Wax Moth | Beekeeping in Richmond, Virginia

Wild Times in September

Been really busy (bee-stuff and non-bee-stuff), so I have a bunch of updates regarding my Richmond, Virginia beekeeping adventures. To reduce boredom, I have tried to title each one separately below, so no one is forced to go through all of my dribble for the topic that really interests them!

Successful Swarm Trap!

This is hot on my mind and I couldn’t wait to post about it later. Anyone that has had the patience to actually read through my adventures for awhile knows that I put out swarm traps in the Spring. These are effectively homemade boxes the size of a Nuc that are screwed together tight and hang on a tree (some 8′ off of the ground.) In them, I put 1 frame of drawn wax (I use my old wax) and 4 or 5 frames of foundation (they were supposed to only hold a max of 5 frames, but my carpentry skills are nothing to write home about…)

In late March, I try to get my traps out within a quarter mile of my biggest outyards or known bee trees. The drawn wax is supposed to entice them and I put a drop of queen juice (simply a film canister with rubbing alcohol and the dead queens that I cull out of weak hives during the year.) By the end of June, I try to pull them to save any drawn wax that I can (sometimes the wax moths get in it and sometimes they don’t.) It’s not a loss, as the frames are my oldest frames that I culled from my hives, but I want to save the for the next year if I can.

Of the 6 that I put out this past April, I couldn’t get one of them (or, I wouldn’t) because it was covered in a thick patch of poison ivy that had grown up the tree (didn’t see that bit of nastiness when I put the thing up, because the leaves hadn’t come out!) I figured I’d either wait until Winter or get my pop to get it for me sometime (he’s immune to the ivy’s). With so little success, I had decided to start Nuc’s in each of my traps in the Spring of 2012 to get some good bee scent in them (and thus be more enticing to swarms.)

Well, the real point of this is that I went by that loner today (while doing some last minute checks on the hives) and found it FULL of bees! Ha! Success at last! I have no idea when the swarm came into the trap (well, I know it was after late June, when I last looked at it), so it will be interesting to see what they look like when I put them in a Nuc on Sunday. As long as the queen is laying well (and I’ll probably let them live even if she isn’t, as an experiment), they are golden. I have a ton of deep frames of honey to give them for the Winter (pollen is another subject – I do not have a lot of that to spare, so I hope they at least have that stored in the trap.)

Catching this one swarm has me pumped to build more of my traps this Winter!

July Nuc’s

Once July came around, I stopped selling Nuc’s (with the exception of one to an ERBA member who was interested in trying out a late Nuc – they are experienced beekeepers, so I sold it to them for a slight discount, even though I typically refuse to do so.) Most folks have always said that a July Nuc has next to no chance of growing to a full hive (and I have tended to believe them, because July and August are nightmares in central Virginia.)

This year, I purposefully tried to build up five early July Nuc’s using my simple techniques. One year does not a pattern make, but I was encourages. Each Nuc was fed with boardman feeders until they filled out their five frames fully. I then moved them to full deeps and dropped Maxant top feeders on them (I think this is the real key.) These feeders were easy to check and fill (pop the top, pour in the syrup) and I kept meticulous records of how much they got and how long it took them to eat it up – no hive went more then a day without syrup. These feeders can take nearly 3 gallons of feed, which makes it real easy.

Once they had drawn out at least 8 frames, they received a Medium of foundation, again with the feeder on top. Once they filled out 70% of the Medium, I moved them to an outyard. Of the 5 hives, 4 became full hives and were moved out before September 1. I would argue that the one that didn’t make it suffered from some bee problem (it may have been one of the paralysis viruses – the bees would flop out on the ground and not fly, or fly erratically at times.) They did not act right from nearly the start.

In conclusion, I think you can definitely build up a hive from a July Nuc (of course, I can only REALLY say this with confidence once I see them make it through the Winter.) I think the key is moving the big hives out of your Nuc yard once they fill out and using the top feeders (keeping them on syrup 24/7).

