Well, it definitely appears that my weak hive has been taking a beating these last few weeks. After putting the entrance reducer on, things really heated up on the landing area. Bee’s were all over it, all day long yesterday, and it certainly appeared like some fighting was going on. I am guessing that the sugar syrup that I put in there probably increased the aggressor’s desire to get in there and feed.
I am now very worried about my queen. When I broke this hive apart on Sunday, I never found the queen on the frames (but I did not actively search – if she was not easily seen, I went on to the next frame, as (at that time) I was not worried about her, but worried about the general state of things.) But, when I went to brush the bees off of the top board, there were a ball of bees on them. I sort of figured that some stray bee had come along and they were working on him. But, I have seen this ‘balling’ term used a lot when talking about queens. Now I am wondering if they had a queen in there.
To be honest, I have no idea what is going on. Michael Bush wrote an article saying that one way to help a weak hive is to shut off the entrance completely (one night) and see if there are bees outside the next day. If so, those are the robbers. Leave the entrance shut off for a couple of days and the robbers will give up. It is nearly 10 PM and I have tried twice to close that thing off, but the bees on this hive are still on the landing board, milling about. This cannot be a good sign.
Hopefully, I can help them out and rectify this issue. Lesson? When you get a new Nuc, put a daggone entrance reducer on it right off the bat.
The bees looked good this morning and I went ahead and put the entrance reducer on the weaker hive (Hive 2). I also checked the feeder and they were working on it pretty good. At last they are eating, which should mean some good results in a couple of weeks if it bears out like Hive 1. Of note, I was not able to get the entrance reducer in the hole, so I placed it flush with the opening. This afternoon, a bunch of the bees seemed to be busy propolizing the narrow crack between the reducer and the brood body. There was no apparent fighting, so I am hopeful.
On the ‘fighting’ note, I read an article by Michael Bush (http://www.bushfarms.com/beesrobbing.htm) that spoke about robbing (and how to not mistake it for an Orientation Flight). One of the comments by Mr. Bush was that you may not see any fighting if the robbers have already killed the guards. This is a bit concerning. Regardless, I will definitely keep the entrance reducer on these boys until the next Nectar flow begins.
Beekeeping in Richmond, Virginia is a definite adventure! Basically, it was not perfect timing to be sure. Most of the bees had returned from their foraging and where holed up in the hive. You’re supposed to check them between 10 and 5, when all the gals are out working. The wind supposedly makes them cranky, but I have no idea about that. Regardless, I had some real tasks to perform and I could not delay (or so I thought.)
Hive 1
Queen: Check
Frames: 6-7 (some just being drawn out)
Spotted the queen, great brood pattern, drawing out frames 5 and 6 now, with a little work done on 7.
I did not keep track of how much brood vs nectar vs pollen (I forgot!), but it looked really good. In addition, since I had seen several training flights at this hive, I was definitely expecting good news. In fact, I had brought a second brood chamber along just in case. I may have jumped the gun, but I went ahead and put the second box on top and refilled their feeder. I had to brush the bees off of the top board with some straw but I finally got the feeder to sit directly on the box (the new brood chamber that I installed.)
All in all, I am happy with this hive and will probably only spot check (no frame withdrawal) a couple of times over the next month.
Hive 2
Queen: Did not see her
Frames: 3-4
Different story here. Did not spot the queen, but did see a lot of good capped brood. This hive had just started to use the feeder (I noticed the first use of it when I took off the top.) These gals were really not even on 4 frames. I have to hope that the problem is not that my queen died (no sign of any queen cells). I will have to keep an eye on this one, perhaps checking it again in a couple of weeks to see if there has been any progress. I am happy to see that they have at least started to use the feeder.
Of note, they were balling something on the top board when I went to brush them off. I have to say that these gals were pissed about me brushing them off and I received my first sting (on the pinky!) of my beekeeping career. I removed the stinger, just like they say, and all was good. In truth, I was stung at the end of the examination (when I was trying to get those fools off the top board since I was placing the feeder on top of the brood chamber.) I am not certain if this balling indicates robbing or not. I am definitely going to get an entrance reducer on these guys (and probably Hive 1 too, since I do not think it will hurt much) in the next couple of days (and try to level them out a bit more.)
