Beekeeping in Richmond, Virginia

Let’s Have a Picnic!

The other evening, around 6 pm, the cellphone rings and a fairly nervous fellow begins to explain that a mass of bees has created a nest under the picnic table at his work! Based on the initial description, I immediately thought ‘yellow jackets’ (and that’s not something I tangle with…)! But, as he went on to explain the scenario, it became clear that he had a swarm of bees under his picnic table… Weird, I thought. I am used to swarms hanging on branches or gutters, but under a picnic table?! His business was down in Colonial Heights, just to the south of my home outside of Richmond, Va, so I assured him that I would be down there in a little over an hour to take care of it.

From this guy’s tone, I could tell that a little over an hour was a little over an hour too long. But, there was nothing for it. I had Anne Katherine in my charge and I wasn’t about to take my daughter on a swarm call. That would be bad for both daughter and pop (once mum found out….) So, I waited for my relief (mum-in-law), placed a call to confirm that they were still there (Oh Yeah! They’re still here!) and off I went, arriving about 1.5 hours after the initial call.

And there, handing from the bottom of the picnic table, was a very nice swarm. In addition, several fairly nervous men were about, keeping their distance. I could tell what the problem was, as the picnic area was just outside of the main work entrance to the warehouse. Interestingly enough, the men all thought the bees were building wax and creating a new home. Of course, this got me to talking about bees and how they were not building a home, but ‘hanging out’ while the scouts found a new home for them, either in a tree or someone’s attic. They mentioned that the maintenance guy had offered to spray the bees with Raid, but they decided to try to save them instead! I owe the manager some honey for that one.

Hiving the swarm was pretty easy. The Deep body slid perfectly beneath the seats and under the mass. I got on one end, lifted the table about a foot off the ground and dropped it. The ball fell neatly (well, not THAT neatly, but good enough) into the hive body and that was that. I waited around for about 45 minutes for the foragers to come home and off I went.

Beekeeping Supply Companies

Well, I am not a whiner. Take the bad with the good, is what I say. But, my current experience in the bee shop (translated, messy garage turned into workshop) may have had a profound effect on me.

Three weekends ago, I realized that I was short on Mediums. I use them as the top ‘hive body’ on my brood nest and for honey supers (I also use shallows for honey supers, which I was running short on, but figured I had enough for the honey.) Right now, I needed second stories to several swarms that I had caught earlier in the month.

I am mainly a Dadant customer, so I first checked them. The freight was nearly $200 for my order (and this was just to tide me over until Mother’s Day, when my wife would be in Chatham (Dadant’s Va branch) to be able to get a bigger load)! I couldn’t stomach that and even considered, multiple times, just driving down there. Finally, I ordered from Mann Lake, since they had free shipping. The merchandise was more expensive, but the total cost (Dadant included freight) was less than Dadant. I started building and painting supers.

Two weekends ago, I went out to hives that had between 1 and 3 honey supers on them, to check to see who needed more. I have already used up the meager supply of drawn wax supers, so I am in the ‘add a super of foundation’ phase, which has to take place 1 bloody super at a time. When you have several supers of drawn wax, you can literally drop them all on (I have never put on more than 2, but I know some folks that put on 3) before the flow and the bees (assuming you’ve chosen a strong hive) will happily fill all of the frames in all of the supers with honey.

On the other hand, if you dropped a bunch of supers with foundation on a hive, it would start working on the middle and probably give you a headache at harvesting time. So, I was looking to see who could use another super. I brought 6 with me, as I didn’t feel like trucking the trailer down to Charles City and 6 is about what I could store in the Trailblazer with the inspection gear, spare Nucs and other beekeeping junk that I drag all over the world.

As of the second outyard, I was out of supers… Heh. Those gals were really pouring it on (of course, I have the laggards that will probably become Winter Nucs this Fall, but most were really putting it away.) At the time, I figured no problem! I’ll grab a few more supers from my shed tomorrow and make the rounds again. Much to my dismay, when I returned home that afternoon, I found zilch on the super front. I didn’t have a single one left. I knew I was out of Mediums, but had no idea I was out of Shallows (I need to be better organized.) So, I open the box of Medium frames from Mann Lake to get to work and suddenly realize these things are not wedge bars!!! The wax I have won’t fit it and the wax from Mann Lake hasn’t arrived yet!

