Beehive Reminders | Beekeeping in Richmond, Virginia

Is it a split when you break it into thirds?

As I have started to sell full hives, a lot more full hives are in my backyard than normally at this time of year. In fact, I have usually moved any Overwintered Nucs (transitioned to full hives) out to other yards by the end of March. The yards are just full of Nucs. But, I have actually been moving full Hives to my backyard this year, as I sell off some of my force.

This is important because I did something yesterday that I have never done before. I was checking a hive that I was about to sell to make sure it wasn’t going into swarm mode. Of course, the daggone thing already had capped queen cells. I had checked it a month ago and, based on my experience, it should just be filling out about 70% of the hive bodies. But, this queen had other ideas. She had fully capped both upper hive bodies and the workers had created a bunch of queen cells in both. In the bottom deep, she had laid eggs in about 4 frames. Most were larvae, but none were capped.

Normally, I might create a Nuc or two when out in the field, but heck – this is my backyard. I can do anything I want, since checking on them frequently is very easy. So, I decided to take all three boxes and create hives. I have no idea if the queen flew the coop or not, but I ended up placing the two upper bodies, with lots of capped brood and queen cells, off on their own in the yard, with new bottoms and tops. I left the Deep where it was, to collect the returning foragers and begin building a queen from scratch.

At this time of year, it is hard to screw up, but we shall see. I will check the ones with queen cells in 1 week and the other in 3. I hope to have 3 hives at that point!

Swarm “Prevention” and Nuc Creation

There are only a handful of things more distressful to a beekeeper than opening a hive for an inspection (or worse, to take a Nuc) and find the gals in full blown swarm prep mode! It has happened so often to me that I have grown use to the pain and actually simply expect it on many of my strongest hives each Spring.

Although, there are many documented methods of swarm prevention (and I believe that I have tried them all), it is my experience that you can rarely stop a hive that is set on swarming. So, I have mostly given up on fighting Mother Nature. Since I do believe that there are some queens that will not swarm if given enough space (and with population reduction through taking Nucs), I do make sure that all hives have at least one honey super by mid-March. Now that we are in April, most of my hives have 2 honey supers (well, at least the ones that have started to make good work on the original.) The hives that really go crazy (gang busters is a word I sometimes use), I simply focus on pulling as many Nucs off of them as possible, before the old gal heads off to my neighbor’s soffit:)

And so I had my first “scenario” on Saturday, when I went in to take a Nuc off of a hive that had really been rolling since mid-March (I already had two Nucs from the hive going along well.) I found the White queen, along with several capped or partially capped queen cells. In the past, I have played with taking the queen from the hive and all sorts of other things, but this time, I simply bid her farewell and good luck on her future journey, and placed her back in the hive.

But, before I did that, I located two confirmed queen cells in good shape (and in a position where there was no chance that I could harm them in my misadventures) and placed those frames aside – they were to go back in the hive and be the new queen for this great hive, when it swarmed. I then located queen cells on other frames and created two Nucs, shaking a lot of bees into both (I know a bunch were prepping for a little journey out into the hinterlands with my wayward white queen, so I got as many as I could.) At this point, I did something a bit different than I have done in the past.

For years, I create a Nuc and simply set it up in the same yard as the parent hive. I do that to this day and it works just fine. Some Nucs are no more than 5 feet from the parent hive. But, I have also discovered (over the years) that when I take a Nuc from a hive in Swarm Prep mode, I occasionally come back in two weeks to find the Nuc completely empty. Not a single bee. This seems to ONLY happen with Nucs from hives in swarm prep mode. It seems logical to me that somehow these bees hear their brethren issue a swarm and they simply go with it, leaving the Nuc empty! So, on Saturday, I actually sealed up both new Nucs and moved them a couple of miles down the road, to a different apiary. We shall see how this works. It can’t be worse than before (I hope!)

Spring Splits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Snow!!!

Wow. I spend a good part of the year looking forward to March and April. It’s Beekeeping Nirvana! Not this year, however. March has been a monster. Really cold weather (and often SNOW!) has always been in the forecast. My bees are behind, which is good, because I am behind (I’m always behind, but this year it feels like I am behind a whole month!)