Hive 1 has finished all of the sugar syrup that I gave them and seem to be itching for more. Hive 2, however, has not even touched a drop of the stuff. I have added more syrup to Hive 1 and am waiting until the weekend to determine what the heck is going on with Hive 2. Kenny, a wise Beekeeper at the ERBA, mentioned last February that ‘if you have two hives, one will always be noticeably stronger then the other one – no rhyme or reason.’
This weekend, I will give Hive 2 a full ‘redo’, getting rid of any excess pollen and putting the feeder (after I clean it) directly on top of the box. I also plan to do a thorough inspection of the brood on this hive to see what the heck is going on. On Hive 1, I will mainly add a second brood chamber (or ‘Deep’, as some call it.) I do want to give them a good ‘once over’, as I doubt that I will be looking in that chamber again for a month or so.
On a ‘nectar flow note’, I was walking to my car from work yesterday and noticed a bunch of bees on a small, yellow-blooming tree. Upon closer inspection, this tree appears to be the Golden Rain Tree. Amusingly enough (or sadly enough…), I dumped several seedlings of the Golden Rain Tree last year (or let them die). Now, I see that it could be a very good source of food for my gals. Of course, this whole even took place at Cary and 6th street. There are probably not a lot of options in that area to begin with. Maybe that was the only thing blooming in that area.
Although I have been waffling on looking at the hives this weekend, I finally decided to basically let them be with respect to an actual frame inspection. I did, however, observe them externally on several occasions and frequently checked the hive-top feeders that I put on them earlier this week. As always, the two hives are not working at the same rate.
Training Flight on Hive 1
Yesterday, I had checked both hive-top feeders a couple of times. I never noticed any bees eating the syrup. In fact, except for 1 lone bee flying around in the feeder section in Hive 2, I never noticed any bees in the feeder section at all. This all changed today (I wish I had snapped a picture of it.) In Hive 1, the bees were in the feeder entrance thick as flees! In Hive 2, nothing. The more that I read up on feeding, the bees take up the syrup to help them build out more comb. Next weekend, I should see a substantial increase in comb. Hive 2 continues to struggle, at least from external observations.
As a final note, I once again found the bees outside of Hive 1 doing the Training Flights and actually snapped a picture this time. The picture definitely does not do justice to this event. Honey Bees are all over the place, climbing on the front of the brood chamber and flying all about in front of the thing. It appears to be a very positive sign.
Today I decided to put some sugar water on my hives to give them a bit of a leg up. I purchased the Beemaster Top Hive feeder with some Christmas money provided by my family, based on recommendations from the fella at Dadant’s down in Southwest Virginia. I had issues with this, but first an observation.
When I approached Hive 2, I again noticed dead, partially formed brood on the landing area of the bottom board. Since this is the second time that I have found this on this particular hive, I posted some questions and this pic on the Beekeeping Forums. The folks there said this was nothing to be concerned about. In fact, one fella said this was a good sign. Brood dies as part of a regular thing (and the rain flushes we have been getting are a logical reason.) My picture demonstrated that I have good, clean bees that are doing their housekeeping right.
So, this was another bit of info to file away for another day!
Now, back to feeding. I combined equal parts (volume) sugar and water in the morning in a pan on the stove. I covered it and let it sit until lunchtime, when I put the food on the hives.
The first problem that I encountered was the megabee pollen substitute that I put on the hive previously. Bees were all over it and it was difficult to get off of the top board. Once I did this, I placed it directly on top of the frames. This was recommended to me by Wade at my beekeeping club. It seemed to work well. The problem was that I now had to get my hive-top feeder on it. With the pollen, it would not fit down on the hive directly. Finally, I went ahead and put my top-board in between the feeder and the hive. I have since determined that this is a problem, so I will have to figure out what to do with this tomorrow.
