Beekeeping in Richmond, Virginia

It’s been awhile sense I have shared any of my adventures (and misadventures) with beekeeping! Although the bees and I have kept at it (our partnership is set in iron!), I have also been spreading into other “hobbies” of a sort, in both agriculture and animal husbandry. Covid and various other insanities have driven me to take more and more actions towards raising or growing much of my own food.

And so, about two years ago, I started the process of selling my existing home and moving to a farm. It’s hard to believe that it has been that long (and how much effort it took to accomplish the goal), but I have finally settled in a farm/homestead/farmstead in Goochland, Va! Man, it’s been a ride.

The end result of this is that I have decided to once again ramp up an online presence (of a sort), but not solely focused on bees. This time, it will be about my family’s adventures at our new farm. In that vein, I am ramping up a new website and hope to begin a bit of a youtube channel (I think they call it ‘vloggin’).

I am currently designing how all of the content here will transition to the new location, as well as to begin posting the first bit of information at the new location. Although the site has not been setup yet, the new url will be https://farmofflowingmilkandhoney. I will post more as I get it going. I hope one or two people find it educational or at least entertaining:)

The bees are working hard and building up well ahead of schedule, as per the continuing theme in many of my posts this year. We are getting some rain, but it seems to be interspersed enough with sunny, nice weather that the bees are not being impacted (seemingly, anyway!) I received my first swarm call this past week, which was very encouraging. I started creating Nucs three weeks ago and have been very worried that the new queens would not have enough drones out there to have a really good mating. But, if Mama Nature seems to believe that the bees can swarm (and have successful mating’s), then those first Nucs have a better chance than I had thought.

As of yesterday, I think I have created somewhere between 15 and 25 nucs. I actually did my first “Nuc check” yesterday, which happens 3 weeks after I create a Nuc. My primary goal here is to find a queen cell that indicates a queen did hatch. It is extremely difficult (at least for me) to find a young queen. She seems smaller and much faster (when I do luckily find her.) So, my primary goal, 3 weeks after creating a Nuc, is to find the open cell (or two) that indicates a successful hatch. If I do not find it, I give the nuc another frame of eggs.

Sometimes, a queen actually did hatch and they tore down the queen cell so quickly that I missed it. When this happens, I find a bunch of capped brood on my follow up “brood check”. This follow up check is 2 weeks after I have found evidence that a queen did hatch (and, thus, 5 weeks after I have created the Nuc). I am looking for the actual queen and at least some larvae or something else that indicates we have the making’s of a good nuc. But, for yesterday’s check, I was looking for signs that a queen (probably a virgin) was in there somewhere, which I found. It’s always nice to have positive news on the first check – today, I will check a few more and will no doubt have some bad news somewhere.

On that same note (was it time to create Nucs, three weeks ago), I found one hive (an overwintered Nuc that I upgraded to a full hive a few weeks ago) that was full of swarm cells yesterday. The overwintered nucs are always a challenge – they come out of Winter like nothing else. This one apparently needed a full hive in February. But, the good news is (once again) that Mother Nature believes we have drones out there for a good mating (this hive will swarm within the next 3 days). So, maybe my early Nucs will be solid!

The temps are popping up a bit and now is when I go out to have my first real look in the hives. The main thing you can possibly deal with right now would be a lack of resources (feeding or frames of honey from another hive), but it mainly serves as a temperature check for me on each of my hives.

It is amazing to me how you can go to one hive and find them basically just waking up from the Winter (capped brood on 3 frames in one (of two) hive body, with resources on all sides and lots of space to expand into) and then the next hive already has 7 frames of capped brood! In truth, based on my notes, I rarely have many hives that already are covering 7 frames at this time – it usually happens to the majority of my hives by the end of March. This year, the bees are definitely ahead of schedule. I looked through nearly all of my hives in Charles City today and found one thing very much in common – they all had PLENTY of honey. In fact, I had more than one Deep/Medium setup with the Medium nearly full of honey still. This isn’t completely unusual, but in several cases, the Deep was over 60% full of capped brood. Based on my notes, I have never had that happen by March 8.

