Hive Check: Week 9

Bees are pretty.

Prepping the smoker.

Getting a couple of puffs into the entrance of Hive #2.

I'm storing Hive #2's second deep on top of the feeder, so it'll be ready when its time to put it on and so I don't have to carry it up and down the roof access ladder (again.)

Joined by a student film crew from the intensive summer program at Parsons, I headed up to my Fort Greene apiary to check whether the influx of pollen from my Week 8 inspection improved the survival rate of the brood in Hive #2.

Cruddy lookin' brood in Hive #2.  Big surprise.  Please excuse the hat.  I had a sunburn.
I am very white.

Oh wait, what's this!?

Solid, baby.

Whistling with appreciation.

This solid as heck brood pattern suggests that the pollen did the trick. These pupae were newly capped, and since worker brood spends 6 days as uncapped larvae a week ago when I added the pollen to the hive, these cells contained old eggs (2-3 days old) and very young larvae (4-6 days old)- just the right age to benefit from the resultant upswing in royal jelly production. After I was done inspecting the hive and making lots of noise to indicate how impressed I was with the level of improvement, I fed them more pollen and will continue to do so until they have a good stockpile stored away for the winter.

Checking for more good lookin' brood.

And I found it.  I imagine that the queen has been laying extra to make up for  all the brood that hasn't been making it.

The answer to all of life's little problems.  POLLEN.

The bees are taking the pollen and storing it under honey to preserve it.

I'm hoping that the increase in viable brood and the resulting boost in population will encourage this hive to ramp up their comb building activity and catch up with Hive #1. It is already July and they are still working on their first deep. As a rule of thumb, they'll need AT LEAST two full deeps of drawn comb and stores to make it through the winter. If they don't get caught up, I'll probably have to squash the queen and combine them with the much stronger Hive #1 in the fall.

The bees continue to build comb in the airspace of the feeder.

Quite a bit of it.

In an attempt to prevent them from reattaching it to the top bars of the frames, I  pressed the torn comb down.

Maybe they'll get the idea.
Probably not.

Hive #1 is well into the task of drawing the second deep, with workers actively drawing comb on about 5 of the frames. Some of the comb in the center is a little bit funky and oversized. It looks like they're trying to build drone cells, so in a week or two I might cut out some empty comb in the bottom, allowing them build a nice little discrete patch of drone brood.

More smoke = better.

Popping the top

OH LOOK, MORE BRACE COMB! YAY!

Workin' up a storm in the top hive body.

There is a bit of funky comb, but it hasn't stopped the queen from laying.

One of the problems with using foundation is that it strongly discourages the bees from building any drone comb, which is decidedly unnatural. The overall population of a feral colony may be up to 10% drones. In a traditional colony built on foundation, the drone population may be as low as 1% or 2% of the total due to the enforced lack of drone comb. Some colonies will fill any available empty spaces (like under the feeder, or between poorly spaced frames) with drone comb to make up the difference, gumming up the hive in the process.

Looking for drone comb/brood.

This frame is being drawn out beautifully.

Getting our bokeh on.

Esmeralda continues to impress with large swathes of solid brood.

Checking out their stores of pollen.

Traditional literature will suggest that drones are a resource drain on the hive; they don't do any work other than mating, so they do nothing but use up energy that the hive might otherwise put towards making honey or raising more workers. However, more recent studies have shown that colonies allowed to raise as many drones as they want are just as productive as those colonies in which the drone population is artificially limited.

*wolf whistle*

I love my frame perch.  Never again will I accidentally kick a frame with my clumsy-ass foot.

Magritte in profile.

A new frame!  Where's that queen?

Heeeeeeere queeny, queeny, queeny!

Why?

Jim Fischer of the NYC Beekeeping Group has my favourite explaination:

Boys are good for morale!

Getting the band back together.

*slurp*

Back to work.

Photo Credit: Thanks to Adrian Bautista, Martha Glenn, and Brooke Tascona for taking/sharing pictures of this weeks inspection!

P.S. If any of my readers want to volunteer their skills as a photographer and come take pictures of my inspections, get in touch.

I like pretty pictures!

Hive Check: Week 7

After my weekly public hive inspection at the Added Value Community Farm in Red Hook, I headed up to my rooftop apiary in Fort Greene carrying a pair of extra hive bodies, plenty of frames and a bunch of foundation.

Herro.

As I hypothesized last week, the influx of queen and brood pheromones from the activity of the new queen (Esmeralda) in Hive #1 resulted in some gangbuster comb building. Unfortunately, a lot of it is in the space under the feeder.

Brace comb all up in my business.

After removing all the brace comb (and feeding it to a photographer that tagged along for the day), I started flipping through the frames. They're up to working 8 of the 10 frames in the original deep hive body I installed them in, which is excellent. According to the '7/10ths rule', which suggests giving bees a new hive body/frames when they have drawn out 7 of the 10 frames in the newest box, they are more than ready for a little extra room. The large amount of brace comb built under the suggests the same thing. Bees want to build vertically rather than out to the side, so you will often see them build up wherever they can (usually in an inconvenient manner) and neglect the outer frames.

Not low on stores, no sir.

After you give them a new hive body and they start drawing out comb, you can start shuffling the frames in the original box and move the undrawn outer frames a few spaces closer to the center. This will encourage the bees to draw them out, but be sure not to put frames of undrawn foundation between ones that contain brood of any age (eggs/larvae/pupae). You don't want to break up the brood nest in a young colony! Ideally, you should move the unworked foundation between two combs that are fully drawn out and which contain stores of (un)capped honey and/or pollen.

A frame of newly capped brood.  I seem to make this pose a lot.

