Nicot | Beekeeping in Richmond, Virginia

Nicot Day 15

Wow – the weather changed and then some! I’ve started receiving swarm calls and at least 2 of my hives have swarmed. I actually caught the marked queen from one of my hives and Nuc’d her, but she actually swarmed (with most of the bees in the Nuc) anyway! That’s simply amazing. I have never had that happen before. Taking a wild guess, I suppose they were literally getting ready to swarm while I was inspecting the hive. When I moved the bees to the Nuc (to make the parent hive think she had swarmed), they simply went ahead and swarmed! Ha. Oh well.

Besides creating a ton of Nucs (some with eggs, some with swarm cells), I have been fine tuning my queen rearing program. Over the weekend (actually on Friday), I hit Day 15 of the Nicot System. This is the day when you have capped queen cells that are about 2 days from hatching. On Day 14, you create a bunch of queenless Nucs to receive these cells. It is said that a bunch of bees without a queen will pretty much always accept a queen cell that was started by a queenless hive and finished by a queen-right hive. We shall see.

I miscounted my cells by 4 (it’s not that easy to count them, as the bees swarm the things when you remove the cell bar), so I had to create 4 Nuc’s ‘on the fly’ and give them cells. It will be interesting to see if the bees accept them (or kill them and go about raising their own queens.) I am feeling very comfortable with the Nicot system, using my double-deep setup (which I only have a few of, just for queen rearing.) If you stick to the schedule, the success rate is pretty good (I’d say about 50% – maybe that’s not good, but it’s more queens than I can handle.) I plan to make another run of it next weekend, this time providing some to the members of the East Richmond Beekeeping Association.

The toughest part, without a shadow of a doubt, is creating those queenless Nuc’s. It requires a ton of resources (I have 2 queen castles, that only require 2 or 3 frames, but everything else is a full, 5 frame Nuc.) Since I am building Nuc’s at the same time, I really had to push to get my Nuc’s created. When I create a Nuc, I pretty much just carve a piece off of a larger, parent hive. When I’m done, they typically do not miss a beat – sometimes spawning one, two and sometimes three more Nuc’s before it’s over. Most of the time, they (the parent hive) still have a great honey crop. But, this past weekend I had to cut deeply into several hives. I plan to pay special attention to these hives just to make sure they get back to critical mass and store enough honey for the Winter.

But, this weekend, I plan to build a few more of these ‘queen castles’ – I think I will shoot for 2 frames per section and give that a shot. I really just need this second batch to mate, so I don’t think this will be a problem. But, I can’t fathom how often I’ve said that and been wrong…

New queens, Nicot mania, swarm cells and struggling hives

That pretty much sums up the last couple of days. This was my three day weekend and had long been planned as the weekend that I would be dropping queen-cells (from the queen rearing program) into various Nuc’s. Instead, I spent most of the weekend around the house (sometimes doing beekeeping chores, but mostly other stuff!), waiting for the temperatures to breach 50. Friday had some positives, Saturday had a lot of interesting events and Sunday was purely a prep day.

My first stop on Saturday was to check out a tree with bees in it. Friends had mentioned it last Fall and wanted me to ‘save’ them, so I wanted to see if they were still alive (and they were, so I hope to get that genetic pool in April – should be a quick extraction, but you know how that goes…) On a whim, I slipped by one of my nearby apiaries, remembering how they had swarmed on me last year and I still hadn’t gone into a single hive in that yard. When I arrived, it was like a melee of honey bees – there were so many coming and going from that line of hives that they were banging into my head as I made my initial, outside inspection. I tackled the most active one first (usually, I do the opposite) and immediately found 5 uncapped swarm cells on Medium frames. Checking the Deep below, I found the queen (yellow) and 8 frames of capped brood (about 75% full.) This hive was tearing it up!!

I went ahead and created two Nucs off of the hive, liberally shaking (two shakes each) bees into both Nucs (one a Medium, one a Deep). I put two (or maybe three) of the queen cells in the Medium Nuc and let the Deep Nuc raise their own. I replaced most of the frames with drawn frames, but did put some foundation in there to give them more room. I squashed the remaining cells. Note: I absolutely do not believe in this method of preventing a swarm. I honestly do not have time to check for cells every X days and I’m not sure it helps at all. My plan is to come back this weekend, after Easter Sunday, and look for more cells. If I find even one, I’ll pull several frames with the queen and let the hive go ahead and raise a new queen. I’ll use that queen as a backup queen for the Summer.

The rest of the hives in the apiary were more along the lines that I expect these days (a week to three weeks out from being big enough to spawn a Nuc). I did find one hive that could have used the old checkerboard method, but I didn’t have the equipment to do it (I will have it next weekend!)

The rest of the checks that day (there weren’t a lot, as I only had a few hours of decent weather) included one more hive that spawned a Nuc, several average hives and one hive that was well below average. The last one really surprised me a bit (I’ve become used to finding the average hive, the rare strong hive or the (fortunately) rarer dead out. I have not really found a ‘weak’ hive. This one was chock full of honey and only on 2 frames. She has a lot of brood on those two frames, but it’s the first hive that I have come across with less than 5 frames of capped brood (except the dead outs…) I’ll probably take action on this queen, but will let them roll into April before making any drastic calls.

Another bit of interest was the number of new queens that I discovered. I apparently had a lot of swarms last Fall and didn’t know it. Most were White or Blue queens, so it should be expected. I was happy to find the new ladies and mark them all (yellow).

Finally, I got the Nicot system off the ground and am hoping for a bunch of queens in a few weeks. Timing being like it is, I had to release the queen in the middle of a snow storm! The main bonus here was that I could see a ton of eggs in the system, which was a huge positive. I wasn’t sure she would get any laying done, given the events of the setup and capture. But, she did her thing! This year, I have two hives ready to take the cells, giving me the opportunity to raise over 40 queens. But, I’ll be overjoyed with just 20!

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.

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.