Panic mode.

Again, I think about driving to Chatham, Va. But, then I remember a posting on the Richmond Beekeepers mailing list from Tiny or Anthony Abate regarding a fellow in Mechanicsville that sold bee supplies! I called him first thing and bingo! He had what I needed. He is a dealer from Brushy Mountain. I ran up to get enough for 10 Mediums, which I was hoping would get me through Mother’s Day.

So, here is where we get to the guts of it. Mann Lake and what this guy sold were identical. A bit more expensive, but amazing woodwork. I had grown used to forcing super rabbets to fit together and the occasional warped frame. With these new ones, not a single problem. In fact, putting the stuff together was a piece of cake. Not one single equipment problem (2 of the super sides were damaged in shipping, but Mann Lake was resending them at no charge!) I have over 50 hives and only the Lord knows how many Nucs. Each of the hives have at least 3 boxes (2 hive bodies and 1 super) and most have 4 or 5. I have a ton of Dadant equipment. I like the folks at Dadant. But, this Mann Lake stuff has me thinking that I may change horses. With free shipping, it makes it much easier to swallow. I haven’t officially made the switch yet, but I’m leaning that way a lot!

On a final note, I ended up getting an open bottom on my frames. I have always used a closed bottom. No reason for it. It’s just how I do my thing! But, about 50% of the time, I have to trim the wax to make it fit without buckling. These open bottoms eliminated that task completely! All in all, I have decided to make this change for sure. Wedged Top Bars with open Bottom Bars! Easy as cake.

Nuc Build-up Progressing Well

In normal years, I would be checking on some of my early Nuc’s now, looking for eggs (or the queen) and seeing about scheduling some pick-up’s over the next couple of weeks. But, this year I am already into my 3rd round of Nucs with a bunch already out the door! I actually believe that I will get everyone on my primary list at least 1 Nuc before the first week in May (crossing fingers for at least a little rain – we are very dry in Richmond, Va these days…)

My Deep Nuc’s have been nearly 100% successful. I kept one of my February Nuc’s (and it was the weakest one), just to watch how it does. So far, so good – I am confident that it will finish filling out the Deep well before the end of April. Brood pattern looks great, but I have to wonder if it is possible that a poorly mated queen can still have a good brood pattern, but run ‘dry’ much earlier than normal. We’ll see.

As to the Medium Nuc’s, I have had a huge struggle here. I am very confident (which probably isn’t a good thing – confident beekeepers, in my experience, typically have major issues all of the time!) that I have the ‘early’ Deep Nuc plan down to a science. But, that plan simply doesn’t work with the ‘early’ Medium’s. I think my success rate on those is a little over 60%. Currently, I think the problem was that I needed to shake more nurse bees in those small boxes. Shaking two Medium frames of Nurse bees simply is not the same thing as shaking two Deep frames of Nurse bees into a Nuc. You just get fewer bees. I’m not sure why that didn’t occur to my dense brain at the time, but most of my failures definitely centered around bee populations. The other possibility is that you just don’t have as much capped brood on a Medium frame as you do a Deep. Maybe I need to put more frames of capped brood in (which would lead me to charge more for them next year!) I have never been a fan of the ‘all Medium’ set-up and this experience is only firming that belief (wrong or right) in my mind.

The other big learning experience was with the queen rearing. I will be starting another round this weekend and hope to benefit from my earlier experiences. The key with Queen Rearing is (in my opinion) the Starting and Finishing hive(s). You have to get that right and monkeying around with it is a sure fire path to problems.

In closing, I have to pat myself on the back about this year being the ‘Year of the Swarm’. I have collected more quality swarms this year, so far, than all of last year. With much less enthusiasm, I must admit that (year to date) I have also had more hives swarms this year than I had swarm all of last year… Heh. With great rewards comes great sacrifices! Interestingly enough, about half of my swarmers already have a super of honey and are well into the second super. I have surely lost out on honey production, but this year’s crop is looking to be so good that I am hoping I won’t miss it.

Should Have Been Here Last Week!

