Geronimo Hive | Beekeeping in Richmond, Virginia

Christmas, Snow and Rearing Queens

Snow on the Geronimo Hive — The Last Snow of 2010 - Christmas at the Geronimo Hive

Christmas has come and gone, but a blanket of snow persists in the central Virginia area even today. I did not measure it, but it appeared to be about 4 inches of snow that came down between late Christmas day and the following evening. It was really the perfect snow for Christmas, blanketing everything (including the beehives) but leaving the roads mostly clear since the daytime temperatures had stayed above freezing since then. For the garden plants, snow is one of the best things around. It creates a blanket over the ground, effectively keeping it right at freezing (for the most part) even during the brutal nights when it gets down into the teens. But, does it help the Bees?

I doubt that snow has much effect on bees except that it provides water for the surrounding landscape, which indirectly helps the bees out. One of the things that folks up north worry about is snow that is higher (due to the depth) then the bottom entrance. Some folks (Michael Palmer, up in PA, for one) have switched to all or mostly top entrances to prevent this. Although I am not worried about snow covering the bottom boards of my hives, I am going to try a top entrance hive this year (2011) just for fun. I am interested in seeing how they work when it comes to managing the hives.

Thinking about the top entrance reminds me of one of my main goals of a beekeeper this time of year: identify and target achievable goals for the upcoming year. There are tons of things to do with bees. Many of the things you have to learn on the spot, as you are simply reacting to something going on in one of your hives. But, there are a lot of things that require planning. To do them all would be impossible (for me, anyway). To do them right, I need to identify the learning goals of the coming year and begin preparation in December of the previous year. For 2011, I have three main ‘learning’ goals.

Icicles hanging off the front porch at Wilton — Winter Setting In

My first goal is to dabble in Spring Nuc creation. I am currently thinking that I will attempt to start 4 Nuc’s the traditional way (traditional to me, at any rate), letting them raise their own queens. I will be happy with a 50% success rate, but will certainly take more! I will definitely keep one Nuc to watch it grow and might trade one for some local bees from another beekeeper, to continue to diversify my genetic pool. If more then two do well, I’ll worry about dealing with them later. The long term goal is to possibly start selling Nuc’s, but I will not sell them this first year, as this is a learning year.

The second goal is to start a Top Bar Hive. I have already cut a lot of the wood from an old fence to make it. The key will be getting some bees into it. Hopefully, I’ll get a swarm in April to use. Otherwise, I’ll figure out a way to transfer a hive from my Langstroths.

The third, and final, goal is to raise some queens. I received some queen rearing gear and books for Christmas that I am looking forward to trying. It included a system from Mann Lake which is basically the Nicot System and a queen castle (which is really a deep hive that has been divided into 4 cavities, each for a new queen). I hope to raise four queens, but will be happy (as with the Nuc’s) with raising just two. Again, I will use one myself and hopefully trade one for a queen from another local beekeeper’s stock.

The bottom line is that I have three goals in mind that I will begin working towards now. At this point, I simply want to do as much research as I can (to develop my initial plan for each goal) and to obtain/build/paint any gear that is necessary to make it happen. I want all of this in place by March 1 so that I can be working on my goals as of April 1!

All of this, of course, assumes that I am not wiped out (all of my hives perish this Winter)!

Late July Split

Today, sort of on a whim, I went out to check the Geronimo hive. It has been and remained my strongest hive since starting beekeeping in the Spring of 2009. At the last check, everything appeared to be going smoothly : 4 to 5 frames of pollen, 4 to 5 frames of capped honey in the two bottom deep suppers, 10 frames of drawn comb in the top medium super (with a few that had patches of capped honey). Add to this a healthy dose of eggs, larva and capped brood and I figured things were great. With the dearth coming on in the midst of a drought here in Richmond, Virginia, my expectations for today’s inspection were to find mostly the same with perhaps a bit less stored honey (they should be eating into some of the Spring stores now.)

Queen Cells — My Bees Decide to Cast a Swarm

Of course, that’s not exactly what I found. They did have a good amount of pollen and honey socked away, in addition to the fact that they were about half finished in drawing out a couple of frames of foundation that I had given them when I took some capped brood to start those Nuc’s for the new queens that I picked up last month. But, they also had about 10 swarm cells, 4 of which were torn open…

So, here we are in the worst time in the world for bees to go off and build a new hive and my bees have either already sent the original queen on her way (I did not find the little wench, but did find larva) or were about to. The fact that I found larva says that the queen has been here in the last week. She may still be in the hive. As to the queen cells that were torn open, they could mean a million different things (of course!), each dictating a different strategy by me!