Today, I was really going out to find my queens and make sure they were all marked. Sometimes, a hive swarms late in the season and I miss it. Now is the time to get green marks on them – for one, it’s easier to find them when I start Nuc creation in a week or two, and, secondly, I do not have to wonder if they were born this year or not. When I make this run, I usually bring several “readied” Nucs to drop off in the yards for later in March (I can’t carry it all if I wait until the day I need them.) I didn’t bring extra brood chambers or honey supers as I never need them at this time of year. But, today, I had two hives that were FULL. I needed to either give them space and/or remove some bees!

So, today I created some of my earliest Nucs ever. I really had no choice. I had hives that had no space in the Medium bodies (mostly honey) and no space in the Deeps (mostly capped brood and bees!) In addition, several hives were identified for Nuc creation within the next week. I really do not have a lot of hope for these Nucs, as there are only a few drones out there. Maybe things will ramp up quickly when I need them (3 weeks from today, when my virgin queens may start their mating flights.) But, the weather looks good for the next few days, so they have a chance.

What alarms me the most is that this is Charles City. These yards are traditionally a week or so behind my Henrico hives. Tomorrow, I have taken the day off to go through the Henrico hives. Who knows what I will find, but I will be prepared!

The first Beekeeping task of the year is behind me. Typically (or hopefully!), in early February, I will look for a day that rises into the 50’s and go to all of my outyards, looking for deadouts. 95% of these hives will have perished after the first frost and have pristine, drawn wax and maybe even some honey stores. I like to get these right off, as they have a big impact on my next couple of tasks in the beeyards.

What causes these deadouts? Many folks reach out to me when they have a dead hive and ask “why do you think my bees died?” I understand that curiosity, but for me it is simply part of the numbers game. I am going to lose some hives – a few will have starved out, most simply swarmed late in the season and didn’t build up a big enough cluster to survive and (I believe) some had weak queens or one of the bee parasites/diseases troubling them. I pretty much take the position that most of these bees had weak genetics and Winter culls them from my heard. It’s a good thing!

Another thing that many folks seem concerned about is using frames or equipment from deadouts. There were some foulbrood problems before I got into beekeeping that could carry over from hive to hive, but I have not experienced any problem with reusing frames and equipment. I have been doing it for years and my bees continue to get healthier.

It should be noted that this initial run only identifies hives with ZERO bees. I only take off the outer cover and look for bees. If I see honey bees, I leave the hive alone, although I do lift the back of the hive up to take a weight measurement. My point here is that I know I still have hives that are in trouble (you can only assess that by taking them fully apart and digging into the brood next.) But, at this stage, it appears that I lost 6 hives or overwintered Nucs, moving my total colony count to 27. I had 3 light hives (by that, I mean that they seemed light when I tilted them forward by picking them up from the back) and several (heavy) hives with honey supers still on them. All in all, I am happy with the results, compared to what I expected. This is on the high end of my normal Winter losses, but I happen to know that 2 (overwintered nucs) were dice rolls last Fall (they were weak and I decided not to combine them, just to see how they would fare.)

Another interesting event occurred with a nuc falling over! I happened to get a call from a lady that the previous day’s storm (insanely strong winds) had knocked over one of my hives. I found them with lots of bees and very good honey stores. They have been set aright now and I am fairly confident they will move on to a full size hive (unless the queen actually was damaged in this tumble.) More on this hive later!!!!

February is one of my favorite months! Spring is just around the corner and all of my gardening and beekeeping planning begins in earnest. Early February is when my seed tray operation begins to ramp up and I plant several of the new plant varieties for the garden and yard that I want to try out this year. It is also when I begin to brush off the hive equipment and begin to take stock of what I have for the next month or two of very busy activity! I really love this time!