Pic of Honey Bee Swarm in Chesterfield, Va — Honey Bee Swarm in Chesterfield, Virginia

I received a swarm call referral (through David Stover) from a family down in Chesterfield (Andy and Pat). When I arrived, it was a nice-sized swarm that was positioned perfectly on a shrub off of their front porch. While talking with Pat and Andy, I commented that it was not a huge swarm, but a nice one none-the-less. Then came the drum roll, to which they responded ‘If you think that one is nice, you should have been here last week!‘ Heh. Hard words for a beekeeper to hear, but sort of funny.

Fortunately, they had taken a picture of the primary swarm, with the old queen. The real benefit to me was knowing that I had a virgin queen in this swarm, which has to be checked a little differently (it mainly means that I definitely want to give them a couple of weeks to get going and then I have to make absolutely certain that I have a mated queen that is showing signs of a solid mating.) Either way, it’s great news as it represents an influx of genes into my queen mating area. I actually used the hive to start a new outyard about a mile from my main queen-mating yard. I hope to add at least two more hives (with more new genes) to the yard over the next couple of months. This hive will be called the ‘Chesterfield Hive’ going forward!

The neighbor had actually located the main hive, well up in a nearby tree. The weather has been so great that they issued two swarms (and maybe more to come.) More signs that the year is getting off to a ‘charged up’ start!

Reality Check – Nicot Round 1 Over

This weekend could have had the potential for being a fairly big event for me. Based on my calculations, the Queen Cells in the Nicot system would need to be moved to Nucs or Queen Castles on Monday. That meant that I would need to setup the receiver Nucs/Castle Banks on Sunday. Although I wasn’t really supposed to look at the Rearing Frame until Monday, I had to have a peak to get an idea of how many cells had been capped! If 20 were capped, that would mean that Sunday would be a busy day. If none were capped, it would mean that I could do my regular bee work on Sunday. I also was a bit paranoid that I had left a rogue queen cell in the Finishing Hive, which would mean she might get out and kill all of the queens on my rearing frame.

My expectations were high, even though I kept telling myself that I should expect the worst since this was my first go of the system. When I had moved the hive from the Starter to Finisher, I could see that all (or very close to all) of the cells were being started. Lots of bees were clustered over each cell. Seemed like a slam dunk.

Unfortunately, as mentioned previously, I found several rogue queen cells in the setup. The synopsis goes like so: The key to any queen rearing system is a queenless ‘Starter Hive’. Studies have shown that queen cells started by a queenless hive have a much higher rate of acceptance then those started otherwise. There are several ways to create a queenless hive – I chose the ‘Cloake Board’ method. Although there is more to it, you basically install a queen excluder between two hive bodies (your upper and lower deep, for instance) and make sure you queen is down below (I did this 5 days before the queen eggs would be ready – this is where the issue started). When you are ready to move your new eggs (on the Rearing Frame) into the ‘Starter Hive’, you install a divider (part of the ‘Cloake Board’) over the queen excluder (1 day before you put the rearing frame in). Basically, you make your upper hive body suddenly think they are queenless. They are supposed to do a stand-up job of starting your queen cells now.

Unfortunately, I purchased a Cloake Board that was about an inch and a half deep, with the queen excluder section at the bottom. For whatever reason, my bees thought they were queenless when I did this. I think that extra 1.5 inches between the two supers did it.

So, when I put my Rearing Frame in, I already had several rogue queen cells started. When I came back to open up the Cloake Board, I found 3 frames with capped queen cells on them. Being somewhat greedy (this could have been my big error), I used all three frames to create new Nucs. The problem is, I also took the nurse bees and resources that were on those frames (from the bees that were working on my queen cells.) In retrospect, I see now that I was being too cocky. It appeared that I had a ton of queen cells started and I figured ‘anyone can do this’. Taking those bees from the Queen Finisher didn’t seem like a big deal to me.

In the end, I have 5 capped queen cells (out of what should be closer to 20.) Several of them were definitely started and simply abandoned. There are a couple of lessons that I am taking from this first go of it:

I will probably just use a regular queen excluder next time, and swap it with a bottom board when I need to. This will hopefully reduce the rogue queen cells in the Starter/Finisher hive body
If I do find queen cells, I will either cut them out or destroy them. I will not take the whole frame of nurse bees from my finisher, which I believe is the primary reason for my low success rate this first time

I expect to give it another go Easter Weekend, so we’ll see if I learned anything then!

