The Season Begins Tomorrow!

It is with no small amount of trepidation that I prepare for tomorrow, the first real day of my beekeeping season for this year. It’s about average, although much later than last year (due to the warm Winter) and is marked by 5 or 6 day period that starts at around 60 degrees tomorrow and rises to the mid (or even upper) 60’s over the ensuing days. It’s the perfect time to start a few Nuc’s and get some full hive  checks done!

My trepidation is due primarily to the fact that I have not been in (or even laid eyes on) 90% of my hives since mid-January. Between the weather and a surprise surgery to remove my gall bladder, I simply have not been able to get out. My biggest fear is that I will find a lot of dead-out’s (dead hives.) I have been spared this consequence in all of my Winters thus far, but it seems that I always come into March with this worry. Tomorrow will be a big ‘tell’. I’ve been told that a lot of beekeepers have experienced unusually large losses this Winter. I like to think that my beekeeping practices have insulated me from this threat, but tomorrow will be the real test. We shall see.

Unless things are truly terrible, I plan to create the first Nucs of the year tomorrow. Most likely, they will all be Deep Nucs (I have not mastered the art of creating Medium Nucs this early) and I will stock them with three frames of brood and a shake or two of nurse bees. At this time of year, I stock the Nuc’s with more resources then I will later in March or even in April (you don’t need as much ‘bee mass’ once the threat of long stretches of freezing weather abates.) This is likely to put my first Nuc sales in mid-April, barring some unfortunate event.

When I go into my hives tomorrow, my first mission is to count the frames of brood. I have no idea what I am going to find, but I am looking for 6 to 7 frames of brood. If they have less, I simply mark that in my journal to help extrapolate when the hive will have the right build to spawn a Nuc. In some of these cases, I might look for the queen (mainly if it’s a hive with an unmarked queen that I want to mark.)

If the hive has the right number of frames, I will create a Nuc off of it. Mission 1 is to locate the queen and isolate her. Sometimes I drop her in a closed up Nuc box that I carry with me. In other cases, I just put her on the furthest frame in the super and grab the frames that I need for the Nuc. While counting the brood frames, I am always noting which ones have eggs, so I generally know what I need. Ideally, I’ll grab another frame that has both honey and pollen and place a frame of foundation on the far side. I literally set the Nuc up in the same yard, level it right and leave. In two weeks, I’ll come back and give them a feeder. A week later, I’ll come back to confirm that I have a queen in the Nuc. If there’s any doubt, they get another frame of eggs.

In most cases, I create a Nuc off of every hive that is ready for one. But, some hives are lower on my Good Hive Scale. Nuc’s created off of those hives are for me and, since I track my queens, I know to watch the hive for whatever bad traits that its parent had (to take action on it in the Fall).

Hopefully, my next post will be one of jubilation and not agony!

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…

The Throws of Starvation
The Throws of Starvation

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…

And So It Begins!

The first nectar of the year!
The first nectar of the year!

At the recent East Richmond Beekeeping meeting (held on Feb 12), one of my friends who hosts a few of my hives mentioned that the bees were on her First Breath of Spring shrub. I remember her mentioning this last year, in February I believe, and asked her to snap a picture. They arrived today! It’s great to see the little gals starting to bring in resources instead of being a total consumer, as they do most of the Winter. It’s certainly not enough to sustain the hives, but I’m certain it is getting them amped up a bit! I have already begun looking for this plant (it is also known as Winter Honeysuckle). I will probably plant 10 of them over the next few years, if I can find the space!

Although this is exciting news, we still have another few weeks of risk. I do not see much in the way of really bad weather, but you can’t rely on anything outside of 12 hours from now when it comes to the Richmond weather folks. Regardless, this was a great sign.

So, I really wanted to get out and look at a hive or two. My first obstacle was the daggone Gallbladder. That thing went south on me last week and the surgeons had to cut it out. I guess I have never had surgery like that before, but it sure is taking FOREVER to fully heal. I can walk around, but get tired really easily and can’t lift anything above 20 pounds (is there anything bee-related that weighs LESS than 20 lbs!?!) I decided to crack the only two ‘full’ hives that I have in the backyard. Both are really late Nucs (started in June) that I was only able to get a Medium super on in September. So, both remained in my backyard, which is not usual (I have a lot (well, 9 that are still alive) of Overwintered Nucs back there and like to keep full hives elsewhere!) My goal was to take off the inner cover and simply go through the Medium super, only lifting 1 frame at a time (I wish my frames had 20 lbs of honey in them, but they definitely do not.)