Irene Survivors

Irene gave me several hives, thanks to all of the trees that went down with bees in them in the Richmond area. I’m not happy that the trees went down, but (glass is half full) I am glad folks called me to cut them out. My last cut out was about 10 days after the hurricane. The tree had landed on its side and the comb had smooshed together. By the time that I got to them, most of the comb (literally 90% of it) was full of SHB and wax moth. I was surprised the bees had not absconded (the two hives I went to get the day before had both absconded because of the smashed wax.) I cut them out and hived them in less then 30 minutes, leaving about 4 lbs of bees with no resources (I mean NONE). The comb that I did get was empty – no brood, no honey, no pollen – they had been mostly robbed out after the tree crashed.

I took the poor lot home with me and gave them 3 frames of resources from my stash and left them alone for a week. I wasn’t sure if I had the queen (and figured she had died in the storm, which is why the bees had not absconded.) Amazingly enough, I spotted the little wench on the first inspection. She had actually laid eggs in every single open cell (I honestly do not know how the bees will be able to cover all of that brood, but will see how they did on Sunday.) I have given them two more frames of resources (deep frames partially full of nectar/honey with some pollen) and will be interested to see if they make it through the Winter.

Winterizing

I have Winterized all hives in Charles City County now, which comes to 23 hives. All have entrance reducers, a shim for ventilation and confirmed queens. I did not have to reverse any of them (all queens either were laying in the bottom deep or had just started to move down over the last month). I leveled several (some had definitely gotten off-kilter during the year) and checked stores one last time (well, I’m sure I’ll be back in each of them, to some degree, in October). That leaves 6 more hives in Henrico to do over the weekend and it’s Winter, here I come! My backyard is a mix of Nucs for overwintering, Nucs from swarms, Nucs from cut-outs and one full hive that I kept for fun (I’ll move her out next Spring, but I like to see what the bees are doing during the Winter when I go out into the yard.) It really comes down to 1 full hive, 1 partial hive (from the August cut-out) and 3 Nuc’s. I am only counting the 1 full hive for my Winter metrics (so, how many of 30 will I lose?)

Fall Honey Crop

I took a little under 10 gallons of honey off of the hives earlier this month! I’m sure this isn’t much to most beekeepers, but I am excited! For the first year that I actually took honey, I took between 20 and 25 gallons of honey! Wow! There still a fair amount left on the hives, but I won’t extract that. I have each of the ‘bank’ hives noted so that I can steal their resources come Jan/Feb in case my home yard experiments are struggling. All in all, I am feeling pretty good about the future…

Nuc List

My Nuc list is filling up, which is very cool. Folks are starting to see the value in local bees that are not medicated. My primary goal now is to make sure that I have enough Nuc’s built to produce the numbers that I need. I do not foresee a problem, but I like to be over-prepared. There is still a good bit of prime painting weather left in the season!

Master Beekeeper?

I took the Certified Level test last weekend. I must say that I am not confident about it, but am hopeful. The test wasn’t extremely hard, but some of the virus/disease questions were nothing more then educated guesses for me. Plus, they had an entire part based on chemicals, which I do not use. Fortunately, I had studied up on it. I am confident that I DID pass the field test, but will not know about the written test for some time.

So, that’s it. Another month gone and another month closer to Winter. Many more adventures to be had.

Small Hive Beetles, a Failed Split and first Robbing Attempt

This past weekend, I did my last deep inspection of many hives until August. There were plenty of good signs and it will be interesting to see how the bees do over the next few months. I harvested several 5 gallon buckets full of honey and still have two more hives to harvest from! It’s a pretty good harvest for me (considering it is my first, I guess anything is good), but I know a fellow in Buckingham that has already harvested 200 lbs of honey! I could take a bath in that much honey…