Basically, the open ‘Cloake Board’ made my bees think that they were in a queenless situation, even though they were not.

Queen Bonanza & Queen Sounding

We had a nasty bit of beekeeping weather the last couple of days in Richmond, Va, temps dropping to near freezing. It’s no sweat for the established hives, but it can be very tough on the little guys (aka Nucs) coming along. I had only created one Nuc over the weekend, primarily due to the VSBA Spring Conference. I stocked her with nurse bees, so I do not have much doubts. I am a firm believer (I should translate this – I do not have a ton of experience doing this, but it is my current beliefs based on my knowledge of bees and successes (and failures) last year) that March Nucs in Richmond, Va (especially early ones) actually need a bit more nurse bees and frames of brood then late March or April Nucs.

In March, it can get really cold (we’ve really only had a couple of days like that this year), so the bees need to be able to create some kind of cluster. Drop one frame of eggs and some resources into a Nuc and you reduce your chances of a good queen, in my opinion. Later, in April, I start most of my Nucs with only 3 frames from a hive and they do great. But, I’ve had some failures with 3 frames of Nucs in March (specifically in 2011). The other benefit of taking a bunch of bees from a strong, full grown hive, in March is that it acts like swarm prevention (in my opinion). It frees up the space in the hive without setting it back very much. Usually, they can recover in a couple of weeks (brood-wise). Based on my inspections today, it looks like it paid off.

Of my 3 February Nucs, 2 raised their own queen and I gave a queen cell from Nuc 2 to Nuc 1. I think the problem with Nuc 1 was that I didn’t confirm eggs – I only confirmed 1 Day old larva. That was a good lesson, as I didn’t know what one day old larva really looked like (now that I have used the Nicot system, I am certain what they look like.) I think that Nuc ended up with 2 and 3 day old larva and simply never tried to start a queen. But, they took care of that queen cell and I found her walking on the frames today. In two of the Nucs, I can already see a nice pattern (eggs and larva – nothing capped). I am not ‘sold’ on them yet, but all signs point to green at the moment. I’ll check again in a week and hope to find 3 solid Nucs, ready to go.

I finally went back to the ‘cut out’ that I did from the old hive a few weeks back. I had decided to put in SHB traps (hangers that you put oil in). I do not have a ton of faith in them, but I figured every bit could help. The hive appeared full of the things. To my surprise, I found very few SHB on the inspection. I do not see them in my other hives, but only time will tell. I did find where a new queen had hatched. I am not so sure that I killed the old queen, as they had capped cells when I moved them (which I squashed under my foot by accident, like an idiot!) I think they had swarmed the day before I picked them up. A few frames later, I found the little queen. She was amped up, like a typical young queen, and bouncing around the frame. The really cool thing about this was what happened next. As I moved to put the frame back in, she let out the queen bugle! She was issuing a challenge! Of the dozens and dozens of new queens that I have seen, I had never heard this call before. It was really cool. But, it also got me to wondering ‘who is she challenging?’ Three and Found frames later and I found out – 2 more capped queen cells! I both frames and put into one of my queen breeders. They will need another frame of brood/nurse bees, but I didn’t have time to go get one. I’ll probably do it tomorrow or Friday.

So, I have around 25 Nucs started and I haven’t even gotten going good yet! Good times. I am really wondering what I am going to find in my queen rearing system this weekend. I am going to have to construct some more queen mating boxes asap!

Cloake Board and Nicot – Part 2

Today was the day to move the ‘started’ cells to the ‘finishing hive’. Since I am using a Cloake Board, the ‘Finishing Hive’ is the same hive as the ‘Starter’. I just remove the divider between the upper and lower deeps, leaving the queen cells in the upper chamber (protected from the queen by the queen excluder.)

Well, the first thing that I found was queen cells on my frames in the upper chamber. These were capped, which meant that they started them when I installed the Cloake Board. Since I found no queen cells in the lower chamber, I firmly believe these cells were emergency cells – the bees thought they had lost their queen. I am not sure if this is because of the distance created by the Cloake Board (it was an inch or so) or if the queen excluder was the problem. The bottom line is that they started these well before I put the divider in place (they were already capped.)