In most books (and probably elsewhere on this blog!), folks recommend spending December and January working on your honey bee equipment. I agree that this is an ideal goal, but I never seem to find the time or the energy to tackle those tasks during those months. But, come the first warm day of February, a fire is lit under me and I gladly begin to tackle these tasks. Last weekend, I mainly did a cursory look at the main boxes that I have available for new hives and nucs. I organized the various tools/boxes (everything sort of gets stacked together at the end of the season…heh) and took a loose inventory of what I have. This weekend, weather permitting, it will be time to do the first real task that I tackle in the bee year – collecting the deadout’s.

In past years, I have usually experienced a fairly low loss ratio over the Winter. I have long said that my main risk happens in late Summer, when I miss a stray swarm and the parent hive fails to successfully raise a new queen. But, I worry that my losses may be bigger this year – I have lost one overwintered Nuc (out of 3) and one full hive (out of 1!) in my backyard. This rough 50% loss is about 4 times my normal loss ratio. Maybe my backyard will be the anomaly, or maybe the rule…

Whatever the results, I will be collecting the deadouts this weekend and bringing them home for use in my Spring Nuc creation. This year, I plan to create a lot of Nucs but sell very few. The main goal this year is Increase! I was blessed to marry a lovely young lass in 2019 who very much wants to join the bee operation – she will be my apprentice! She wants to create a lot more hives and help manage them. She also has dairy cows and goats, so we plan to move to a place with a bit more space this year as well. It will be a busy year!

June has thrown a couple of new curve balls at me, which shouldn’t be a shocker. I feel like every month the bees or mother nature throw something at me which I cannot explain at the time! This time, it centers around robbing, sort of. On June 16, I went to my first outyard (for my inspection rounds for that day) and opened a hive to mark a new queen (green!) The hive was open for maybe 10 minutes… Suddenly, I noticed what was clearly an onslaught of foreign bees trying to rob the hive. Somewhat alarmed (I had two nucs for overwintering in that yard and I was certain an attack would not be a good thing for them), I finished marking the queen, closed up the hive and dropped entrance reducers on all hives and nucs in that yard. As I left, the number of bees in the air and on the hives was disturbing, but I had done all that I could do. I decided it must have been caused by some of the wet supers in the back of my truck and the high winds of the day.

Moving to the next yard, I placed the wet supers about a half mile from the hives (along a country road) and moved on to mark a queen in one of my full hives that had swarmed in early to mid-May. Again, after I marked the queen, I again noticed an unusually large number of would be robbers going for the hives (and the nuc) in that yard. Now I was beginning to wonder what the heck was going on. Again, I quickly reassembled the hive bodies, dropped some entrance reducers and moved on, still trying to understand what was going on.

The next yard was an exact repeat of the first two, except that I wasn’t even marking a queen this time. I can almost guarantee the hive was open for less than 5 minutes as I was doing one of my quick health checks. That was enough – I stopped opening hives for the day and went around doing smaller work in the yards and let them be. So, what was going on? To recap – we had had a lot of rain, so it was not dry; anything blooming should have been pouring it on. Unless nothing was blooming (a definite possibility), “attempts to rob” should have been minimal. It should be noted that I always have 5 or 10, maybe even 20, foreign bees nosing around a hive that I open up. But, the resident colony takes care of them without a problem. This time, I was dealing with hundreds of bees and only after keeping the hives open a few minutes (leave them open a long time, normally, and you get hundreds of bees and possibly create an issue – this was not the case on that day.) In addition, the winds were very high – maybe that caused or contributed to the issue, pushing the open honey scent into the air. For now, I am not comfortable with any of the current theories and will just mark this as something to watch next year, in mid-June.