In the inspections, I found several hives that were loaded with honey in their brood supers (Deep-Shallow, in most cases). In one (of three) hive that still has a ‘2 Deep’ setup, I found literally every frame in the top Deep was capped with honey. My back still hurts from moving that thing. I have some drawn deep frames now (see the sad story below) and will probably go out this weekend to swap out 3 frames with these empty ones. I do not mind a hive superceding in July/August – in fact I love it – but I do not want them swarming. A swarm in July/August is just a waste of bees. The chance of them establishing a colony that can last through the Winter is next to Zero. There’s simply not enough time to build up. So, by giving them a bit of space in the Deep, they should go back to work (and forget about swarming, since they have space again) and I’ll have to check them again at the end of the month to see if they are full again… Maybe I should have purchased the extracting basket for Deep frames (this is the one millionth time I have said I would never do X and then changed my mind weeks or months later…)

There were several hives that were also a bit light. Most of them were jammed full of capped brood, but they simply did not have the stores that I expected (or had seen on other hives.) This was not purely location-oriented, although I did find some locations to be better then others this year (but 1 year does not a pattern make – still, it’s good to record it.) Logically, the bees should not be bringing much in at this point, so you would think they will be net consumers of whatever they have. If August rolls around and they have less honey then this past weekend, this will be born out. But, I am interested to see if they can simply maintain what they have (and subsequently add to it during whatever nectar flows in the Fall.) I am also interested to see how much honey the heavier hives eat. Many folks have firmly told me that they eat into the stores come July. It makes sense, but I want to see it. Plus, I’d like to see if different bees eat into it more then other bees.

All in all, I checked on 18 of my hives. Most of them appeared to be doing well (some better then others) and I was able to make sure nearly all of the queens were marked, so that I will know for certain if a swarm/supercedure happens this July (I had some swarms last July, which I discovered after the fact.) But, there were two big problems.

The first problem occurred with Blue Byrd (a split off of William Byrd, which was a 2010 split off of Westover.) I mentioned in an earlier post that I had personally caused what appeared to be a minor Small Hive Beetle invasion on Blue Byrd. Well, it turns out that my efforts were all for naught (I took what I thought was the only problem frame and froze it – I didn’t see evidence of SHB on any other frames.) I checked this past weekend and Small Hive Beetles were in all of the frames. I never saw the queen (she should have emerged a couple of weeks ago) and the hive looked horribly. SHB larva (maggot loooking things) were going through all 9 deep frames of (mostly) capped honey and pollen. A few wax moths had even started to join the fray.

This was so discouraging at that moment that I had to put the hive back together and go sit down to think about what to do next. There were probably a couple of pounds of bees left, but nothing else of value. I have 2 other, strong hives nearby (that I had just done full inspections of and they were rocking.) This hive was like a ticking time bomb (that may have already gone off.) I bet several thousand SHB larva were crawling in it.

Well, after I manned up, I went back to my home apiary and picked up a brand new setup (deep, bottom board, top) and put 9 frames of foundation and 1 old drawn frame of wax (that I was going to melt this week.) I returned to the outyard and shook the bees off of the deep frames (and into the new setup) and put them in my car (they went directly into my freezer). I put the new setup in the exact same position as the old hive. I will return tomorrow or Thursday to have another peak. I am not sure if I should even risk combining them with another hive at this point – I am tempted to just shake them off in my home yard or in the outyard and then put the hive in my car to let it bake in the sun while I am at work. I may combine them just to experiment, but I may not be brave (or foolish) enough to try it. We’ll see if I see a bunch of SHB in them on the next inspection or not (I really wonder if they are doing anything, as I gave them no stores in the new setup.)

As to the frozen frames, it has been 72 hours and I am sure the SHB are dead (don’t listen to that nonsense about SHB living at -40 degrees.) But, each frame has those daggone larva in them. They say that a bee will not eat the honey after a SHB larva defficates in it. Well, I wasn’t about to put these frames into a thriving hive, but I did take one and put it (well away from any hives) in my home yard. I cut some cappings off and let it sit in an open super under my shed.