Walking Drones
Late Winter Drones

The first hive gave me a good show – walking drones, capped drone brood and eggs in drone cells! Walking drones is a huge find. I still have one of the February Nuc’s that I created last year and believe it is doing great, but I’m not going to do that again until I can see how long the queen in that hive really lives a productive life. But, this all but guarantees Nuc’s getting created in early March, weather permitting. It should be pointed out that the second hive had no Drones in the upper Medium and no evidence of drone brood or eggs up there. Both hives were equally strong, but one was already kicking into 3rd gear.

I am encouraged by what I found today. We’ll see what the next few weeks hold.

First Winter Loss and Deadout!

It had to happen one of these days, but I must say that it gives me little comfort in knowing that…

The weathermen claimed it would rise into the lower 70’s this weekend, so I used it as the ideal chance to check Winter stores in half of my hives. On Saturday, I focused on the Charles City hives (32 out there) and plan to tackle the Varina/Eastern Henrico hives today. I do not think it rose above 60 yesterday, so we’ll see how it goes today.

What is a ‘hive check’ in January? I suppose it means different things to different folks. For me, it primarily means that I approach the hive and lift it (tilt it) from both the front and back, to get a feel for the weight. This initial check is very valuable – some hives are obviously still chock full of honey (quick checks) and others simply require a visual inpsection (it’s hard to gauge some, so you have to go deeper in.)

The ‘quick check’ is simply taking off the inner cover and looking at the frames of the upper super to be sure you still see capped honey. In my yards, a heavy hive rarely has many bees up in the upper super and it is all capped. In those cases, I will break the upper super off of the top super and tilt  it up, to make sure I see a bunch of bees doing their stuff (I know, I know, the nervous nellies will begin to run around screaming about breaking up the cluster – I don’t think it hurts them any when you have warm days.) The ‘deeper check’ involves actually pulling frames, sometimes on both the upper and lower supers.

I mostly only did quick checks yesterday, although I did run into a few that were questionable and one that was a goner (a first for me.) I dropped a super of honey (from last Fall) on 3 of the ‘iffy’ ones and broke down the ‘deadout’. I gave the questionable ones honey so that I would not have to mess with them again until late February or early March. The ‘deadout’ was a new experience. It was my second strongest hive this past year (honey-wise). I lost my strongest from Westover Plantation in July, so now I lost my second strongest too! Amazing.

The ‘deadout’ was very interesting, once I got over the sadness of losing her. To begin with, there were probably 20 or so bees in the hive. I am fairly certain these were the first of the robbers. I really must have just caught it, as the hive was still chock full of honey with very little evidence of robbing (torn cappings.) Maybe 15 bees were on the bottom board, dead – another 10 were dead, face down in the cells. As with all bee analysis, there are a wide array of possibilities, but I have learned to focus on the most likely. The most likely scenario (based on my hive journal) is that my monkeying with the hive in November either killed the queen or they swarmed really late and the virgin queen never made it back. The bees slowly died out and finally were two few to keep a decent cluster (to keep warm) and just died.

What about laying drones? That’s a pretty good question – if the queen really did fail/die, why didn’t I find a lot of drone cells or dead drones. My hypothesis is that it was so late in the season that the bees did not kick into that mode. Until I actually see drone layers in the Winter, I am sticking with this synopsis. The queen died or was a virgin and died on her mating flight (or didn’t get mated.) Some might say this looks like ‘absconding’. I personally do not think ‘absconding’ holds much water in the Richmond, Va area, so I have crossed that off the list.

At any rate, the next question is ‘what will I do with the current frames of honey and drawn wax’? I will let my wintering Nuc yard eat out the deep and, sometime later this week, freeze the frames on the Medium and put them aside for possible use in the Nuc’s or what-have-you.

Another 30 or so hives to check today – hopefully no deadout’s, but it’s part of the hobby. We’ll see.

Winter Thoughts and Requeening

So, the season has wound down and the bees are put to bed. Although this might be considered a quiet time for the beekeeper, for me it is one of excitement and more work! The excitement centers around the coming Spring. That season is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most exciting time to be a beekeeper when you have hives that are overwintering. The work centers on taking inventory of the last season, planning for the coming season and repairing or building any equipment for increase or new experiments. Although the bees sleep over the Winter, I certainly don’t!