In the end, I created 1 Nuc and banked three other frames with cells on them in a Nuc that I setup back home. I plan to deal with them tomorrow – tonight we may have a frost, so I decided not to create Nucs with them today (I didn’t get home til 6:30 or so and it was already in the 50’s.)

But, the real excitment from this venture was that every single queen cell was started on my rearing frame! I really don’t know how many that is, but it is probably around 20. Assuming this continues to play out successfully, I believe I could have tripled that number, since I took a very small number of started larva from the Nicot system! At any rate, I should probably be knocking on wood…the fat lady hasn’t sung yet!

It is also important to note that I’ll have to go back into that box again on Wednesday, just to double-check for queen cells once again. If I missed just ONE, it will mean that little wench will come out and kill all of my started queens! Argh!

I will probably build my own Cloake Board going forward, to alleviate the problem with the upper bees thinking that they are queenless before I am ready for them to.

Nicot & (My Bad) Timing

I finally decided to give the Nicot system a go. I need to get a picture up, but it is basically a queen rearing system. You confine the queen in a small box where she lays eggs. You can then take the eggs and easily put them on bars that the bees will draw queen cells from (that’s a real high level overview, which I may delve into deeper if I actually have some success!)

One of the things about any queen rearing system is timing. There are certain tasks that must be done at a certain time – you can’t wait one day or do it one day earlier. Once you commit, you have to perform each task exactly when it should be completed.

For me, this meant that I had to move my 1 day old larva into the rearing frame (a frame with crossbars that lets you attach the eggs to it, so they can draw out the cells) and then into the Starter Hive (I hope to go into this more later). The bottom line is that I had to open 1 hive, get some stuff out of it and then go to another hive and put the stuff into that hive.

So, what’s the big deal? Well, for one, we had the VSBA Spring Meeting this weekend. So, I had talks and stuff going on all day. Fortunately, there was a 2 hour break for lunch.

Next, the two hives were 25 miles apart (that’s lesson two for me). That meant I would be pushing it to get all of this done.

Finally (and most beautifully), it was raining…

All in all, I can say that it was a bit of a cluster. I do believe that everything went as well as it could and am hopeful for a good batch of queen cells from this experiment. More later.

Bee Removal – Depressing Mistake

Last November, a fellow contacted me from over in Stratford Hills (near the James River, off of Huguenot Road in Richmond, Va) to say that he had a couple of hives in his backyard that had not been tend in several years. The hives were rotting and he wanted to know if I could give them a good home. I told him that I’d come get them in March, when it would be easier for me to deal with them (at the time, I thought I might have to cut them up a bit, to move them, if they had wax all through several hive bodies.)

As it so happens, they were living in only one Hive Body (a deep). I moved them last night and opened them up to get them into a normal hive (and fix the frames.) It was sort of like a cut-out, but much easier. I was able to use rubber bands to get the comb into one of my hive bodies without much bee problems. They were probably the gentlest bees that I have ever ‘cut out’.

During the cut-out, I came across swarm cells on the second frame. Of the three, one of them was uncapped (the queen was out.) I assume that the bees had already swarmed, but I knew that I wanted to cut out the other two cells for Nucs. Two frames later and I had a pile of 4, capped swarm cells on the ground beside me. I had left a couple in the hive, just in case.

Fast forward to the last bit of wax and I decided to reposition the original hive so that I could get that last wax. SQUASH! I stepped right on the queen cells! It’s hard not to cry. The only positive thing is that I had left some in the hive and it was not a critical situation. The bees suffered no real loss. But, I sure did. Just having 4 queens off of this clearly strong genetic pool (plus, insanely gentle line) would have been a huge boon.

Oh well. Lesson learned. The next time that I cut queen cells out, they will go into a container that I cannot miss.

On a negative note, there were a bunch of small hive beetles in this hive. I do hope this does not become another lesson learned if these SHB start attacking my Nucs. I will put some traps that I have (and never really use) all through the hive tomorrow. I think the hive is dealing with them. but after cutting up all of that comb, some of which had honey, I will have to go into this hive every few days over the next many weeks, if not months.