Tomorrow, I had scheduled a Sustainable Beekeeping 201 class, the first in the series of sustainable beekeeping classes for more experienced beekeepers. One of the primary tasks was to create a few Nuc’s in one of my outyards. Since the weather today and tomorrow is supposed to be the same, I planned to use the temperatures today to judge whether we could hold the class (although, when I scheduled this in late February, I thought my main problem would be to find an apiary that still had hives that I had NOT pulled Nuc’s from – right now, that’s pretty much my entire fleet of hives!) At 11 am, when we would be well into building Nuc’s, it was still in the very low 40’s. Although it could be done at this temperature, I simply didn’t want to risk it. So, we postponed to the ‘bad weather date’ (which is next Saturday – this doesn’t look very promising either, but we’ll see.)

By about 2:30 PM, the temps his 50 and I journeyed out to the Westover Plantation outyard. I had not been through this outyard since February 2 (and that was just a quick inspection – pull the inner cover and a frame or two from the upper supers.)

The best news, of course, is that all of the hives were doing fine. In fact, two of them were really pouring it on. Being close to the river, I have found that these hives typically are ahead of most of my other hives (excluding overwintered Nucs). I could have easily created Medium Nuc’s from two of these hives, but instead created a single Deep Nuc off of each of them. It’s supposed to be wet (maybe with snow) and cold over the next couple of days, so I gave them both an extra shake of honey bees. Medium Nuc’s are tough enough (for me, anyway), so I hope to return in a couple of weeks and get a few Mediums off of this crowd.

Of note, I have still not seen anything to indicate that hives are in swarm mode right now. I will probably regret those words, but I currently believe that there are 2 to 3 weeks before I have to really worry about a hive swarming. Ideally, I will have reduced all of my hives by then (by spawning Nuc’s.)

I want to close on a totally different topic – reversal. That’s the practice of going into your hives in March and moving empty supers (from below) to above. You follow this up, every few weeks, with another reversal. The followers of this practice say that the bees go into swarm mode when they get to the top (as if they don’t have enough sense to realize they have plenty of space below.) I had a large number of hives with empty supers on the bottom this year. I did not reverse one. So far, every single one has done what I expected them to do – built down into the empty super. I honestly do not believe that reversal helps one bit (and probably simply stresses the bees more than anything else.)

Whoa doggie!

Well, my enthusiasm got the best of me again! I feel like this happens every year!

The good news is that I checked 19 hives and only had one problem hive (see end of post for thoughts on this hive.) The ‘other news’ (I do not consider it BAD, but simply informational) is that I found very few walking drones and nowhere near the amount of capped drone brood that I expected. This was the first bit of news that caused me to hold off creating any Nucs yesterday. These are Nucs that will go (for the most part) to new beekeepers. The last thing I want a new beekeeper to be strapped with is a queen that is not well mated. Based on my drone findings, I should only start Nucs next weekend and really pour it on in 2 weeks.

The second observation was ‘hive build-up’. Although I did find several hives with brood on 6 or more frames, the capped brood was no more than 25% of the frames. In my opinion, I could easily create Nucs today with that kind of setup, but it would definitely set the parent hive back a lot. Basically, imagine the queen beginning to build up. It is more of an exponential process. She starts out with a few eggs one day, a few more the next day and so on. The main thing holding her back is the number of bees available to keep the brood warm during the cold nights (and days, as has been the case the last few weeks.) At some point, there are enough nurse bees to manage nearly all of the eggs that she can lay. I want to create my Nucs when we are very close to this point. So, when I remove a bunch of nurse bees for the child Nuc, the queen does not have to reduce her egg laying by too much (there are still enough nurse bees to sustain her build up.) In my opinion, my hives are 1 to 3 weeks (depending on the hive) from this point. Creating Nucs now would set the hives back by as much as a month in some cases. But, wait for some of that capped brood to hatch over the next couple of weeks and I will only be setting them back by a week or two.

It’s a good thing to set them back, as a swarm management technique, but I don’t want to set them back so much that it makes it hard to create more Nucs in the near future or puts the hive at jeopardy. That’s my philosophy anyway and the final piece to the drivers for my decision to hold off creating Nucs for the time being.

As always, the Overwintered Nucs are on a totally different playing field. They all have a good amount of drones and have filled up the bottom Deep Nuc with brood (for the most part.) They are laying on 80% of each frame and the bees are rocking. None (that I checked today anyway) have started to lay in the upper Mediums to any degree. I want them to move up into the Mediums and allow me to split them, creating a few Medium Nucs. They may swarm – we’ll see. It’s ‘experiment mode’ this year.