While reviewing my notes (at this point, this includes multiple notepads, a computer app and various scraps of paper in my ‘hive’ file!), I took at look at some of my early strategies and how I had planned to let them evolve as my hive count increased. The central theme of my early increase strategy (‘increase’ simply is beekeeper jargon for methods that he uses to increase the number of hives that he has, like splits, nuc’s, etc…) was simply survivability. I didn’t care if a hive produced only a little surplus honey or if they were a bit mean – I simply wanted the hives that could survive our Winters without any medication or feeding. My goal was to begin to flush my ‘bee genetic pool’ with the survivor traits.

But, starting this past year, I began to weed out some of the hives that didn’t meet certain other standards. By weed out, I simply made sure that I did not create any Nuc’s off of them or increase off of them. They still have the survivor traits, so I want the genetics (I let ’em live to send drones out for my queens).

But, one of the things that I noted this year were the blue queens that survived through the Summer and led hives into the Winter. Out of the 30 or so queens that I started the year with, 5 blue queens came into the year and 2 blue queens made it to this Winter. This is significant on many fronts. To begin with, many beekeepers requeen regularly. A blue queen was born in 2010 , a white queen in 2011 and a yellow this year (2012). Most beekeepers who follow the requeening strategy went into the Winter with yellow queens. Those who went into the Winter with white queens will probably requeen next year. The strategy is based on two theories. One, a young queen increases the survivability chance of a hive over the Winter. Two, a hive is less likely to swarm in the Spring with a young queen.

I do not dispute either of these facts, but I think that this strategy may be a major misstep for the beekeeper that is looking to build apiaries with bees that can survive the various issues of our time without medication. The fact that queens are unlikely to live longer than 3 years is a factor of our times, not of the honey bee. I have been told, back in the day, that queens lived 5 or 7 years. But now, with the confluence of diseases, pests and pesticides, they are unlikely to make it past the 3rd year. So, beekeepers manage to those stats, requeening and removing the chance of having a queen fail over the Winter and thus kill the hive.

But, what if you let those old queens have a go of it? Wouldn’t those old queens be carrying the best of the best, when it came to genetics? Wouldn’t these queens be the ones that you would love to raise your next queens off of? I think so. It is true that my management techniques do not allow a queen of that age to sit in the same hive through their entire life (all of my blue queens from this past Spring went into Nucs before August, allowing the primary hive to raise a new queen to continue on with), but they still have survived. These are the queens that I want to breed my next round of queens from. This is how my strategy has evolved.

Of course, the blue queens in my apiary may not make it through the Winter. Fortunately, I have enough hives that I can sacrifice a few in the pursuit of knowledge. But, I sure hope they make it. Ideally, one will come roaring out of Spring like a young queen and provide me with a bunch of new queens and Nuc’s.

Of course, Spring is a long ways off. Other ideas could cross my mind and change the whole plan. But, that’s why Winter is so fun, as a beekeeper!

Winter Prep and Nucs for 2013

Well, we are moving well into November and I am definitely behind in my Winter prep. I have probably secured about 50% of the 60-some-odd hives and hope to take care of the rest tomorrow. Like every year, I am putting entrance reducers on (even though I have never tested to see if this really makes a difference), leveling the hives and doing a last honey check. The honey check has been mostly very positive, but I do have a few hives that seem to be a bit lighter than I normally have, going into the Winter. It will be interesting to see how they do. I have about 4 supers of honey collected from the Winter checks (I break hives down to 2 or 3 supers, at most.) If necessary, I’ll use them on any hives that may need it.

One thing that I am doing differently this year is using pop-cycle sticks. In each Winter check, I remove the normal stick under the outer cover (it raises it about a half an inch or more above the inner cover, providing ventilation) and putting a half of a pop-cycle stick under each corner of the inner cover. It’s a bit more work, so I’m not sure why I decided to ‘switch up’ (I’ve not had a problem with survival using the old method). In retrospect, it was probably not a good idea and I may not do it for the remaining hives.

I have definitely learned another lesson in these checks. When you go into August, make sure you have nothing but Medium supers on the hives (if you have any honey supers at all.) I ended up leaving some of my shallow supers on because of how the bees managed their living space. Although all of them were above Queen Excluders, I had to remove the excluders and most will probably end up having brood in them now. One of the benefits of having ‘brood free’ honey supers is that you can store them without much risk at all (wax moths don’t care much for wax without pollen or brood remnants (cocoons.)