In 2 hours, the bees cleaned it like you wouldn’t believe. They ate every bit (I guess they tossed the dead larva on the ground.) I took the frame this afternoon and put it back in the freezer, just in case some wiley SHB laid a few eggs in it during the day. So, for the ‘glass is half full’, I should have 9 drawn deep frames that are empty. I have never had that many and it opens up some management strategies/options/experiments. Regardless, I would rather have my hive of bees back…

In addition to the SHB fiasco (just to recap from the earlier post, I am 100% to blame for this, by squashing that honey up against the side of the super and leaving it like that), the Geronimo hive was unable to make her queen. Again, blame the beekeeper, as I went into the hive 14 days after I put the eggs in to have a look and damaged one queen cell irreparably. I thought I could see others deeper in the hive and stopped the inspection, but I wonder now if that was the main one. She looked great, except that she was white and soft and not ready to be pulled out of her queen cell… At any rate, this hive was still holding its own, with a full Medium of capped honey and a full deep of empty (mostly) drawn frames! Sheesh. Well, this is why you start a bunch of Nucs in the Spring. I took one of the Nucs that I had recently put in a Deep and combined them with this hive. Normally, I’d say that I have a strong hive in that outyard now, but with the recent luck, I wouldn’t put any money on it. Hopefully, this weekend, I will find a combined hive with lots of stores and ready to build up for Winter.

So, several lessons this past weekend, about inspections (how to do them and when not to do them) and taking swarm cells from strong hives (that was why Geronimo ended up without a queen in the first place.)

Finally, I had my first robbing attempt this past weekend. The home yard has a couple of strong hives that need moving out and one of them has decided that their neighbor’s honey is better then going out and working to bring in their own. Again, I caused the problem. I use top feeders to great effect, but this time I put one of my migratory covers on top of the feeder. In addition, I left it open longer then I should (went back to get another gallon.) Finally, I did not have an entrance reducer on the hive (they were strong…) I came back to find robbing in full earnest. I had seen plenty of dead bees outside of many of my hives and new that robbing was starting to ramp up, but this was the first full scale assault.

Fortunately, I THINK I resolved it for the time being. I dropped a wet towel on the hive and waited until after dark to come and install a robber screen. This is VERY important. If you install one in the middle of robbing, the robbers who are in the hive will learn how to get back in (as they will have to leave from the new exit on the screen.) The next day, I found many bees trying to get back in, but the two days following have shown fewer and fewer would-be invaders. I think the migratory cover is not helping, as several invaders are always crowding at the cracks along the top trying to get in, as if they can smell the syrup through the cracks.

What are my lessons here? For one, I now do my feeding right before or at dark. Secondly, now that it has started in the yard, I need to get the strongest hives out of here this weekend. There is a robber (or two) about and I have found (from past years) that once you start moving hives out, one day the robbing just stops. It is clear to me that the main hive (or two) that is responsible was moved out of the yard. I’ll probably move 3 or 4 hives out this weekend, all to outyards with strong hives and start each of them off with robber screens (only 2 are to the point when I normally move them – fully drawn deep and 70%+ drawn medium.)

Overall, it has been a bloody past few days. When I step back, things still look great. I have to remind myself that you can only learn by experiencing the bruises (well, I can only learn that way.) So, I keep saying that it was a good thing to only lose 2 hives. Hopefully, I will not be back here later this month talking about similar lessons with other hives. I’d like to keep the Summer losses down – Winter is tough enough…

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…

Albo Hive Inspection & Blue Cottage Downsizing

I picked up a couple of new queens today (more on that tomorrow) to replace the queens in the Blue Cottage Hive and Pop’s hive. Basically, these hives have been under performing in my opinion. But, once I got home and mentioned it to Pop, he was incredulous that I had already given up on the grand ladies we picked up less then a month ago. He hasn’t kept bees in a couple of decades, but he has a bit more patience then I do! In the end, his comments were good as it caused me to give the Blue Cottage Hive another thorough inspection today.