As to my one problem hive, it was a bit of an oddity (as always!) The hive had plenty of honey and pollen, but it appeared that the bee population was simply too small to support the brood. A lot of capped brood had dead pupae in it and I even saw some that had begun to break out of the capped cell but had apparently perished (probably on a cold night.) I could not find the marked queen, which pretty much means she is gone (I will probably try to find her again today). It was a queen from last year (yellow), so I do find it a bit odd. She actually had gotten a pretty good start within the last 3 weeks (a fair amount of capped brood) but had somehow perished during that time. There were also A LOT of small hive beetles.

The bottom line is that this hive cannot survive in the full setup it is in right now. I could combine them with a nearby, strong hive, but the SHB’s are a bit of a dissuasion here. I could also move them into a Nuc, which would be easier for them to manage, but I’d need to make sure the queen is still alive. More than likely, I will drop by the bee yard some evening when it has gotten cold, grab the whole hive and literally freeze it, bees and SHB’s all. I may then send a few bees to Virginia Tech to have a look. If I do reuse the hive, I will definitely track where those frames go in case I have a problem here. There was some odd, crystal like stuff in some of the cells that I am unable to identify (if I had used mountain camp on these gals, I’d say it was sugar, but I didn’t feed them.) We’ll see, but it is unlikely that I’ll spend much effort on them. They seem to be some genetics that I really didn’t need.

Ouch

It’s amazing how often I fail to follow my own advice…’sad’ might be a better way of putting it.

This past weekend, I held the second class in the annual Beekeeping 101 seminar that I do every year. Part of this session included a lengthy session titled ‘Managing Your Hive’ by me. There are several key points to this presentation, but one of them focuses on journals. They are very important and it is equally important to make sure you review them on occasion.

This past Sunday, I made another run of hives out in the hinterlands. Things are really looking up – hives are working on several frames (I have one hive working on 5 frames, but that seems to be the exception). When I say ‘working on’, I basically mean that the queen has brood (at some age) on the frames. This is a big ‘tell’ sign and a definite prerequisite of building Nuc’s (I want the queen to be working 7 frames before I pull a Nuc off of them.) Honey stores look good and things are shaping up nicely.

Then I gave my Overwintered Nuc’s a look…

I immediately noticed dead bees on the landing board of the 4th Nuc that I checked. Despite the fact that the loss is not going to be a big loss (in the scheme of things) it still felt like a gut punch. I pried the top off, hoping beyond hope that everything was ok. Once I got into the hive, I had the picture perfect view of a hive that was in the last throws of starvation. It was truly amazing. I literally have nearly 3 supers of capped honey in my basement alone – this doesn’t count a few supers that remain on hives (out in the ‘hinterlands’!) as bank supers. I really could not believe my eyes. I had checked all of my Nuc’s in January. I found that 2 of the ones that I created in August were light and had given both of them several Medium frames of honey. Was this one of them? Did they go through 3 frames of honey in one month?!

So, after breaking down the Nuc and prepping the frames for a quick (48 hours) freeze, I went back to the old journal to get an accurate look. And there it was… This was indeed one of my late Nuc’s. I had come to the conclusion in January that creating Overwintered Nucs in August was not early enough for me. They could get to critical mass, but they could not store enough honey for the Winter. So, I would only create them this late (in the future) if I had plenty of extra capped honey to give them. BUT, I had not gotten to this ONE hive in my January inspection. I had a clear note – check this Nuc asap – no visibility yet on the amount of stores left! I had checked all of the Nuc’s in my Nuc Yard but this one and KNEW it! But, due to life and other things, had forgotten this ‘to do’ item. Now, I have paid a painful price for it.

The truth of the matter is that ‘these things happen’, regardless of how often you might tell yourself that they don’t happen to me (this is actually the 2nd Nuc that I have had die on me due to starvation since I started doing Overwintered Nuc’s.) But, it is definitely a learning event. Starvation is something a beekeeper can prevent. Whereas I do not believe you should spend the Winter feeding your mature hives, I do believe that Overwintered Nuc’s should be fed and it’s really not a lot of work if you have frames of honey ready for them. It’s a failing on my part and I am taking steps today to prevent this from happening again in the future. To manage this, I am building a web app to track my hives and inspections here : http://www.richmondbeekeeping.com/index.php?page=testp . I hope to be finished by this weekend, at which point I can make sure that all hives are stored and tracked.

