2013-05-12: Fixing an Oops

I realized that when I had reversed some of the hives the last time, I had not properly separated the slat bottom board ( a device that gives the bees some space under their frames above the bottom board, supposedly allows them to keep the bottoms of the frames warmer during cool months and feel less crowded) from the bottom of the bottom box.  So it had tagged along for the reversing and ended up in between the two boxes in Sage and Blue.  This visit to the bee yard I fixed that.  The bees had built a little burr come in the slat bottom boards, especially Sage.  Hopefully this had not caused them too much trouble with this huge gap in the middle of their brood space.

Here is how they looked after I was done, I find that having the gap between each pair is useful when I need to place a box to one side while working on the hives:

 

I also visited the annex and I was busy shifting the second hive there around to face South and to lay down pieces of cement board under the fence line.  This later material is something that I had gotten off of Craigslist for free several years ago imagining that it would be useful one day.  And it was!  By placing them under the fence line I would help keep grass from growing up and touching the line and shorting it out. 

2013-05-04: Reversing

The plan was to check on how the hives were doing and to reverse the boxes to counteract the fact that bees had likely worked their way to the top of the hives during the winter and might feel crowded up there even though they have plenty of room below.

Purple: So me of the foragers bringing in yellow pollen.  Most of the sugar mush is gone but the pollen patty was hardly touched.  I had placed a medium frame in it at one point in the past and I removed it and put in a frame with bare foundation instead.  There was a brood frame in the bottom box, moved it to the top.  It had brood in it so I will need removal in a 1-2 weeks.  Frames had pollen and nectar (thus they are bringing in nectar).  The hive had a solid bottom board, I will eventually want to replace that with a screened bottom board.

 

Sage:  The top b ox was heavy, outer frame  was solid honey.  Appears to be a lot of done comb built between the boxes which I fed to the chickens.  Had a screened bottom board.  I placed a shallow super on it in which I had modified by adding screened ventilation holes in the sides and open holes (with folded screen landing pads in front of them) for top entrances.  I have read of some theories that increased ventilation will free up more workers from fanning to keep the hive cool and to dry the honey, thus increasing production.  Perhaps, perhaps not, but I do like the idea of upper entrances so the forgers are getting right to the supers instead of crawling up from the bottom entrance all the way to the top supers.  I placed a queen excluder underneath it so as to keep the queen from laying in the supers.  I places it offset to the back by an inch to allow somewhat easier passage by the workers, this left a gap in the front which proved to be big enough for bees to use as an entrance.  I hadn’t meant to do that but it was done and they had already swarmed up into that gap by the time I noticed.

   

DarkGreen:  Empty frames (around 4) in the bottom.  Switched boxes.  It had a screen bottom board (specifically one with a space to allow monitoring trays to be slid in from the back.  I removed the insulation box and the frame of honey that was in it.

Blue: Bottom box was empty of bees, switched boxes.  Replace green plastic drone frame with a regular frame.  Saw a mite.  Some of the comb had dark stains suggestive of nosema infection during the winter.  That might explain why this hive came out weaker than the others.

I did not have time to do Red and Yellow.

Annex yard:  I transferred the nucs to proper hives (Marigold and one cobbled out of spare boxes).  I of course did not do my math right and I had to run home to get enough boxes and frames to finish the set up.  As it was, I was short a frame for each hive in the top box and the cobbled hive is missing a proper inner cover.  I also need to have a better stand for them.

2013-04-21: Moving the Nucs

I had agreed to move some hives to a nearby organic farm in order to help them pollinate their crops and for me to test out the site.  My hope is that the bees will flourish there, produce substantially more honey than at the beeyard at my parents (to warrant the extra effort of a second site), and that they will not be attacked by a bear.

To address that last concern, my father and I went down to the site on a Saturday in April and settled on which site to use, cleared the site, and then set up an electric fence that will hopefully be a bear deterrent. 

When we got home I put straps on the double nuc so it will be ready to move the next day.  I had decided to move the double nuc as I wanted to move to hives down and it was two hives for the effort of moving one hive.  IT would have bene more scientific to bring down one nuc and one full strength colony to compare with the nuc and the other colonies left behind, but I had not been able to transfer the nucs from the double nuc boxes into regular hive boxes since the cold had persisted.

The next morning was a frost, which suited me fine as it meant that the bees were not flying.  I plugged up the entrance again thankful for the cold as it meant that the bees would be less likely to overheat during travel with reduced ventilation.  We lifted the hive up on to the truck, placed it on a bag of wool for padding, secured it, and off we went.