As a final note, I also went to put down my entrance reducers. Both Wade and Kenny (from the East Richmond Beekeeper’s group) advised that I should definitely get an entrance reducer on my hives. Feral hives would be working on my small hives when the Nectar Flow drops (as it should over the next month.) Unfortunately, they did not fit exactly (when I put the hives together, it appears that I should have put the entrance reducer in before putting the two side boards on the bottom board.) I will have to address this tomorrow too.
On Entrance Reducers, an experienced beekeeper mentioned that he has come to get absolutely huge hives from people who want to get them out of barns and trees. A lot of time, they all are coming and going through a hole the size of a quarter! His point was that an entrance reducer is fine all of the time. If there is even the slightest risk of robbing, he says you should put her in! More on this tomorrow.
Today was my monthly beekeeping meeting and it was extremely beneficial. But, before I record these notes, I must comment on the one check I made of the hives today. I only had a couple of minutes between work and the meeting, but something had been nagging me the whole day. The pollen that I placed on the hives last night was a little damp. I had simply placed it directly on the top board, without anything between it and the particle board that makes up the center of the top board. As I contemplated this during the day, I kept thinking that this was only damaging the board and that I need to move it to a small plate that I would sneak out of the kitchen so the wifee wouldn’t know about it.
Feeding pollen to my bees the first time
Well, I took two plates out to the hives and opened the top off of Hive 1. There must have been a hundred bees all over that pollen! They were going to town on it. Usually, I might have 6 or 7 bees between the cover and the top board. Now, there were a hundred and more! Needless to say, I left the girls alone and departed for the bee meeting. Moving this stuff onto a plate was not going to be a quick thing, as expected.
The bee meeting focused on Honey Extraction, but I picked up several useful tips in other areas from both the speaker and chatting with folks after the meeting. What follows are my notes:
Honey Extraction : When you do this, which most folks with established hives are doing now through July, you only want to use the frames that are 80% full (both sides) of capped honey. The rest is nectar and will mainly dilute your honey. The best honey has about 18.4% moisture, so you do not want a lot of nectar (which is nearly 95% moisture!)
Also, once you extract the honey, put the empty (but still dripping with some honey) in an empty box above the main hive. In a day or two, the bees will come up and pull all of that honey out and put it in their stores. It’s the best way to clean honey frames.
Nectar Flow: It turns out that bees will typically completely ignore both feed (Sugar Water) and honey during the nectar flow. This very much explains my experience with the spilled honey in mid to late May. I put some honey that had spilled on the floor on both of my hives. The bees pretty much ignored it (a couple of bees appeared to drown in it, actually!) Now, this activity makes perfect sense. The Nectar Flow (Spring) was on and they were busy at work.
The fella that gave the talk mentioned that this year was not a good nectar flow for his area (coastal Virginia). In fact, he was pretty sure it was over. Kenny, a wise member of our group, said ours was still on, but it was dwindling. It appears that early to mid-June marks the end of our Nectar flow.
When the Nectar Flow is on (Spring or Fall), the speaker hardly bothers his bees at all. He might lift the top cover to see what they are doing, but he does not smoke them or break the hive apart. This is the time that they need to be working 100% and any setback is not good. Another good tip to remember.
9 Frame Strategy: The speaker likes to use 9 frames in his honey supers. The bees will draw them out further and fill them with more honey. There were a couple of very important tangents to this advice.
1. When you do the 9 Frame Strategy, always start with 10 frames. Remove one later on, otherwise the bees (when started with 9 frames) will build comb all over the place (burr comb is an example.)