This should prevent future issues. We’ll see…

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.

Great VSBA Fall Meeting

The Virginia State Beekeepers Association had another great Fall meeting a few weeks ago, focusing on Honey Bee nutrition. The keynote speaker, Dave Mendes (President of the American Beekeepers Federation), focused on protein feeding. To his operation (of many thousands of hives that he trucks to California (Almonds) and the northern states (Blueberries & Cranberries)), feeding protein at the right time makes all the difference. His mantra is ‘good food + clean comb + good genetics = success’. I have long been a proponent of clean comb and good genetics, but have not focused much on nutrition. It has always been my belief that bees with good genetics will find the right food, unless the beekeeper takes it all (which I don’t.) But, I am starting to rethink this idea.

For a couple of years now, a successful beekeeper in Buckingham county that I collaborate with, has been talking up nutrition, specifically in the Fall (which was the theme of a couple of talks at the VSBA meeting.) I have always been reluctant to experiment with this, ONLY because of the SHB. I had found out early on that pollen patties in my hives in August meant SHB problems. But, Dave had an answer for that – you put your feed mix (he called it protein feed, as opposed to pollen feeding) into a wax paper bag with a single slit in it – giving the bees an easy area to defend. He also stressed that you only wanted to give them what they could eat in a couple of days. These two items have me thinking that next Fall I will give protein feeding another shot, in a hive or two. We’ll see how it works.

It only makes sense that giving the bees a source of quality protein at this time (early August for me) would be beneficial. In early August, they are raising the bees that will eventually raise the bees that go into Winter, or what I call the ‘fat bees.’ This is a critical time for all beehives, so a little extra quality feed can help. Dave Mendes recommended the publication ‘Fat Bees Skinny Bees’ by Doug Somerville (sp?), as this seemed to be the basis of his methods.

Another really interesting talk focused on Nosema ceranae. The researcher had found that it appears that this newest Nosema has been around longer then we had thought. In addition, it is starting to look like it is displacing Nosema apis. It’s hard to say whether this is a good thing or not. Regardless, we are seeing an increased presence of this virus, so they are watching it closely.

There was another great talk on feeding, by a fellow along the VA/NC line who focuses on selling bees and queens. He mirrored much of what Dave said, but was even more adamant about the early Fall feeding. He had found that feeding at this time was much better for the bees then any type of feeding in the Spring (syrup or protein) or even feeding during the Winter months. The bottom line was that he found that his bees came out of Winter much healthier with a focused, late Fall feeding. He also noted that the presence of Drones, Drone larva and Drone eggs was a big determinate for feeding protein at other times of the year. Bees with weak protein stores or sources would eat the Drone larva first, then the Drone eggs, for protein. A lack of both of these, in a Spring/Summer hive, was a sign that the quality of the pollen coming in was poor.

There were many other good tidbits of knowledge, but those are the ones that hit home the most for me at this stage. I want to start looking at Fall nutrition. We’ll see where it takes me!

Oct Swarm Has a Queen!

As posted back on the 19th, I actually picked up a swarm of bees this month in Richmond, Virginia! October? Well, I’ve been through that before. A swarm caught in August requires work to get through our Winters. One caught in September requires a lot of work and you are still at high risk. I would have to say that the chance that an October swarm will make it is next to zilch. Fortunately for me, I love a challenge.

Once I got the swarm back to my house, I put 5 frames of drawn wax with 5 frames of foundation in a Deep and placed a top feeder on them. Most will ask ‘why didn’t you put them in a Nuc?!’ It’s a valid question. The main reason I put them into the Deep was because of their need for feed. I know you can feed a Nuc, but I have found that my Beemax top feeders (for full-sized hives only – they have something similar for Nucs, but I do not own any) are the absolute best mechanism for me to get syrup into hives. It was Oct 19! I had no time to mess with an entrance feeder (plus, I was worried about robbing). So, I gave them drawn wax to immediately start laying in and foundation (in case they were a swarm and were ready to build wax, like Spring swarms do.) I dropped the feeder on them and began feeding them.