It was straightforward enough to get unload the hive and put it into place on top of some cinder blocks. 

 

My beeyard looks noticeably emptier without them and Orange hive.

2013-03-09: More Mush and a Post-mortem

I went up to the beeyard to see how the bees were doing, give them more sugar mush, and try to learn something from Orange, the dead hive.

It was 48F in the shade, sunny, and bees were flying enthusiastically.  Green was especially busy, I suspect that it has a very large population and I will have to keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t swarm.  And here is a video!

Here is a piece of wood where you can see the results of the cleansing flight.  And you can also see where a bee cleansed herself at me.

 

When I opened up the top box on each hive, the bees were all over the sugar mush from last week

 

After adding more mush to all the hives I moved the Orange hive out of the bee yard and opened it up to try to figure out what went wrong.  I discovered what looks like the remains of a small cluster in the back right corner of the hive.  They apparently starved there, even though on the left hand side there was several frames of honey.  Perhaps without the insulation at the top of the hive the bees couldn’t travel to the other side to make use of that honey.

I took three frames of honey from the hive and placed two into the Red hive’s top insulation/feeding box and one into the Dark Green hive top box.  I picked these two hives because they had deep boxes on top which allowed me to place the frames in easily.

2013-03-03: Mush! Mush!

I went up the my parents with the intent to buy some insurance for the bees in the form of giving them some sugar mush as I did last year.  “Sugar Mush” is a quick and dirty substitute for fondant.  Fondant, aka fudge, is used by some beekeepers as source of food for the bees that they can access late in the Winter/early Spring since they can lick the solid fondant but wont feed off of syrup when it is that cold.  I tried making fondant, but it was a lot of work and kind of risky since you have a pot full of sugar at the soft ball stage… something that Alton Brown described once as “Culinary Napalm”.  So last year I through some simple syrup, a little honey, some no cornstarch confectionary sugar and regular table sugar in a mixer (with a little bit of Honey-B-Healthy for taste) and mushed it all up.  They mush actually stayed mushier and the bees liked it fine.

I repeated that recipe this year, though I had to make much more (I think about 15 lbs in the end) and went out the bee yard to give it to the bees.  Last Fall I had placed an empty hive body on top of the inner cover of each hive, filled it with wool, and placed the outer cover on top before wrapping them all with tar paper.  The plan was to take the outer cover off, remove the wool, and slap on the sugar mush over the hole in the inner cover so that the bees can nibble on it without having to leave their hives.

 

The plan fell apart as I took the top off of Orange to find an empty box.  I had apparently not added wool to all of the boxes.  Oops.  Furthermore, there was no sign of bees despite several raps and kicks.  I think they died.

Purple did have a box full of wool, and its bees were right under the inner cover waiting to greet me as I took off the wool and then slapped on the sugar mush over it so that they wouldn’t greet me to warmly!  Green, Blue, Dark Green and the nucs were much the same.  I had not put wool in Red since I had apparently left a feeder in place and the bees were much fewer in number at the inner cover hole.  Yellow also lacked wool and the bees again were fewer in number.  I am not sure if they truely had smaller populations or if they were just farther away from the inner cover since it was colder at the top without the wool insulation.

 

Well, now I have evidence that the wool is useful as opposed to just theory.  And if I don’t loose any more hives I will still be doing very well.

2013-01-26: First Visit in the New Year

Earlier in January there was a thaw that ate all the snow that had filled the bee yard.  January thaws can be very useful to the bees since a period of warm weather allows them to fly outside of the hive and make cleansing flights where they void all of the waste that they have retained rather than voiding inside their hives.  The waste should be yellow.  Dark brown is indicative of the disease, Nosema, which is essentially bee diarrhea.

My mother had checked on the hives at that time and reported that bees were coming out of all of the hives and making cleansing flights and painting the remaining snow yellow.

By th e time of this visit to the beeyard, Winter had returned an a light layer of snow as on the ground.  The hives seemed to be in good shape.  I did clean up the dead bees that had collected at the lower entrances.  Purple and DarkGreen had the most to clean up.  This will be something to keep an eye on, but not necessarily a sign of impending doom.

2012-12-30: More Snow

More snow had fallen before I visited the hives again to wish them a happy New Year.

The usefulness of upper entrances in Winter is very evident in this photo.