2. You want your 10 frame setup to be 10 frames pushed close together. They should, in fact, be touching. This will leave space to either side. This is a big lesson for me. When I first picked up my hives, the sequence went like this :
a. I went to my provider around 2 pm and brought a brood chamber full of frames.
b. We took 4 or 5 of his frames and put them in the brood chamber.
c. I returned at 8 pm to get my brood chamber and take them home
The problem with this was that I never opened them after putting the nuc’s in them. This meant that they were jostled on the ride back (and me carrying them around.) Needless to say, on my first inspection, they were not snug together and there was comb everywhere. I have still not rectified this, but Kenny advises this is something for me to do in the Winter, when I need to add a new Brood chamber for the bees to work. When I do it, put a Queen excluder between the boxes and the Queen will stop laying in the lower or upper chamber.
This gives me a chance to clean up the frames some, which I will have to do later this year.
Food: With the Spring Nectar Flow waning, I definitely should be feeding my bees, according to Kenny. I need to get my top feeders going tomorrow, if possible. Wade, another member of the Bee Group, advised that it’s a good idea to always do this with new or small hives. If they need it, they will use it. If Nectar is available, they will ignore it.
The sequence, according to Wade, is to put the pollen right on top of the frames. Remove the top board and put the feeder on top of the brood chamber. Finally, put the cover on (you do not need the cover in this setup.)
Ventilation: It is very smart to get some ventilation on your hive to help them keep the hive from overheating and it helps with curing honey (the bees rely on the flow of air to make this easier.) Wade said to drill a hole and cover it with number 8 hardware cloth. Kenny said to just put something about a quarter of an inch wide on top of the top cover ridge and rest the cover on it. Right now is a good time to do this.
The beekeeper that gave me my bees has many decades of experience with bees. He had a few hundred hives up until a year or two ago, when his health got in the way. He has a ton of no-nonsense knowledge, but getting information out of him is like pulling teeth! He’s very nice, but I think that he believes that most of the ‘new techniques’ are hogwash, but doesn’t want to say so outright. So, he loves to give an off-handed remark about it which is neither negative nor positive. He seems to like to talk about bees on occasion, but giving advice is not something he’s really on board with. It’s probably because I am so clueless he figures that I need to get some experience of my own under my belt. I am good with that and will continue to soldier on!
Regardless, the point of this blabber is that I specifically asked him whether I should feed my bees when I got home with them. I had read where a lot of folks put a 1-to-1 Sugar::Water solution and pollen on a new hive, to get them off to a good start. But, most of this advice was aimed at folks that received bees through the mail, which typically happens in mid to late-April around here. The thought is that the weather could be iffy and it’s a good idea to give them easy food to start.
But, I picked up Nuc’s, which you get a bit later since you’re getting local bees. I received my bee’s in what many call the Nectar Flow. Weather was good and food (nectar and pollen) was everywhere. But, I asked the beekeeper anyway. His only response was I’m not feeding my bee’s. So, I let it be and that was it. I should have realized that he was not answering me, but prompting me to figure this out for myself. I should have put more thought into it.
But, over the weekend I had some time to really read what a lot of regular first-time beekeeper’s are doing out there (on forums and discussion threads.) A bunch of them are feeding their bees and, with this easy food source, the queen will recognize all of the extra food and start laying more. This gets the hive rolling fast to take advantage of good times (which we are in right now.)
At any rate, I decided to feed my bees some of my pollen (of course, now I am wondering if the stuff is any good, as I had in in the garage and thought it was dry, cracker-like stuff and it appears that it is slightly damp…) I gave both hives a third of a piece this evening, placing it on the top board. We’ll see if this makes much of a difference. I might consider putting some sugar water on them later this week.
One final note that I wanted to record is the water drinking habits that I have witnessed over the past few days. Everybody always harps on how you need to keep water available for the bee’s (they use it to convert honey into food and, more likely at this time of year, to cool the hive.) You can either leave a faucet dripping all day or put out chicken waterers. I chose the latter, as the former will no doubt give me more well troubles.
Well, I think the only thing drinking out of my waterer’s are the birds and some mystery night-time visitors. I have never seen them on it. But, if I put some potting soil in a pot and water it, the soil will be covered with bee’s in NO time. They love some dirty water. I guess it’s easier for them to stand on the potting soil and suck up the moisture in it. Who knows. The bottom line is that I need to come up with a more permanent solution by July (when they will really need lots of water.)