At the last moment, I dropped another deep frame that I had which was mostly honey but had been ravaged by SHB back in July. I had frozen the frame for 3 days and kept it in my basement since then. Although I knew some of the honey was shot, I figured some would be fine for them (I had already seen the bees clean out 2 similar frames when I placed them out in the open in my Nuc yard earlier in the year, so I knew there was value in what the frame had in it.)

The problem is that these frames have a different scent to them. It seems to really draw bees quickly, which I really didn’t think about when I dropped it into the October swarm. The next day, it looked like I had a robbing situation. As always (and usually to my detriment – and the bees!), I try to get into the heads of my bees – I figured that we have a new swarm of bees, moved about while being captured and now in a new location (trying to get oriented) and I have created a robbing scenario! Before they could even get their feet under them! Now, it’s going to be hard to follow my twisted logic, but hang in there…

Seeing what I thought was robbing, I looked closer and could see bees fanning OUT of the hive. At that exact time, I thought that this was the bees trying to get the scent of the SHB frame out of the hive, which (again, enjoy the roller coaster ride of my weird logic) was only inviting more robbers! I did my quick trick of dropping a wet towel over the hive and waited until nightfall to remove it and seriously reduce the entrance.

So, all kinds of things are going through my head now. On day 3, I finally figured out that it wasn’t robbing. It was merely flight orientation of a ton of bees (remember, the whole hive (experienced foragers included) had to reorient.) I know full well that you need to see a lot of fighting to know that there is robbing going on (which I hadn’t seen), but I figured (here I go again…) that the problem was that the swarm had never really made the hive their home – so they weren’t defending it yet. Oh well.

So, the weekend arrives and I go in to have a look. These bees were making really good use of the feeder and had basically put cured syrup (most of it was already honey) in ALL of the frames. What the?! Is the queen going to lay anywhere. Again, cursed with my brain, I began to think back on the fanning bees and dropping the wet towel on them. Did I have virgin queen in this swarm that had gone out only to be thwarted from returning by my towel?!?! I checked again – no queen and no place to lay. I could also see a few gals still fanning, as if to say ‘The grand lady will be coming home any moment now – keep sending our scent out there to guide her home!’

At this point, I was pretty sure that I had lost the swarm and would need to combine. But, I know full well to let the bees alone for as long as possible before enacting my own will upon them. So, I decided to give it another week.

Today, as the temps rose into the upper 50’s, I opened up the Deep to have a look. I actually had a Nuc setup nearby, as I expected that I would not find a queen and wanted to combine them with another Nuc that I have from an Irene cut-out. Much of the syrup in the frames had been moved, but no eggs. The problem was that it was still somewhat cold and there were a lot of bees in this swarm – they were very good at fully covering all 5 drawn frames. I find that lightly blowing on bees makes them disperse, so I was able to check a few cells to no avail. I did find where they were drawing wax (before today, if anyone told me a bee would draw wax in October, I’d think they were smoking crack), but nothing…until frame 4! The queen! There she was, inspecting a cell and inserting her abdomen into it! Bonzai! Patience, when it comes to bees, always pays off for me.

These bees have a tough road in front of them. I did not notice any pollen, but the bees were covering nearly every cell. They have about 20% of the honey that they will need for the Winter. They also are only now building up brood. I have no idea how hardy the current set of bees are (are they made up of Winter bees? how many are Winter bees that can make it to February?!) If I had more experience with October swarms, I’d know what to do. The wise man would probably kill the queen and combine with one of my hardy Nuc’s. But, I have never been called a wise man! So, we’re going to see how it goes.

What’s up next? Over the next week, we’ll have good beekeeping weather (temps closing on or even eclipsing 70). I plan to go out to the Albo hive and pull at least two Deep frames of honey. I also plan to grab a shallow or a medium off of one of the hives at Shirley Plantation (they have extra supers on them). This super will not be full of capped honey, but it will be at least 50% full, based on my last inspection. Finally, I will add a spacer on this hive and put a few pollen patties on them (I have the mix, but have never made them, so be ready for another adventure posted here in the next month or so.) I think that will give them the best chance at making it.

(I may initiate another plan, moving them to a 2 Nuc high setup – depends on how many deep frames I feel comfortable taking from Albo – plus, I do not have a Nuc spacer, so I’ll have to build one – another reason why this option is the least likely one….)