Finally, I have opened up my Nuc list (click here). I notified everyone on my waiting list from last Spring (who didn’t get a Nuc) first, so they would have first shot. Right now, I probably have orders for around 13 Deeps and 15 Mediums. I will take orders for 20 Mediums and 35 Deeps before I close down the main list and move to a ‘waiting list’ only plan. Get on now, if you’re interested.

 

VSBA Fall Meeting – Day 1

I barely made it up to the VSBA Fall meeting, but am glad that I did. The two speakers today were Jerry Hayes (from the ‘Classroom’ in ABJ) and Nancy Ostiguy, a specialist in Entomology at Penn State. Jerry spoke about the problems facing both honey bees and mankind, focusing on Monstanto’s drive to feed an ever-growing world population while also looking at ways to reduce problems for our pollinators. Nancy, on the other hand, spoke about the problems facing bees and the different chemicals/treatments that are being used to deal with them.

The interesting thing about Nancy’s talk is that she readily admitted that folks in her profession have been urging Beekeepers to put all manner of chemicals into their hives to ward off the varying problems of the last few decades. Although she did not come right out and say to ‘STOP’, she was stressing the need to be more judicial in the application of treatments. The bottom line is that researchers are starting to see that treatments are not good for the bees, as a whole.

Again, this stresses something that I have believed long before I became a beekeeper. I am not someone who stresses about ‘organics’ or trying to keep bees a ‘natural’ way, for sure. I simply believe that it is best to do what has always worked and let the bees’ genetics work out the rest. It’s certainly not a strategy that today’s commercial beekeeper could take, but I definitely think it is the only strategy for the small-scale beekeepers. In time, I believe the commercial beekeepers will be forced to move in this direction too.

Lessons for 2012

I was recently asked by an experienced beekeeper ‘what did you learn in 2012’? I have had a lot of time to reflect on that question, as I prepare my hives for the Winter (see a brief note on that task below.)

This year proved to be a banner year in the apiaries. I created several Nuc’s in February that all became nice, strong colonies. I sold all of them but one, as I wanted to see how long the queen remained a viable later on. There are two risks with creating a Nuc so early. One is the weather – this past Winter posed no problem here. The second is the possible lack of drones. This second issue may mean that the queens from those early Nucs were not mated enough to make it as long as they otherwise might. In my mind, there is no real way to determine this except to keep the hive for three years and make sure the queen doesn’t falter early. So, no likely update on this experiment until 2015 (or earlier if it turned out to be a failure!)

I also learned that, under good conditions, you can take more than 3 deep frames from a Deep/Med setup for a Nuc without slowing them down or even stopping them from swarming. In all likelihood, I will simply create more than one Nuc from my strong hives in 2013 (I have increased my Nuc boxes by a lot, to prepare for this possibility.) The key here is to not take so much that they flounder for a month trying to rebuild. So, instead of taking more than 3 at Nuc creation time, I’ll probably take 3 one weekend and another 3 some three or four weekends later.

The painful lesson centered on supers. I will never leave 4 or more supers of honey on a hive. My banner hive (out of 30 or so honey producing hives this past Spring) drew out and capped a little under 4 supers (2 shallows and 2 mediums) of honey. I was struggling during these months, trying to keep up with my bees, and never got around to pulling the supers until sometime in June. I cannot be sure, but it appears that the hive swarmed and the queen did not make it back (another lesson here is to check for a single frame of brood at every inspection). The hive was robbed out with a bit of wax moth and SHB in  it, once I got to it in June. I deal with losses pretty well, but this one hurt. I had big plans for that queen/bloodline. I was also excited about 4 supers of honey! At any rate, I now know that I can never be sure that I will get to every hive in a timely manner. So, I will be unlikely to leave more than 3 supers on a hive at any given time.

For Winter Nuc’s, I found that early August is about the latest I should start them. I tested a few in mid to late-August and they were unable to fill out the second Nuc body with honey. I’ll let them make a go of it this Winter (as a test), but I’d prefer that they had more  honey (I may give one of them a medium nuc of honey from one of my bank hives.)

Winter Prep

Winter prep for me basically involves a few simple tasks, none of which require a full hive breakdown. The first thing I check is honey. I pull a few frames from the top hive body (for me, this is almost always a Medium) and make sure they have a fully capped super. The second thing that I do is spot check the bottom super by pulling one of the center frames and making sure that I have capped brood. All the while, I am looking at as many bees as I can and making sure that nothing is amiss (currently, my main way to judge this is by deformed wing virus.) I then level the hive off (in case is shifted during the year) and make sure it is slightly leaning forward. Finally, I put on an entrance reducer (and a cover, if the hive has a screened bottom board – I stopped using these but still have a dozen or so out in the yards.)

