It's warm out. Silly warm. Driving to my apiary in Fort Greene, my car told me that the temperature was topping 70F. Days like this were meant to be spent outside with your bees and I am not one to deny myself such simple pleasures.
Two weeks ago I stuck my head in my Fort Greene hives and found them healthy and full of stores; even a little brood. This week, I found the bees in full on spring prep.
First I saw the huge amount of flight traffic coming in and out of the hive.
Little dudes were comin' in hot and heavy, loaded with nectar and pollen. From the roof, I could see multiple blooming trees, and a friend told me that Maples were already starting to bloom upstate. Sounds like it's gonna be an early spring. The bees think so, at least. I'll probably have to start swarm preparations within the month!
There seem to be bees in this hive.
Both hives have at least two frames of brood in all stages of development, and both are laying in nice, solid patterns. I was inspecting alone, so I don't have any shots, but expect to see pictures of emerging brood this week.
Smoke is magic. Also, that is sugar, not my drug cache.
I'm not gonna lie. I'm a little excited about this upcoming season, but a little nervous as well.
Thirsty bees. Apparently sub-irrigated planters make great waterers.
With the unusually mild winter that we have been having (and enjoying), there has been a lot of concern about the survival of hives in the city. The warm temperatures have altered the behavior of our bees, resulting in more time out of the winter cluster, an increased number of flights, and the early initiation of spring brood rearing. More activity means higher food consumption. For hives that were insufficiently prepared for winter or poorly maintained, it could mean starvation.
I spy with my little eye...
A queen! I do, I do! Esmeralda in Hive #1.
Quick, regular hive checks are an excellent way to see if your hives are on track for spring survival. When the weather is under 50F, you can quickly gauge the status of your hives by 'hefting' them. It's about as simple as it sounds. Go to the back of the hive, get your hands under the base and lift smoothly and gently from the back. If you can lift the hive without effort, the colony is short on supplies and should be reinforced. Dry sugar, syrup, fondant, and full frames of honey from another colony are all options for supplementing a hive light on food.
Tasty, tasty refined sugar. While Hive #1 has consumed a large amount of dry sugar, Hive #2 has consumed none.
What you give them will depend entirely on what you have available and what kind of mood you're in. Honey from another hive (a deadout, perhaps) is the best and most natural option. Dry sugar is the easiest, but is messy and sometimes the bees don't care for it. Fondant requires time and effort to make, but is nice and clean and the bees take it easily. Sugar syrup is the hardest to use as a winter emergency feed. It is easily cooled to a temperature that prevents the bees from taking it by chilly weather at night. Anything under 50-60F, and the bees won't touch it. Not much help there.
When the weather is well over 50F, you can do a real inspection to see how your bees are doing. If they're flying, it's warm enough to open them up. Even so, you'll want to be quick about it to limit any disruption or potential damage to developing brood. Keep in mind that the bees may be a bit more defensive than normal, and may continue to be so until spring brings new sources of nectar and pollen to distract them. Don't be alarmed, but do be careful and make sure you have your smoker lit and your veil at the ready.
There are a few things you'll want to keep your eyes out for. First and foremost, the priority is to make sure that the hive has adequate honey and pollen to make it until spring. What qualifies as 'adequate' is completely variable and subjective. Some bees are very frugal with their stores and need much less in the way of honey and pollen to make it through the winter. Italian bees from Georgia, for instance, require much more food than northern-bred Carniolan stock. You'll have to make your own determination as to whether your bees have enough food, based on your own experience. The heft test is still a great resource in warmer weather. Remember, if the hive is easy to lift, you should consider supplemental food until natural sources become available.
Hive #1 has about 10 frames this full in their top brood chamber.
While checking for food should be your first priority, if it is warm enough to get in the hives, you should check for signs of brood rearing, as well as indicators of disease. In particular, look out for sick or dying brood, frass (poop) from varroa in brood cells, and dead varroa under the screened bottom board. Even in the dead of winter, many hives will intermittently raise small patches of brood to supplement the cluster with young bees. If you spot a small patch of eggs, larvae, or capped pupae, don't be alarmed, but do take caution. Take note of the size and location of the brood, look for any signs of disease, and put the frame back before the brood is chilled. A small patch of brood is solid evidence that your queen is healthy and laying and a good sign that your hive is doing well.
Lovely hand sized patch of brood. Brought to you by Esmeralda.
Eggs, larvae, and capped pupae.