Fast forward to yesterday – the bees seemed completely uninterested in open hives. I went through several, taking some honey supers and otherwise throwing the scent into the air. In addition, I even placed an outer cover with honey on it (I place honey supers on outer covers in my extracting room and they collect a bit of honey before I finish) on my porch in the morning, returning in the afternoon to see that it had not been touched! So, let’s recap – mid-June, plenty of rain and the bees are looking to rob like crazy. June 29, after a good 8 days of heat and no rain (it is definitely dry) and the bees are ignoring the honey scent. It makes absolutely no sense unless we just assume that nothing at all was blooming in mid-June but now we have a flush of blooms at the end of June. I head out again today to reconfigure some hives for Winter, so more to report tomorrow!

I happen to notice that one of the top searches for my site was related to ‘laying worker and swarm cells.’ I am not sure if I have ever covered this scenario before, but I thought I would spend a few sentences on my view of this beekeeping event.

This actually happened to me a couple of days ago. In early April, a hive swarmed on me. I may have messed things up a bit, as I went in and discovered 5 or 6 swarm cells. I took one frame with cells on it and created a Nuc. I have done this countless times (successfully), but it may have created a problem for the mother hive. For some reason, I did a quick check on this hive 3 weeks later and was very confident that I found eggs (and left it at that!)

I went into the hive a couple of days ago (really intending to do a 3 minute check – pull 3 center frames in Deep, confirm queen was working and move on) for a health check and discovered laying workers. Tons of drone cells. In addition, there were numerous swarm cells. This was not a welcome sight, needless to say. I was actually thinking about selling that hive, once they built up a bit…

At any rate, I have seen this before. Laying workers are laying eggs with wild abandon (all unfertilized), but there are some bees that are still wanting to smell the pheremone put off by a real queen. So, they will create queen cells from unfertilized eggs. In truth, I do not believe that I have ever seen one capped, but I have seen many with large larvae in them, not yet capped.

The easiest way to tackle this is with a strong Nuc. I literally just finished selling all of my strong Nucs. The current Nucs are more recent and none of them strong enough to do a combine right now. So, on to the more labor intensive option 2 – frames of eggs. I dropped two frames of eggs in the hive on the day of discovery (last weekend) and will drop another this weekend. It is far from a sure fire fix, but I have definitely seen that just the presense of worker brood will cure the laying worker issue. I do not know whether the current bees recognize a good source of eggs and kill the worker or if the pheromones actually cause the ovaries in the laying worker(s) to become disabled. I will probably give them 2 weeks now and hope to see a queen (or, at this point, I will combine them with a Nuc – at least one will be strong enough to combine in a couple of weeks.)

I think it was 2012 or 2013 when I realized in June that I needed to begin extracting early mainly because I had run out of honey supers. It seemed to make good sense to simply pull off the top super from several hives, extract it and then place it back onto the hives that clearly needed it. Plus, I was learning that my back did not take kindly to supers stacked 4 and 5 boxes high! Before that year, I had followed the recommendations of my fellow beekeepers and started all extraction in early to mid-July.

Since that time, my practice has evolved into a late May/early June start regardless of the number of honey supers on hand (given the gradual hive decrease I have done over the past few years, I have lots of extra drawn honey supers these days!) I have found that the best time to start extracting (for me) is when the temperatures broach the upper 80’s or even 90’s. For one, my Honey-Bee-Robber works fast on my fume boards and, secondly, any honey from last Fall seems to be thinner and easier to filter and store. Thus, I started my extractions in late May this year and seem to have pulled in about 40 gallons so far. There is probably another 10 gallons out on the hives, but I am wrapping it up until July for now. It feels good to look out for all of June and realize I actually have some free weekends ahead!

I need to post some images, but my honey extraction process runs like this:

1. Identify hive with 1 or more full honey supers,
2. Use Fume board to push bees out of honey super (around 5 or 6 minutes each),
3. Pull honey supers and place on front porch (make sure they are sealed!),
4. Extract over 2 to 3 days,
5. Return wet supers to any hives with strong colonies.

Hopefully, there is more nectar for the bees to convert into honey in June (so my July extraction will be a good one.) But, for now, all is good. I consider this a good year for many reasons.