20 Day Queen Emergence?

No matter how prepared that I think I am for Spring in the Apiary, I always seem to bee beehind! To date, I have created 22 Nucs, which is quite a number given it is only March 17! I have also supered a large number of my hives around Richmond, Va and actually had a queen hatch in my hand (I wonder if I’ll EVER see that again…)

The hives are healthy, period. Many folks have been warning that the bees will have eaten up all of their stores. I had two problem hives (one at Westover and one at Sherwood Forest), but both went into the Winter with low stores. So, warm or cold Winter, these gals were going to have a problem (both made it with a little help). But, not a single one of my other hives came close to eating all of their stores. Instead, I would say that I have to PULL frames of honey on most hives just to give the queen space to lay! The bottom line is that I will probably ignore the warnings that ‘a warm Winter means they eat more stores’ going forward. It probably is a worry to the folks that take so much honey that they have to feed in the Fall/Winter, but it appears to me that my strategy already deals with this possible obstacle (although I doubt we’ll see another warm Winter like this for some time).

On that note, I created a Nuc off of a strong hive last Sunday (3/11/2012). This time of year, I create the Nucs in the same yard as the hive. My hives are building up so quickly, they they seem to be able to give 2 to 3 frames of brood without missing a beat. Add a shake of Nurse bees, and the Nucs come out strong. Well, the one from last Sunday wasn’t acting right. It usually takes 2 to 3 days to begin seeing a forager or two and I wasn’t seeing sqat. So, I took a peak. Somehow, I must have mostly shaken out foragers into the Nuc, as there were VERY few bees. I decided to go back into the original hive and shake again. All three frames of foundation, from last Sunday, were 75% drawn and 30%+ full of nectar as of Thursday! These were Medium frames, but that’s a huge build up in my opinion. I had no idea this amount of nectar was coming in. What was the takeaway? I needed to get supers on all hives, which I have pretty much done as of today.

The final (and wildest, to me) bit of news came from my two early Nucs. I created both of them on Feb 26. In my mind, with the cool nights, these queens should have hatched on or around the 13th. Maybe the 14th if the cluster couldn’t keep the hive warm enough. So, I went in to check both Nucs for the first time today. The primary goal was to find open queen cells. If I spotted the queen, all the better.

Nuc 1 revealed nothing. This Nuc was a risk, as I had not found eggs but had seen 1 day old larva. I had been wondering if a Nuc could really get itself together in time to make a queen with nothing but larvae that would be too old in a day or less. The queen may have emerged and they may have torn the queen cell down, but I sort of doubted it. I would give it a few more days to be sure.

Nuc 2 revealed what I expected. Three queen cups and one of them open. After a brief span, I could see the queen prancing around the frame. Interestingly enough, I noticed two unopened queen cells – neither of them damaged (like you would see if the first hatching queen had stung her on the side). This was odd, as the Bee Math didn’t add up. This was 20 or so days after I created the Nuc! I figured that the queens were probably dead or maybe I just missed where they had been stung by the queen that hatched.

A few hours later, I got to thinking about the Nuc without any evidence of a queen and decided to take a risk. Why not cut out those two other swarm cells and put them in the Nuc? Couldn’t hurt, right? Both parent queens are good and the Nuc is ‘for sale’, so a queen offspring from either parent would be fine. So, I went back into the Nuc and cut out the two swarm cells (fortunately, both were about an inch apart) and began carrying them to the other Nuc (across my yard, maybe about 150 yards). As I looked at the small patch of wax, 3 nurse bees and two queen cells, I noticed a head poking through a small crack in one! Good lord, this queen cell not only had a living queen, but she was coming out right now! The next part is amazing. In less then 5 seconds, she came all the way out!

So, this poor queen comes out thinking she has a new hive to rule, which turns out to be a patch of wax about 3 inches across with 3 Nurse bees and another queen cell! I doubt there are many queens who are greeted with such a small domain in the first few seconds as an adult!

At any rate, I was set on a course and I just prayed that she would keep hauling around the small wax while I made my way to the Nuc, which she did. When I set her in the hive, it was very hard to tell if they attacked her or accepted her. Several bees seemed to probe her and then she went down between the frames. I left the other cell on top of the frames, just to be safe. In retrospect, I should have taken the other cell and created a quick Nuc with her. But, so much was happening so quickly that I really didn’t have time to think (or what little thinking I did was not very efficient!)

Regardless of the outcome, that was definitely exciting.