this problem themselves. This is the second (seemingly) failing queen that I have found, out of 19 hives. I write the first off to my inability to find the old queen last year (so that I could whack her). This second one is a bit of a mystery.

Today’s events brought me back to reality, which is a good thing. Some hives are definitely ahead of schedule. Some very few are way ahead of schedule. But, I am no longer that concerned about swarming. I also can relax on the Nuc creation. I still hope to create some this weekend, but probably only one or two, like last weekend. It is more probable that the vast majority will be created in the 2nd and 3rd weekends of March after all. For whatever reason, that give me peace of mind…for the moment.

Swarm Prep

I was painting some hive equipment in the nice weather we have been getting in Richmond, Virginia today, which typically means there is a lot of ‘thinking’ going on as I tackle the fairly monotonous task. I kept going back to my beekeeping excursion this past week and how much some of my hives had progressed. Finally, although the temps were in the low 50’s (definitely beneath the temps that I normally pull frames in), I decided to look into the hives and overwintered nucs in my backyard. The big caveat to all of this is that I started open feeding in this yard last weekend, as part of a multi-year experiment on how it really affects already healthy hives.

In the first Nuc, I found that they had expanded into the full Deep. This was a bit of a surprise. They had nearly twice the brood from last weekend and had drawn out the 2 frames of foundation (yes, they are drawing wax.) This ‘nuc’ was already in a Deep, only because I never got to transfer them into one in the busy part of last Fall. So, I dropped a Medium on them. I normally feed a hive when they are drawing out a Medium, but I think this is still possible robbing time. I will wait for mid-March before I start feeding (hive feeding, I mean.)

The second look was a full hive. I found the beginnings of a daggone swarm cell. They had not drawn it out much, but I could see the mass of royal jelly in the thing. This is a pain – I wanted to be ahead of this. I whacked the queen cell and took a Nuc from them (my first Spring Nuc). I replaced the frames with some drawn but mostly foundation. I shook a bunch of nurse bees into the Nuc and also gave them a frame of foundation. I think those nurse bees need something to do (like draw wax) or they get antsy and kick off a swarm.

The next hive was from the Aug 1 cut out that I did near Lewis Ginter. They were only starting to work into their upper Medium and had plenty of space. They looked good, but are not near causing me problems (i.e. swarming.)

I then checked several Nucs. Two were ramping up nicely and will probably either be split (if they are doubles) or simply moved to a Deep (if they are singles) next weekend. But, the final Nuc (the cut out from post-Irene off of River Road) had a nearly capped swarm cell! Nurse bees were everywhere. They were in a double, so I moved the queen and 6 frames into a Deep and moved them off of the Nucs original location (a few feet.) I left the Nuc with the swarm cell and some 24 hour (or less) larva (and eggs) on three frames from the double nuc, 1 drawn frame and (of course) 1 frame of foundation to give the nurse bees something to do.

I am not sure if this activity is due to the open feeding or if all of my hives are on the verge of swarming. There are 15 or so hives that I haven’t seen since January… I may need to take a day off from work this week. I will definitely be starting a group of Nucs next weekend. I have decided to postpone my queen rearing program until March 10 (that’s my current plan, at any rate!)

All I can say is beekeepers in this area should be watching their hives. Swarms are not a bad thing, but if you are thinking about increasing or creating Nucs, it’s better to catch them before they swarm for sure.

First Full Inspections of the Year

With the weather being what it is, I had decided to start my full inspections in the middle of February (instead of early March, per usual.) A full inspection means that I open the hive and pull every frame. What’s the big deal? There are two big reasons why doing this in February (in a normal Winter) is a risk. One involves the cluster. I will break whatever cluster they have, by pulling every frame. In a normal Winter, this might set them back severely. They are unlikely to be able to form the cluster quickly again and, assuming we hit a week where the highs were in the low 40’s, a bunch of baking brood would likely die as the colony would not be able to keep them warm enough. But the second reason why this is typically ill advised is much more important. Whenever you do a full inspection, you are necessarily pulling the frame with the queen on it. This means you may kill her by accident. Normally, in mid-February (in my experience), no drones are about. This means that a new queen cannot be mated. Therefore, killing your queen in mid-February is normally a death sentence for the hive. Thus, only the foolish or those with a high risk tolerance (they don’t mind losing a hive or two if it furthers their knowledge of honey bees) will break a hive up this time of year.