At any rate, new experiences and lessons every day.
Thanks to a very troubling issue with my hounds, I had to spend a lot of time inside on this otherwise beautiful day. In my continuing effort to look for the positive, the one bonus of this day was that I had a lot of time to review various bee literature online and read some of the forum posts. This was extremely informative and I wanted to make this post to remind me of my goals for next week (yes, I have already decided that waiting two weeks is too long!)
1. Open each hive from the opposite side that I have been working them
2. Take a good look at the capped brood pattern of the queen
3. Be sure to look for any queen cells. It is highly unlikely that the bees are looking to make a new queen, but I keep forgetting to look!
4. Make a note of exactly which frames have brood (see if I can see Drone brood on the outside), which have capped honey and which have pollen.
Finally, if I have not done so already, give both hives a third off a piece of pollen and put the rest in the fridge. I also need to consider putting my feeders on top of them, as it appears that this is the best way to get some fast growth in the young, small hives (of which I have two.)
Well, it’s a learning experience for sure. Today, a bit before 3 pm, on a mostly Sunny day in the low 80’s, I decided to cut my grass. As I neared Hive 1, I suddenly noticed a ton of bees buzzing all over the thing! I cut the mower and got off to take a closer look (maybe the mower had upset them.) As I neared the hive, I was amazed at the number of bees buzzing around this thing!
To put it into perspective, I am used to seeing two to three bees coming and going from this hive every 5 seconds or so. Right now, there were probably a hundred bees buzzing all over the thing. I could see a bunch coming and going, but most seemed to be simply buzzing around the front of the hive, occasionally hitting the landing board and some even crawling around on the front of hive itself!
Needless to say, I thought we had problems. Looking at Hive 2, I could see a small number moving back and forth (maybe 1 bee every 5 seconds, which is par for the course here as this hive continues to show less progress from outside observations then Hive 1.) At first, I tried to call the fella that sold me the bees, but he was not in. I even considered posting on the bee forums (http://www.beesource.com/forums/), but was not really sure that my description would give them enough to go on.
So, back to the hive I went, watching from a few feet away, to see what I could see. Robbing was one of my main concerns, but I could see no fighting at all. Occasionally, one bee would seemingly feel out another bee, but I really think this was typical inappropriate feeling by the bees (maybe transferring pollen or even nectar.) Mostly, bees were just coming, going and flying all around the front. As far as I can tell, they were all workers. I did notice that some appeared smaller then what I was used to seeing (or so I thought).
Unfortunately, I had a dog issue today and had to go to the emergency vet at 3:30, so I was unable to readdress the issue until around 6 PM. When I returned to the hive, everything was normal again. We were back to 2 to 4 bees coming and going every 5 seconds or so and no sign of my original issue. Regardless, it was time for the weekly check-up.
Hive 1
Still working primarily on 4 frames. The two frames outside of the 4 central frames were starting to get drawn out with some honey and pollen. I did not see the queen, but only went about 5 frames into the hive before I decided to stop. I found lots of brood and more bees coming.
Hive 2
These guys are working on 5 frames now. It’s hard to figure what to make of this, but these guys look stronger from the inside. Again, lots of brood and more bees coming.
Conclusion: After looking in the hive and reading some posts on www.beesource.com/forums/, I am pretty sure that I have now witnessed my first training flight! It appears that bees, early on in their lives (before they take the role of forager) go out for a training flight on nice days between 3 and 5 (I think mine started around 2:15 to 2:30 this day.) I am confident that this is what I was seeing. These bees were taking one of their first orientation flights, and thus all of the hubub (and maybe I really did see smaller bees!)
All in all, learning about ‘Training Flights’ was a very good thing. I look forward to seeing more of them in the future. I may give them two weeks to get going this time, before my next check. I hope to have both of my next Deep’s built by then, so that we can look at adding some more room for the little gals.