This time, I took the time to note exactly where and how much she had been laying. After a good look, it is clear to me that she has pretty much laid in every available cell to her. The pattern is great. The problem is that she did not start off with enough bees to really get a good growth curve going. I have to go back to the old lesson that I have to relearn every month – leave the daggone bees be! I decided not to kill the old girl, but I did move the three frames they were working (really 2.5) along with one frame of foundation that they had started to draw out (about a quarter size,) into a Nuc.A Nuc only holds 5 frames and is a much more defensible position. I have run across several moths hanging under the lid of the cover or on a frame far away from the bees. These are probably wax moths looking to lay eggs (or maybe they already laid eggs.) I wanted to get the bees in a box where they consumed most of the space, hopefully giving them more of a chance to deal with these predators. Unlike the Southside hive, I rarely notice more then one or two small hive beetles here.

This hive will be an experiment for me. If they do not make it or build up enough, lesson learned. If they do, another lesson learned. Hopefully, they’ll get a full five frames drawn out over the next month and I can try to spend August to October getting them to fill out a full brood chamber. Like Doug said in a recent comment, it takes a worker bee 21 days from egg to emerging. The key now is to get them to draw out the remaining frames quickly so that they will get a good population going and I can move them to a brood chamber. Of note, they did have a nice dome of honey and a half frame of pollen. I will switch them to a MegaBee mixture shortly.

Now, I have two queens that need homes. These queens are supposed to be rocking queens, so I do not want to shirk them. I had checked the Southside Hive today, expecting to see a queen laying (although today is the earliest I would see that, according to the Bee Math). Instead, I found two more queen cells (that is really odd to me, as I cannot figure how they could have had any eggs in that hive that would still be in capped cells right now), in addition to a very old queen cell, in the horizontal position, from the original cut out! You’re supposed to put comb in at the same position (up-down) that you find it in the tree. I did not know this when I did my first cut out and just put it in however I could squeeze it. Apparently, they were in the midst of making a new queen when I did the cut-out. Sadly, I did not see that cell and put it in at the wrong direction. I imagine it has a dead queen in it now, although who knows. This might be the target for one of my new queens.

Finally, I had to get at least one small hive started for one of my queens. So, I did a full inspection of the Albo hive. Good lord. These bees are doing everything right but giving me honey. They had a ton of honey in the upper brood chamber and the queen was laying like a mad woman. The pattern was incredible in the bottom chamber. Bar-to-bar eggs. As a side note, I did notice what they call ‘backfilling’, a term Doug introduced me to. The workers have started to fill some of the cells that held brood with honey in the upper deep. As it stands right now, they have more then enough to make it through the Winter. But, they’ll surely eat into it over the next couple of months, so we’re not out of the woods yet. Regardless, this hive has received no feed (except what it probably stole from another hive) or other treatment. I will do a couple of dustings for mites in July/August, but that’s it. This hive has lots of promise.

My final task for this hive was also completed, as I moved all of the old frames that I started with last Spring to the outside of the hive. I will probably remove one or two this Fall, but will definitely remove all 4 next Spring.

The War is Over…for now…

Yesterday was an interesting experience, to be sure. Later in the day, after the Berkeley Hive check, I went out to check both the Southside Hive and the Blue Cottage Hive to see if they could use some more feed (more on this later.) After this check, I was pretty much harassed by a bee anytime I went out in my yard, no matter where I was. My house sits on a little over 3 acres of land. No matter where I was, a bee would eventually find me and begin to actively fly at me, in my face, hair and all of the rest.

Now, I know this wasn’t one bee. It sort of felt like it was one – perhaps from the Westover Hive looking to get even, but I knew that was nearly impossible. Something else was going on. I think, in retrospect, that I had alarm pheromone on me or in my hair from my adventures earlier in the day. When I would walk out into the yard, some nearby bee (who was simply out to get some nectar, pollen or water) would get a whiff of me and go into attack mode. It was more then a bit annoying and disconcerting.

At any rate, I took a good shower this morning and either the smell is gone or that lone enemy has gone back to its regular chores and decided to stop bothering me!