So, why would I go into 10 hives today (well, 6 hives and 4 overwintered nucs)? The weather has simply been very unusual for Richmond, Virginia beekeepers this year. Based on my calculations (which, as ludicrous as it may sound, are based on a hybrid Maple’s blooming date this year, vs previous years), I thought that Drones might be walking on the comb as of today (and I mean exactly today!) So, I took the risk. I figured that I would be unlikely to kill any of the queens, but worse case could only be one dead queen. I was willing to take the risk.

I started out going through a full hive. I found capped drone brood (= drone walking on the comb by March 1 for sure). Stores were great, population was great and brood pattern was at a 10 (I ran into several 8’s that day and one 5, but this one was a 10 – Grade A Queen and definite Nuc parent.) I then hit my 4 Nuc’s. All looked good except for 1, which was literally slam out of food. They had a small brood nest (but the pattern was a 9) and no food. This was the swarm that I found in one of my deeps in the shed last Fall. You can’t expect a Fall Nuc to build up much, but these guys were completely out (I had a Nov swarm that had more). This got them a 2 on the Winter Stores scale. We’ll see how they score out by March. But, the bottom line is that they will live to March because of my inspection today. When I found them without any honey, I dropped a fully frame of capped honey from the hive that I started the series with. That will get them by for 2 or 3 weeks (based on their population), when I’ll check ’em again.

At this point, with the exception of the one nearly starved Nuc, I had found Drone cells (capped) in the one hive and all Nucs. Opening the last Nuc, I figured to find the same. Wait? What was that? A Drone just starting to make his way out of the cell!! In truth, only his eyes were visible. Being the lazy male that he is, the workers have to cut him out of his cell. So, there he was, smiling at me. This means drones will be walking on the comb in a day or two!!!

Why do I care about walking drones? This is the number one flag for Nuc makers. If a Drone is walking on the comb, you know with near absolute certainty that Drones will be flying to Drone Congregation Areas in 14 days. You also know that it takes a Queen 16 days (give or take a day) to hatch and another week (at least) before she heads out to be mated. So, if you see walking Drones, you can start a Nuc on that very day and feel comfortable that Drones will be out to mate with your virgin queen when she is ready! So, walking drones are critical for Nuc makers and Queen rearers.

So, seeing one trying to poke out was encouraging. But, I was not that excited, as I had expected to see one walking…wait..what was that?! A big, fat beggar drone making his way among the workers looking for food! And this was just a Nuc! Ha! Drones are out in central Virginia! Booyah! (Man, I love this time of year.)

For me, I like to wait a week or so after the first Walking Drone so that I get more drones out there for my queens. I have no idea if it makes a difference or not (I will experiment one of these years, but not this year.) So, my target date for the first round of Nucs (March 3 to 5) is holding steady!

All in all, the inspections went well. I didn’t get deep into several of the larger hives, as it started to get a bit late. If you go into a hive and break her apart , they need some time to get back together even in this kind of weather. I don’t like to break them up inside of 2 hours before sunset when the temps are going down into the 40’s or lower that night. Regardless, all hives are alive and (with the exception of the one Nuc) with more then enough stores to make them to the holly bloom. Dandilions are blooming now (although I do not see my bees working them.)

We’ll see what March has in store, but I’m going on record saying that this will forever after be known as the Year of the Swarm. It is very clear to me, based on full hives and nucs, that the bees are ramping up very strong right now. I am confident saying that swarms will happen the first week of March around Richmond, Virginia. I’d bet big money on it.

 

Maples in Bloom

Red Maple Bloom
Red Maple Blooms in January

I was amazed to see that my hybrid Red Maples were in bloom yesterday (1/29), to the east of Richmond, Virginia. Last year, these same maples bloomed a couple of weeks before the main Maple bloom, so I checked my records and found that they bloomed in mid-February in 2011 last year. You shouldn’t draw a major conclusion from this, at least in the beekeeping world. Of course, I will draw a few just for kicks!