For example, it is possible that they made hatched queens (and my old queen already swarmed), but these queens have not gotten around to killing the inhabitants of the other cells (I spent a good many minutes examining three of my larger, unhatched queen cells for evidence of Queen regicide). It is also possible that the bees tore them apart because of some failure of the queen larva (maybe she had some mites in there with her…) In fact, I have include a picture in this post that has to be an example of that. The cell’s cap is still intact, whereas the side of the cell is torn open… When a queen emerges, she comes through the end (well, that’s how everyone else’s queens emerge – it wouldn’t surprise me one bit of my queens did it differently from all of the bees of the last several hundred thousand years…) There are a million possibilities, but knowing the answer really wouldn’t help me with my current situation. I still had 7 or so cells, on frames all over the hive, to deal with.

Queen Cell Just Before Being Capped — Still Feeding this Queen Wanna Bee

I personally do not believe in destroying the queen cells unless you are so late in the season that the drone level may be too low to mate with the virgin. I had decided that I would try to find the queen and move her to a Nuc, where I could then take action later (my 4 Nuc’s for overwintering may need a queen at some point or maybe I would just overwinter 5 Nuc’s – but, judging from the issues with a couple of the Nuc’s, I was pretty sure that one would need a queen over the next month or so.) At that point, my hive would think they had swarmed already and the first queen to come out would just kill the others.

Unable to find my queen, it made more issues. If she swarmed, these other queen cells might be for after-swarms (what kind of insane bee swarms in this low nectar environment? I would bet big money that they would die out before Fall, if they landed in some tree hollow out there.)

Again, I had to focus. Deal with what you know. I had a bunch of viable queen cells and a probability that these bees might swarm again (or maybe were getting ready to swarm for the first time). So, I split the hive, giving equal parts brood, pollen and honey to both splits. I have come to grips with the fact that they are going to need feeding. I honestly was not looking to increase further this year, but now I am wondering about the Albo hive (my second strongest hive), out in Charles City at the Mountcastle Apiary.

At any rate, more to come on this developing situation tomorrow or Sunday. I do know that I will be a bit more active in looking at the strong hives in July going forward (when time allows.) I would have liked to have gotten ahead of this before the cells had even been capped. I hope to go through the splits again tomorrow and finally locate the queen, assuming she is still in there.

New Queen Cells Started

Today, in my continuing effort to spread out my hive inspections, I decided to focus on two items. The first focused on the Geronimo Hive, as I wanted to check on the progress of the honey super. I do not want them to swarm because they filled that thing up too quickly. A couple of frames were capped, but most simply held drawn or partially drawn comb with nectar and/or honey. They could probably use another honey (Illinois) super, but I do not have the frames available for them yet. I will build some tonight and get it on them tomorrow.

The second, and more important, task was to check on the Southside Hive. Although I was hopeful that I retrieved the queen from that hive, I was doubtful. So, I wanted to see if they had started a queen with the eggs that I dropped in there last Monday (4 days ago.) I also wanted to see what they were doing with the rubber banded comb that I had jimmied into frames for them. I would like to get rid of this comb for two reasons. One, it is dark and old. This just means that it has the greatest chance of having pesticides and other poisons that have slowly built up over the years. Comb like this can lead to American Foul Brood, or so I am told, as it weakens the bees resistances to ‘issues’. I would like to remove it once the bees have gotten a good footing.

The second reason for removing this comb is that there is a chance that some of it has a recent insecticide (from the spraying by the landscaping folks that felled the tree that they were in) right on it. The last thing you want is something that fresh in your hive.

Well, as to the queen cell or eggs (eggs would have been a boon, as it would have meant that I had caught the queen), I found one capped queen cell and one that they were still feeding (I could see the larvae in the pool of royal jelly.) I am sorry that I did not get the original queen, but it is still good news. I picked up a ton of bees in this hive and they had already stored 6 frames of nectar (not full, but lots of cells on each frame that were 75% full of nectar). Basically, they had not drawn out any of the foundation and were simply storing in the existing comb. So, I could not remove any yet, but it will be at the top of the list once they get a queen laying. I will need to do the Bee Math to figure out when to check for the queen and then for the eggs. I have about a month or so before the plan hopefully comes together.

