Swarm Update

Glenn and I (with help from Grammy, Oliver and Owen) opened up the new hive today and were pleased to find the swarm bees busy at work. I have been reading "Beekeeping for Dummies" and found the inspection much more interesting with the information I picked up from the book.

We observed drones in the new hive. The drones are male bees and are pretty much worthless except for their mating abilities. They are easy to spot (when you know what you are looking for) because of their large eyes and large bodies. Did you know that the male bee dies after mating with the queen? His member gets stuck inside the queen during the act and then he falls to the ground to die. I circled a drone from our new hive (hive two).

Our new queen has been busy laying eggs. You can see a nurse bee tending to the eggs in the picture below. Can you believe the bees have done all of this in five days? Bees are excellent creatures.

Our old hive (hive one) seems to have less bees than the new hive, but appears to be healthy and increasing in numbers. Here is a picture of my nephew Owen checking out hive one for the first time.

Bee Inspection (3/28/09)

We opened up the hive this weekend to find all of the things we we hoping to find: honey storage, new brood and our queen. There should be quite an explosion in our bee population in the next couple of weeks. We are also patiently waiting for our neighbor's bees to swarm so we can start a second hive. Steve and Floyd (the neighbors) have been keeping bees for years, but do not harvest honey. They enjoy having bees in their large vegetable garden. You can see our queen easily in the photo below.

The bees love the wildflowers that have recently bloomed.

Here are a couple of our ladies getting a drink.

Bee Update

I am officially a beekeeper now and not just the photographer. Glenn and I switched roles today as I felt ready to take on the challenge of opening the hive. I tried to keep my nerves under control as I put on my bee hat and gloves. As I puffed smoke into the top of the hive, the sound of a thousand bees buzzing filled the air. Bees are gentle. I had to remind myself of that fact every couple of seconds. And they were. We inspected the top portion of the hive and could not find our old queen. There was a little bit of honey storage but no brood. We decided to remove the queen excluder (separating the top hive from the bottom hive). The bottom portion of the hive was filled with brood and a few open queen cells. Glenn is assuming we have a new queen and she is establishing herself. After I realized the bees were not going to attack me, I started to enjoy watching them work. We even saw a bee doing a “bee dance” which we have yet to see (or recognize) on the outside of the hive.


We also found our bees on our pluot tree today! Its flowers smell like sweet tarts so I am not surprised our bees were able to find it. Glenn is thrilled because our fruit trees have to be cross pollinated.

Bee Inspection

Last week I called the beekeeper from whom I purchased the hive. He told me that the bees were about to swarm. With the cold nights and the large vacant space in the brood box, the queen was unhappy with her living space. So I went back into the hive the next day with the intentions of removing the new queen cells so the old queen would not leave. To my surprise one of the queens had emerged and was moving around somewhere.




With my inexperience I went looking for the new queen (looks like a larger worker bee but is smaller than a mated queen) but was unsuccessful. I was able to find the old queen hanging out by the side of the hive waiting for the weather to be right so she could swarm. Not knowing what to do, I took the old queen and her followers and put her in another brood box. I added one of the full brood frames from the original hive hoping the new queen was not on that frame. I then put another feeder tray on the top of the new box and sealed it up with grass shoved into the reducer holes.



Two weeks later I opened both hives to see how things were going. In the new hive all looks calm and productive. There are very few, because I was unable to put that many worker bees with the old queen, and I figured she would be able to produce more brood to increase their numbers.






The second hive was a different story. When pulling the frames the first thing I noticed was the four new queen cells that had been produced in the past two weeks (see image below cells are circled in red). They were not on the bottom of the frame as before, because this time there was no laying queen. The cells were in the middle of the two frames on both left and right sides.



Did the new queen die? Were these cells created to make sure that they have a queen if the new queen dies while mating? Was killing the queen brood the right thing to do in this case? I will have to get back to you on these questions. My plan is to observe the hive in the next couple of days and if I see stress from the old hive I will rejoin the two hives. It is looking very much like spring here so I am confident that they will be able to overcome these issues with the increase in temp and food sources.

Second Full Inspection

We opened up the bee hive yesterday to look to see how our airport bees have progressed. I first noticed that the top feeder was close to being empty. The remaining sugar water had turned to a thick sugar mixture with little water remaining. The greasy patty was 90% consumed so I will need to put another patty on top of the brood frames.



When removing the frames there had not been a visible increase in spaced used by the colony, still only about four frames front and back. I removed the first two outer frames from the left side, both were empty. The next frame in was started with honey storage on the top section of the frame. I pulled out the next three frames to find them packed with bees and a full structure of comb. The brood size was less than expected.

If you look closely on the picture below you can see white larve within the open cells in the center of the comb.



This is were my inexperience makes explanations murky. We were unable to find the queen within the main frames. What we did find was three queen brood cells, which have me concerned. Could this be a Supersedure!? For people who don't know what that is: "Supersedure- a natural or emergency replacement of an established queen by a daughter in the same hive." Should I be worried-it is mid February and my hive may not have a queen? Are there drone bees present all year round or only in the summer months? Below is a blown up picture of a queen cell.





If anyone has seen these patterns before and can make some sense of it for me, I would appreciate it.
~ Glenn

Second Inspection

I made a brief inspection of the hive today to see how much of the grease patty was consumed by the bees. They had eaten 1/3 of the patty in one week. We will see if it will take three weeks to completely consume it.

The hive is expanding to more than four frames. Last week the bees were only on three frames. I also noticed that there are capped comb. We did not disturb the central frames where the queen is located due to the chill in the air. We did pull out one of the outer frames.

This is the frame that has new construction on it. You can see the capped honey on the top (white). The middle is completed comb (but empty). At the bottom is comb under construction.

Jessica took this picture of the inner frame when I took out the other frame. It is wall to wall bees with a lot of capped storage for brood and honey.

This is Oliver being very cute! He will be the bees best friend.

~Glenn

First inspection of our beginner hive!

1/09/09 Jess and I met a very nice man named Steve from King Honey in Atascadero. We were purchasing some beeswax for our lip balm. We started talking about bees and if he had any in his yard. To our surprise he did, they were in cardboard boxes. He is a swarm collector for SLO County. Steve was talking about how he needed to find homes for them soon or they would parish in the cold. With that said we purchase one and started our beekeeping adventure a few months early.

1/10/09 At 5:30pm we drove the truck to King Honey and picked up our new bees. I put on my protective gear and watched the bees go into their new home. Oliver and Jess walk around looking at the full moon and snapping pictures of the transfer. We found out our bees were a swarm rescued from the airport.

1/16/09 We opened our new hive today, six days after they were introduced to their new home. Everything looks great, three frames are completely developed with honey combs. No capped brood yet but there are open ones. Queen looks health and very large compared to the rest of the hive. Did not see any visible mites but did not look to closely this time being it was my first ever inspection (very thrilling). Started mite treatment with a wintergreen mineral patty. ~Glenn