As to the late day hive checks yesterday, I was discouraged to find that the Blue Cottage Hive had not built up since the last check on June 7. Eleven days and not much to show for it. In addition, while pulling some of the empty (foundation only) frames to get to the center 3 frames, I found a moth. It was probably a wax moth. It was too wiley for me to smash, but it was a good reality check. I also saw the queen actually lay an egg on top of the comb! This could have been a reaction to my pulling the comb (perhaps she was in the middle of laying an egg when I pulled it), but I am becoming more and more convinced that this is a bum Nuc. The fact that I paid $75 for 2 frames of bees is a bit of an irritant. I seriously regret having recommended other folks to buy Nucs from the guy that I purchased them from. I can only hope that any of the new Beekeepers received a better deal then I did.

Regardless, we are definitely in a very dry period right now. I am fairly certain that build up will all but stop until the Fall (and will only pick up again at that time if we have some rain.) The bees are probably going to hunker down and slow down the egg laying and try to eke through the summer without eating into their stores so much.

I have a lot of things going through my mind after the last couple of days. To begin with, I am going to move the Blue Cottage Hive into a Nuc. They are too small to be in a 10 frame box and simply cannot defend against their many predators with so much space. I will move their 2 worked frames and the 1 drawn frame (that was full of brood) that I placed with them in week 1, into a Nuc. I will then add one new frame of foundation and one more frame of brood. The frames in their deep will be frozen in my deep freezer for a few days (and the brood chamber left out in the Sun, far away from my other hives), in case there are Wax Moth eggs in them (the freezing should kill them good). My goal for the Blue Cottage Hive is to get them strong enough to move to a deep brood chamber as soon as possible. But, I have heard of other folks over-wintering Nuc’s. So, I might be trying that trick. As to the queen, I would bet that she is simply a poor specimen. But, I cannot rule out that she is simply slowing down (from what? she never really got going!) due to the dry spell and end of the flow. I might re-queen these gals, if the opportunity presents itself.

In addition, this slowing of the build-up phase has me questioning the wisdom of splitting the Albo Hive. It must have really been bothering me, subconsciously, as the moment I came to the decision that I would not split them until we had a good rain (and maybe not, even then,) I felt much better about the whole ordeal. Splitting at this time of year is a risk. Given the dry and hot weather of late, that risk has really become too great for this stage of my bee career. For now, I will only deal with the Westover Splits. Next year, I will definitely play with doing some early Spring Splits.

Finally, this moth (which I am nearly certain was a wax moth – but it looked like any old moth to me) will be dealt with today. I will setup two traps along the back line, where most of my weaker/smaller hives are. We’ll see if we catch any.

Cool Weather Arrives

It is going to get down in the 40’s this week, so my bees are about to get their first taste of cold weather (even the queens have not been through a winter yet!) Both hives seem fairly active and I have actually seen them on both the buckwheat and some of the asters, which is a very positive sign (I rarely seen the wenches on any of my plants, despite the fact that I have tons of different plants blooming all Summer long…)

Hive 1, the Strong Gals, should do well this Winter, although I have not opened them up for a thorough inspection yet. They still have the honey super on them, but I’ve yet to see any honey getting stored. I will probably smoke them this weekend and take the super off, to let them get prepped for Winter. I also want to see if they are having any major problems with hive beetles or (more likely) wax moths. They are so grumpy this time of year that I really do not like poking into their home. They will try (and probably succeed) to sting me for sure, but I need to have a look.

Hive 2 is always a mystery. They look strong. The feeder has a ton of them eating the sugar water and I see a bunch of training flights even now. They definitely ‘look’ better then they did most of the Summer, but every time that I look into the hive, there is only very minor progress. I did not look last weekend, but will take a stronger look this weekend. Last weekend, I basically just eyeballed them and put a second deep on the hive, even though they had not fully filled out 8 frames in their bottom deep. I did find the queen this time, so she was not usurped after all. But, putting the second deep on may have been a mistake, effectively giving the wax moths a free place to breed and wreak havoc. So, we’ll see what it looks like this weekend.