I should also note that the Southside Hive was eating the syrup at an average rate. I probably saw 10 or so bees drinking from it. I put a wooden dowel in the top feeder this time, so none could drown (and this played through true to form – none in the drink!) I will continue to monitor this hive, although I do not plan to remove the frame with the queen cells on it again until I think the old lady has hatched (probably next weekend – certainly by June 24.)

Bee Slaughter

Once again, the bees pay a terrible price for my education! It wasn’t all that bad, but it wasn’t pretty.

James Kiser, a member of the East Richmond Beekeeper’s Association that lives just down the road from me, stopped by to watch me check my hives. As I did a full inspection of all three hives last week, I was only doing some quick checks this week (I currently do full inspections every two weeks during the flow, although a bud at work, Doug Ladd (a beekeeper with more experience then me who lives to the west of Richmond), recommends a full inspection every week – something I may try if I start losing hives to swarms), but James was interested in watching since he is getting his first Nuc from Tom this year.

At the last ERBA meeting, Kenny Andrews recommended simply turning the top Deep on its side to check for swarm cells. Since the only goals for the look at the Geronimo hive this week were to check for swarm cells and see if they were working the honey super (Illinois super in my case,) I turned the top Deep on its side and bees poured out of the side and several were squished on the top of the bottom deep (which I was using as the base, like an idiot). I ended up moving it over on top of the super (which was still untouched, although bees were all over it this time) to have a look. I think I should have made sure that the frames were perpendicular to the ground because all of the frames swung to one side, probably messing with the bees on the frames (one of which could have been my daggone queen!) I stuck with it, though, and smoked the bottom and could not see any evidence of swarm cells. All in all, a ton of bees died and I am only somewhat confident that no swarm cells exist. This hive is so chock full of bees that it really must be thinking about swarming. I will probably take some time from work during lunch this week and do a full inspection. The one plus to this is that they never got mad. I couldn’t believe it, with all of the squished bees. I guess they have come to the sad conclusion that the dopey animal that messes with them each week is simply going to kill a few of us and we might as well go on about our business until the fool leaves! I don’t know how Kenny does this trick, but I will not be trying it again until I get more advice.

As to the Albo hive, I was only checking the honey (Illinois) super. This hive had less activity at the landing board, but they had just started to draw out some of the honey super. It was definitely a positive sign. I might get some honey this year after all! Doug has planted the seed about splits in my brain and I want to get some honey before I do it.

Finally, the only goal with the Westover hive was to remove the top feeder. They were not using it when I checked last Wednesday and I wanted to get it off. The only reason I had it on was because of some fairly wise beekeeper online saying that he feeds them until they draw out the two supers (Deep’s in my case) that they will live in. These bees, as of last weekend, had drawn out the bottom deep and had just started the top deep. But, I didn’t want to keep that syrup on them if they weren’t using it (it will ferment eventually.) But, as it turned out, I had 20 to 30 bees in the well with about a third of them eating the syrup. So, I left that on and that was that (unlike the Geronimo hive, these bees do not put up with a lot of shenanigans, so I am more inclined to let them do their thing without my mucking about in there.)

James didn’t get much of a show, although he was definitely surprised that the bees didn’t make more of a fuss during the slaughter at the Geronimo hive (actually, I was surprised about this too.) I think it put his mind at ease a bit about working his bees in the future.

In closing, I received a flier on a Beekeeping Seminar being given by one of the contributors to my bee knowledge (some of which is on this blog), Doug Ladd. It’s going to be given in Buckingham County on June 19 of this year and will include a lot of good stuff for a new (and experienced) beekeeper, including working hives and other items.You need to RSVP by June 9th – I have included the official flier here : Buckingham County basic beekeeping II seminar .

The Royal Lady Found

Hive 1 : The Geronimo Hive
Queen: Found (unmarked, new queen)
Brood: 5 to 6 frames of brood
Queen Cell: Found (could be old or new)
Drones: Flying now, only a few about (maybe a dozen or so)
Drone Cells: In the corners and thereabouts
Hive Components: One frame, an original from Tom Fifer, on verge of needing repair
Actions: Switched entrance reducer to the larger opening

The inspection today was the most frustrating inspection that I recall. My primary goal today was to change the entrance reducer to the larger opening. I also wanted to check for possible swarming activity. My last check was 15 days ago, so they should not have been able to raise a queen unless I missed the queen cell on my last inspection.