Wintering Nuc Update

We had a few hours of sun today, before the drenching arms of Issac came through and it allowed me to check my Overwintered Nucs. I started 11 for this Winter, hoping to have 8 take (strong, laying queens) and 6 make it to next Spring. One had actually perished a couple of weeks ago (I have already combined it with another Nuc.) This one started getting robbed about 4 days after I created it. Since it was nestled among 4 others, I was worried the robbing would spread, but it didn’t. I even moved the thing and gave it another frame of brood/eggs from a donor hive, only to have robbing start up again. Experiences like these indicate to me that there is some kind of a ‘scent’ issue (the Nuc simply advertises that it is weak and available for robbing.) There are many possibilities – too many for me to touch on in this post. Regardless, I was down to 10 before I even got started! What irks me the MOST is that I tried to save it, even though I know better. It seems that some habits die hard and I am simply going to throw good bees after bad, every year, regardless of my experiences.

On a more positive note, all of the remaining 10 had a laying queen as of today. Of those 10, only 2 were slight laggards. I do not judge a queen by this measure, as a lot of a queen’s laying hinges on the resources available and coming in. These two Nucs may not have had the resources available to them to really lay. But, I start feeding my Wintering Nucs on Sep 1, so they all received two mason jars in an empty hive body on top. Depending on how the Nucs were set-up, I have differing strategies now.

Four of my wintering Nucs came from one hive that I broke down. This was my absolute nastiest, meanest hive. They could handle anything mother nature threw at them, didn’t like to swarm and could put honey away like nobody’s business. But, the second I opened this hive up (with or without smoke, morning, noon or afternoon), they would literally come pouring out of the thing! I never kept track, but I am willing to bet that if you counted up ALL of the stings I have taken from my hives, this hive accounted for over 50% of the total… They were so mean that I never could find the queen when I wanted to re-queen them (I typically do this in May, for an established hive). It’s hard to find a wiley little wench when all of her sisters are jabbing you from all corners! So, I chose this hive to create my wintering nucs from. As a side tale, I never found the queen IN the hive when I broke them apart. I actually found her afterwards, on the ground in a ball of bees, outside of the entrance to the hive. I wonder if she always jumped off the frame when I came looking. At any rate, she lost a head by my hive tool on that day.

But, back to the point, since these wintering Nucs came from an established hive, they actually started with a two Nuc body setup and with a decent amount of stored honey already there. My main goal with these hives is to see them cap off the upper Nuc. Based on my (limited) experience, this is will be a slam dunk for these hives. They’ll be set before the end of September and I probably will not check them again until January.

The other 6 Nucs are in single, deep bodies. I have the same goal for this group that I had for the ones previously mentioned – get a second hive body of capped honey on top of them! I plan to do a little experimenting here, dividing the group into 3 sets of 2.

Set 1 will receive my typical strategy. They will include 2 strong Nucs that will get 2 mason jars today to get them in the ‘nectar consumption’ mode. Once they finish these jars (I’ll check all Nuc feeders every other day or so), I’ll drop a second Nuc body on them with 3 or more drawn frames and one or two frames with foundation. I’ll continue to feed them my normal syrup setup until they draw/cap the entire upper Nuc body or until the end of October.

Set 2 will receive a revised strategy. They will be treated like Set 1, but receive all foundation for the upper Nuc. I am interested to see how much wax a Nuc will draw in September. These Nucs will receive Medium upper Nucs, as I can drop capped frames from some of my Bank supers on mature hives in late October, if this experiment fails.

Set 3 includes my laggard queens. My goal here is really to simply get them to fill out a single, deep Nuc. They are starting with all drawn wax, but they will have an uphill battle (at least I think they will) because of the low number of bees. I doubt they can get a really good nurse bee set until the end of September. They simply do not have a lot of bees to build up a good Winter cluster. I could ‘rescue’ these bees with a frame of capped brood from my mature hives, but I’d like to see them make a go of it. This is really a ‘resources’ experiment for me. I am trying to find the bare minimum that I need for a good success rate for wintering Nucs. These Nucs will receive a bit more attention from me, mainly because I don’t want to open them up in the Spring and find some pest has destroyed the frames. I may also give them some capped frames later on, depending on what I see (if I open them up and find a golf ball-sized cluster, I will not be trying to save them!)