Esmeralda, the new queen of Hive #1, is absolutely fantastic. That frame and a half of eggs/larvae I saw last week are now a frame and a half of capped brood, surrounded by several frames of eggs and larvae of all ages. Her laying pattern is perfect; solid, circular, and prolific. I sure do hope that this hive doesn't decide to supersede her as well. That would be lame.

Eggies, so fresh!

As this new queen was freely mated in Brooklyn, I have no idea what the genetic makeup of her offspring will be. Unlike queens from commercial producers, who flood their breeding yards with drones of known/specific/desired genetics, Esmeralda mated in the jungle that is Brooklyn with "wild" drones. The drones she mated with may have come from feral colonies living in hollow trees or the walls and attics of homes in the surrounding area. They might have come from the hive of a neighboring beekeeper. They could have any sort of genetics; Italian, Carniolan, Russian, or hybrid!

While the queen herself is Italian in terms of her genotype/phenotype (her genetic makeup/her physical characteristics), I won't have any idea about who she has mated with until the new bees start to emerge.

HUGE.

It's risky; I have no idea what the temperament or behavior of the new bees will be. They could be docile and productive, they could be cranky and lazy, or they could be anywhere in between. Many people prefer not to risk the unknown and immediately replace any supersedure queens with commercial ones, but I've decided to let them do their thing and see how it goes. If the next couple of brood cycles come out terrible I WILL requeen, but only as a last resort. I like the concept of using (and sharing) locally bred and adapted bees, so I have an interest in seeing if such bees are a practical option, especially considering the shortage of quality bees and queens this year due to the terrible weather in the American South.

We'll see.

Tasty new foundation.

Hive #2 is still doing it's (somewhat slow) thing. Brood is still spotty and they're slower about building comb, but it does seem to be ramping up. They finally started work on their 7th frame, so they aren't quite ready for a second hive body, but they might be next week. I've been wondering if it is possible that their poor brood pattern may be the result of a dearth of high quality protein, so I think that I am going to start feeding the colony fresh pollen and see if the situation improves. The hives were started out with pollen patties and the brood pattern in Hive #2 was originally pretty tight. While Hive #1 doesn't seem to have the problems that this one does, I haven't seen much stored pollen in either of the hives.

Prettybees.

It certainly can't hurt!

I brought a deep/frames/foundation for Hive #2 as well, but they didn't need it so I stored it on top of the feeder rather than carrying it back down the ladder.

Hive Check: Week 6

When bricklaying proved to be hard on his back later in life, Mr. Churchill took up beekeeping.

V for Victory!

I am pleased to report that the supersedure in Hive #1 was a success. The new queen is mated and laying down a solid brood pattern. Her name is Esmeralda, at least for now. She’s only been laying for a couple of days, but there was a frame and a half of new eggs and young larvae. Beautiful!

In the popular vernacular: "Dat ass!"

Hopefully, the influx of queen and brood pheromones will kickstart the hive back into productivity. As I mentioned in a previous inspection report, the bees have been stalled in terms of comb drawing activity. Flipping through the hive I saw that they were beginning to draw out the outer frames. They’re up to working 7 frames, and if they continue to draw out comb they’ll be ready for a second hive body by Week 7.

Hive #2 is also starting to build comb again, but not very nicely. While they are (slowly) working the outer frames, they remain behind Hive #1 and have only drawn 6 frames so far. They have, however, continued to use the extra space in the bottom of the feeder to build their own unguided comb. It’s annoying, but there isn’t much to be done about it. It’s a flaw in the design of the feeder itself; rather than a small channel allowing access to the feed, it has a wide groove that is more than large enough to contain a large amount of brace comb.

Annoying.

Every time I remove this comb, the bees just rebuild it rather than working the frames I want them to. In the future, I’ll be removing any comb connected to the frames below the feeder, but leaving the comb inside the feeder itself. Hopefully, once they fill that null space, they will get on to more constructive work.

Hive Check: Week 5

A short update as I get the blog caught up to the present day.

Opening up Hive #1, I kept my fingers crossed. As I shared in my week 4 inspection, the bees had decided to supersede their perfectly good package queen. I had found a number of fully capped queen cells, so knowing that queens spend approximately 7 and a half to 9 days developing as pupae in capped cells, I figured that the virgin queens would likely emerge in less than a week:

Metamorphosis of the Queen Bee
Egg: hatches on Day 3
Larva (several moltings): Day 3 to Day 8½
Queen cell capped: ~Day 7½
Pupa: ~Day 8 until emergence
Emergence: ~Day 15½ - Day 17
Nuptial Flight(s): ~Day 20 - 24
Egg Laying: ~Day 23 and up

As it turns out, I was right. All of the queen cells I found during my last inspection were both hatched and in the process of being torn down. It's remarkable how quickly the bees eliminated them considering the queens must have only hatched a day or two ( at most) prior to my inspection. I didn't see the virgin queen(s), but to be fair I wasn't looking too hard. Knowing that the hive was in the middle of a transition, I kept my inspection quick to minimize any disruption.

René Magritte was famously inspired by a beekeeper.

The remains of three queen cells.  I wonder which of these queens survived to mate.

Hive #2 was still plugging along; they're not great, just average. They've started drawing comb again (slowly), now that they have had time to hatch some new bees, so hopefully things will pick up soon. Their population isn't huge; only covering 5 or so frames, so they don't need a new hive body to expand in to yet.

The hive top feeders we have are flawed in that they have a large amount of space underneath them.  The bees have been taking advantage of this by building comb in the feeder instead of using the frames.

Jerks.

Emily inspecting a newly drawn frame.

One of the center frames.

Cleaning up after I removed the spur of comb extending into the feeder.