To begin with, the bees are filling up the top deep. The last inspection had 2 frames of capped honey. This inspection had 4 full frames and several that were partially capped. The bees are using everything but the outermost frames and even some of them are getting a little use. Nectar is being cured and honey being stored. This meant it was super time.

When I got to the bottom deep, I went to work inspecting them one frame at a time. There was still a lot of capped brood, but there were also a frickin ton of bees. A couple of them became a bit grumpy, but no one stung me. I wore shorts and my bee jacket & veil, with gloves, as I seem to be a bit more nervous then I was last year. One frame was trying to come apart (as it did on my last inspection), so I swapped it with a couple of other frames, moving it out a bit from the center. It had brood in it, but I need to move this one towards the outside so that I can hopefully replace it.

About 5 frames in, I came across a queen cell. It was like a small volcano with a hole in it. I marked this frame towards the outside (North side of the hive) and kept going with the inspection. At this point, I was a little excited. I was thinking that I would do my first split this year after all and put those new Nuc’s to work! Regardless, I needed to see if they were building other queens. I also decided that I needed to find my queen this time. I had seem some larvae, but no eggs. Plus, I was going to have to locate her when I did the split, so this was where the rubber met the road. Much to my chagrin, I did find her. But, it wasn’t the queen I started with. This one did not have a bit of paint on her.

Now, my dilemma. I have not really seen the queen in this hive since last Summer. Did they swarm last year and I missed it? If so, the queen cell that I found is indeed a new queen coming and I need to do something about it pronto. If not, then this queen is from a swarm that my hive cast off within the last month. I find this very hard to believe, as Drones have just started to come out. Plus, this hive had a ton of empty, drawn comb above them. They should not swarm with so much empty space (of drawn comb) above them! Or, that’s what I have read and have been told. The bees never even went up into the top deep!

So, ever hopeful, I am hoping that the new cell is a queen on the way. This Wednesday or Thursday, I will do a split if the queen cell that I found today turns out to be capped then. I will need to research this more.

I did put a medium super (all foundation, unfortunately, as that is all that I have right now) on this hive so that they can fill that out if need be. I also need to schedule a time to get into my weak hive. They may be getting ready to swarm too! ARGH!!!!

The Royal Lady Eludes Me Again!

Two dead bees, head first in the comb — Dead bees that starved

Today (actually, 10 minutes ago), I took on the first major hive inspection of the year, focusing solely on Hive 1, the hive that I have started to call my Geronimo Hive. As per my last post, I had lots of expectations for this inspection. Given the fact that folks to the North of me are talking about reversing already, I went in prepared for Bear. Outside of my normal gear, I brought with me:

One of my new Nuc’s, in case I found queen cells
A brood chamber full of frames with foundation, to replace any frames that I removed from this hive, in case I had to
A top board, as I was definitely going to remove the feeder, which they were not using at all (two idiot bees had ventured into the mix and drowned, of course)
A capping knife, to cut out any major burr comb that I came across
A new, painted bottom board (the current screened bottom board is not painted and I want to paint it this year, plus it will be easier to clean it away from the hive.)

The goal of this inspection was to figure out what was going on, find the queen and clean up the bottom brood chamber. For the most part, it was a success.

When I opened up the hive, I removed the feeder and dumped it on the ground nearby. I then removed the Imrie shim and I found one bee eating on the pollen substitute. I think it was wise to drop this in here, although I probably should have done it early (like early February) instead of early March. They had eaten half of a full patty, but now were finished with it. As I found out later, they were bringing in more then enough pollen to feed themselves (and natural pollen surely tastes better then the stuff that I gave them.)

Honey Bee Comb Eaten Through — Wonder how this happened?

I removed the pollen (tossing it on the ground nearby), and started my inspection of the top brood chamber. There were a fair number of bees about the place, although all of the honey towards the south of the hive was gone (except for a couple of patches). In one frame, I found two bees that appeared to have died of starvation, with their tails sticking out of the comb (of course, I forgot to poke them, so I am only assuming they were dead.) On the north side of the hive, I found 3 to 4 full frames of capped honey. For the most part, this hive body was fairly clean. So, I put it aside and began to examine the motherload.

This time, I lit my smoker and hit them with a few puffs. There were tons of bees (I should have grabbed a picture of them.) I think they covered 6 or 7 frames on the top (and I mean tons – not just a few wandering about – head-to-tail, thick). The frames in this hive have no space on either end, due to my lack of experience last year. One of my goals was to remedy this.