After doing a little more research and I located my first observation of walking drones in 2011, 22 days later on March 11… The implied conclusion (that I might see walking drones 22 days from yesterday, or on February 20) is a bit of a stretch (I do not think the appearance of drones is based on hybrid Maple blooms….), but it still bears watching.

To some extent, this is becoming a trek down the proverbial (is Alice in Wonderland a proverb?! heh…) rabbit hole! What if we do find drones on our combs in late February? Can we actually start Nuc’s then? I have heard of some folks who started Nucs during the 1st week of March a few years back. But, what of the risk? The odds of a ‘cold snap’ increase the earlier you start your Nucs. Will they struggle to raise a new queen? What about the mating flight?

All interesting questions. I look forward to pushing the envelope to see how it goes. The way this weather is going, I feel confident that I’ll be starting Nucs the first week of March at the latest!

 

I’ll Definitely Be Selling Honey

Good lord. I mentioned in my last post that I had extracted two-thirds of a five gallon bucket off of one of my hives. In all honesty, I am certain that experienced beekeepers will see that and think it isn’t much. But, I can tell  you folks out there who, like me, are just getting into this hobby, that it is a lot. I was amazed at how many jars I filled up, of varying sizes (and hope to get a picture of it tomorrow.) I have a lot of folks that I am giving honey away to, but even after that I will have more honey then my family can eat in a year (by a LONG shot.) The real kicker is that this was just one hive. I have 4 more hives with similar takes (one has a lot more, but the average on the rest is 3 shallows)!!!! Heh. I thought I might sell a bottle or two to recoup the costs of my glass jars. I can see now that I can recoup the cost of the extractor over a few years. I must say that I have not been this excited since I first got the bees. It’s been an amazing adventure. This honey is from last Fall and this Spring (on a Varina hive), so it is a mix but it is very dark. I look forward to my next extraction (Thursday) from a Charles City hive.

On a side note, I had taken the extracted supers and put them back on the original hive. A couple of notes about this. To begin with, I put them directly on top of the brood chamber (a Deep and a Medium, in my case), under the inner cover. Just like they were when I got them. The goal here is to let the bees clean up the remaining honey and, I assume, consolidate it back closer to the brood nest. They also will patrol the comb to keep the wax moths and small hive beetles out. Finally, they can use it if we get a Fall flow (hasn’t happened since the 90’s in my area, according to the old timers, but I’m ready for it if it does.) After doing this, I had some questions about my experience that I posted on a bee forum. While searching their archives, I found where lots of folks put the supers on above the inner cover. I had no idea and asked why (and if I had made a mistake putting them back on beneath the inner cover.) In the end, many folks responded that they do exactly like I do (for the same reasons posted above) and the only reason mentioned for putting it above the inner cover was to make sure the queen didn’t lay in them. At this point, I am not worried about that. The risk is that Wax Moths are attracted to pollen and brood comb. They don’t care for honey comb. So, keeping the queen out of your honey supers removes the wax moth risk. At the moment, I am not trying to keep her out (as always, this may change in the future.) To begin with, I doubt she’s going up there at this time of year. Secondly, I hope to use other methods to keep the wax moth at bay once I actually remove the supers in November.

The second note is that I definitely noticed a lot of increased activity around the hive that I harvested from when I put the extracted supers back on the hive. I cannot be sure, but I think the smell of the honey drew bees from the other two strong hives nearby. This hive can defend itself, but I am not partial to setting up mortal combat for no good reason (bees die  when these would be robbers try to make a go of it.) The next time that I do this, I will put an entrance reducer on the hive before I drop the extracted supers back on. This will reduce the entrance, make it easier to defend and (hopefully) dissuade most of the combat from happening. We’ll see…

Lastly, I have started my Nuc list for 2012 (a lady in Charles City wanted to get on it.) I hope to get a page up on the site to help folks decide if they want to get on the list and how to do so soon. I’ll also need to get something up about ‘local honey for sale’!!! Bonzai! Beekeeping is a blast.