Hive 2 Revisit

Just got in from giving Hive 2 another inspection. It’s been 6 days since the Wax Moth incursion and I could find no evidence of the little critters this time. But, I must say that I did not make it all the way through the hive. Things were starting to get hot and I think that there might have been some robbers around that were taking advantage of the open top to get a little free honey. Regardless, they are fully on 5 frames now. I found capped honey and the start of some good pollen stores, in addition to larvae and eggs. The best news was seeing the queen, which had been bothering me. The only bad thing about the whole event was that I ended up not pushing the frames fully back together. I am sure that will prove a nightmare (I still only have 9 frames in this Deep, since I decided not to replace the one with the Wax Moths on them just yet.) When I get back from the beach, I might need to smoke them to get this straight.

Finally, I used my new Bee Brush for the first time. I can tell you right now that my bees do NOT like that daggone thing. Everything it touched them, they’d hop on the bristles and start stinging the heck out of it. This was whenever I tried to use it to get them off the top of the frames. When I cleaned them off of the bottom of the feeder, they just took to the air, cursing at me in their bee language and threatening all kinds of dire consequences!

At any rate, I am mostly happy about the outcome. I put the first MegaBee mixture into the feeder to see how it would work. I am not totally happy with this stuff, as it did not fully dissolve into the syrup. Maybe I did not have enough sugar in the syrup. Who knows. I guess next week I will find the results of this adventure.

Master Beekeeper Provides Solace

Well, I finally broke down and called one of the three guys in this industry that I really believe have so much knowledge on bees in central Virginia that you cannot go wrong with them – Tom Fifer. He provided my bees but is really busy, so I hate to bother him (plus, I am certain that most of my questions would only irritate him, being novice ‘worry wort’ questions.) But, with this Wax Moth issue, I decided that I cannot let this one go by without confirming my tactics.

He called last night and confirmed everything that I am doing. Feed these gals and keep a close eye on him. I am not sure that he’s on board with the Robber Screen (he gave me one of his neutral remarks about them, like ‘I’ve heard of them’.) My wife and I laugh about that now, as that seems to be Tom’s way of saying ‘They probably neither hurt nor help, but you can waste your time with that if it makes you feel better!’ Heh. Well, at least he didn’t say they were hurting. And, they do make me feel better, which doesn’t make a daggone difference to the bees!

One comment that he did make was to feed them pollen substitute (‘just a small piece’) to see if they eat some. I was not doing that and I think it is primarily because of the issues that I have with getting the stuff into the daggone hive. I’ll figure out something and get a small piece in there tonight.

He also made the assertion that they would not get into the foundation, which turned out to be incorrect for my Wax Moths. I hope that is not a bad sign. The Wax Moths that I had exclusively ate the daggone foundation (as far as I could tell.) I will have to watch these things.

At any rate, a 15 minute conversation with him has me in good spirits. I am not out of the woods by a far shot, but I have a plan and it seems to be the best one I can implement. I really can’t wait for that MegaBee supplement to show up.

Hive 2 : Wax Moth Incursion…

With the problems going on with Hive 2, I had the president of the East Richmond Beekeeper’s Association, ERBA, come over and have a look to see what was going on. When we opened the hive, we immediately discovered about a dozen larvae of the Wax Moth. I killed each one and removed 4 or 5 cocoons. I also removed that frame to clean it and subsequently replace it. I need to get it in a cooler.

This was a good lesson, although it was not aimed at me. The key point to this discovery was that no larvae were found on or around any of the frames that had bees on them. The good thing was that the bees on this hive had moved out to 5 frames, which was a first. They have clearly been active. The one problem with all of this is that the bees really have next to no honey at this time. They are effectively eating just about everything that they bring in.

wax_moth_coccoons_on_frames — Wax Moth Coccoons

My goal is to get more frames with honey on this hive. I hope to get some Megabee soon and will begin a feeding program to supplement that. I really do feel good about everything else, however. The Robber Screen and feeding have increased this hive’s chances of making it through the Winter. I will be checking them every week, going forward, but not using any smoke. The moment it becomes too uncomfortable (due to stings) to do so, I will reduce my visits to every two weeks and use a tad of smoke.

On a side note, I did also see one small hive beetle in the hive. A bee was chasing him. Beekeeping in Central Virginia is no ‘Walk in the Park’….