Ball of Honey Bees — What the heck are they doing here?

I began to remove the frames, one-by-one. What I found was interesting. What I did not find was irritating. The hive had a couple of frames with lots of pollen and some nectar/honey-being-ripened (partially full cells). One frame, oddly enough, was eaten up a lot. It was like wax moths had gotten to it, but I found no evidence of them in the hive. As I moved through the hive, I came across 4 or more frames that were stock full of capped brood. There were probably one to two frames with eggs and larvae. Fortunately, there were no queen cells (that I found, anyway.) I also did not find that rascal Queen. But, I did not push it, as the frames with the eggs (where I assumed she’d be), had bees a couple of layers thick, all on top of one another. I figured she could easily be in there, out of my sight. I did find one frame with a few capped drone cells, but it couldn’t have been more then 30 or so cells. This was a positive sign, as I also did not see any drones, so we should not be very close to any swarming activity.

Honey Bee Propolis — Propolis Scraped from Frames

One of the big things that I learned during this inspection was that my problem with the Geronimo hive was not burr comb, but propolis. I see now that the whole ‘cleaning’ aspect of beekeeping escaped me (my wife would say that it escapes me in life). When I was inspecting the frames last year, I should have been using my hive tool to scrape the propolis off of the sides of the frames (where they come together). Since I did not do that, it had built up a lot between several frames, spreading them out substantially. But, I took care of it at this inspection, scraping the sticky stuff off of the side bars of each frame, so they could come together more flush. In the end, I did have a little space on the ends of the frames (although I will have to continue to clean through the warm months to fully defeat this issue.)

Junk on the front of my Honey Bee Hive — What is this junk at the entrance of my hive?

As I was leaving the hive, I took a quick picture of something that has started to bug me over the last month. It seems to me that they are generating a big mess at the front of the hive. Some of this might have been here all along, but I am certain that it was not this thick. I am assuming it is excrement, possibly due to the lemon feeder I had on top these past few weeks. Regardless, I am watching it (they do get problems with having some kind of bee diarrhea, but this doesn’t look at bad as the pictures that I have seen of this problem.)

Also, this last picture was just an oddity. For some reason, bees from the outside frames that I had put on my frame holder decided to show off and do some kind of bee acrobatics. I am not sure if this is normal or not, but my bees are always putting on this kind of show (they did it last year and the young ones from this year appear to have picked up the same trick. I typically have to hold them over the hive and push them off with my hand.

To Kill a Bee Brush

Well, I put my first powdered sugar on the strong hive and it appeared to go well. At least until I pulled out the bee brush to brush the sugar on the top bars between the frames. Boy do my bees hate that brush. They get on that thing and try to sting the living daylights out of it. Same thing happened the first time that I used it, to remove them from the hive cover.

Amusingly enough, their ire was not solely directed at the brush. One of them jumped on my shirt and I could see her pumping her abdomen furiously, doing everything in her little power to jack me with her stinger. Fortunately (for her and me!), I was bent over a bit and the shirt was well away from my skin. I blew her off and moved away a bit to let her settle down before continuing.

All in all, I am happy to have gotten that done. My next goal is to do an actual mite count on this hive and get some sugar onto the weaker hive. I will wait until this weekend to do all of this and am hoping to see enough progress with the weaker hive that I can drop another deep on top of her. I honestly considered putting just a super on this hive, as I am not so sure they have enough time under the best of circumstances to fill up a deep. But, it occurred to me that they might end up laying brood in this thing before next Spring and I would have another mess on my hands. So, a deep is what they will be getting. I’m hoping to have enough extra honey from the strong hive to share some with the weaker gals in case of emergencies.

Hive 1 Rolling!

Hive 1 is rolling now. I was worried because I had seen one of the Wax Moth worms out on the landing area of the bottom board a week or so ago. But, I have not been able to really look into it. This was not a full inspection, but I did break down the entire top Deep and was happy to see them drawing out foundation on 5 frames! A couple of the frames were about ready to get an egg or two.

But, I did not break down the Deep with most of the bees in it. It’s a bit late and it looked like they were all in there. In fact, unlike my recent look into Hive 2, there was very little activity outside of the hive. Thus, I will wait until next weekend when I will do a full inspection of this hive too, but with smoke. It will be a busy weekend, to be sure. I hope to not find any (or very little) Wax Moth damage and bees storing lots of honey and pollen, with healthy brood evidence.

This hive looks like it stands a very good chance to do very well over the Winter.