A large patch of brood is potentially worrisome. Too much brood early in the spring can prevent the bees from reforming a winter cluster if the temperature dips again. Workers will not abandon young, even at the cost of their own lives. If they can't cluster up, they won't be able to create enough collective heat to maintain their internal temperature and they'll die of cold. Ick.
Queen Lazing from Hive #2 made an appearance.
If you don't see any brood, don't panic. Some queens will hardly lay at all in the winter, and you won't see any brood at all until spring. Just make sure that they have enough food, wait it out, and chill.
We've entered the package slump. The oldest of the package bees are starting to die as they wear out their bodies foraging for nectar and pollen, and the oldest of the brood has yet to emerge. The drop in population can be precipitous and dangerous. If the temperature is still dropping into the low 50s at night when the population drops, it can result in chilled (and killed) brood as the reduced population of adult bees struggle to keep them warm.
With an ageing population you should also expect to see a drop off in the amount of comb being drawn. As the house bees get older, their bodies become less efficient at producing wax and they start to move to other duties. As the first generation of young workers emerge, they will rush to take over house bee duties; raising their sisters, maintaining the environment within the hive, building comb, and storing food.
Lookit them pokin' their little noggins out! So curious!
We started our inspection with Hive 2 this time. As you can see, there are hardly any bees working the outer comb, but you can see the majority peeking up from the center. The brood pattern is still a little bit spotty, and it's hard to say why. It may be that the queen is very young and inexperienced, which will clear up as she hits her stride. It could be that some of the earliest brood got chilled and the bees removed them to make spaces for "heater bees" to help keep the surviving young alive. Jim Fischer at the NYC Beekeeping Group suggested that theory.
I had a similar brainwave, and it makes sense- the temperatures dropped down into the low 50's those first couple of nights and this hive had brood a few days earlier than the other one, which has a solid pattern. If it was only a loss due to the chill, the bees should clear it up and the next brood cycle or two should be nice and solid, especially once the population starts growing. In either of these cases, the queen should have gone back and re-laid in the empty cells.
Side 1: Spotty brood pattern.
Alternately, the queen may just be kind of cruddy. She's not a complete failure, though. The hive isn't in danger of just dying out- she IS laying quite a bit of brood, it just happens to be spotty. If it's a problem with the queen, we'll be able to tell because it won't clear up over the next couple of inspections.
Side 2: More spotty brood.
Hive 1 continues to be spectacular. As with its sister, not much more comb has been drawn compared to Week 2, but the brood nest is phenomenal. These guys are going to POP over the next couple of weeks.
Big fan of Magritte.
"Busy, busy, busy."
Remarkably white cappings. If they keep it up, I'm going to make cut comb honey next year.
The frame perch you can see hanging on the left of my hive is probably one of the most useful beekeeping gadgets I own.
We spotted the queen and something curious...
First look at the queen of Hive 1. Respect.
Queen of Cups. Getting all mystical.
A queen cup! I spotted this in the fold of comb where I removed that bit of burr comb last week. Rather than just drawing out the comb further and evening out the frame, the bees used the space to build a lovely white queen cup.
Hive 1 is capping plenty of stores.
And they also have quite a bit of capped brood. These ladies will be emerging this week.
You shouldn't panic when you see one (or many) of these. I know you're going to anyways, but queen cups aren't something to worry about. Some hives are just genetically predisposed towards building them, but just having them doesn't mean that they're going to USE them. Sometimes they just like having them handy. Russian bees in particular are famous for building full blown queen cells and tearing them down days before they emerge as new queens. *Insert Russians <3 Revolutions joke of your choosing here.*
Larvae! Tasty grubs!
I just can't get over how white these cappings are.
When you DO see one, take a look inside. Most of the time it'll be empty and you can safely ignore it. If you see a larvae swimming in royal jelly, then you have something to be concerned about and a potential problem to solve, but that's a talk for another time.
The differences between the first and second week inspections for a newly installed package are remarkable. In those short days, the workers ramp up their wax production and are almost wholly focused on making comb to accommodate the brood and stores that a healthy new colony requires.
Bees. I have them.
In the span of a week, the bees in Hive 1 (I still haven't named it yet!) have drawn out four full frames, two half drawn frames, and two frames of undrawn foundation on either side.
Hive 1
This frame was foundation last week.
Nectar, and pollen, and bees, OH MY!
Look at how lovely and white the new comb is.
Also, lookit all them bee butts.
Frame 3. The other side is fully drawn out and is being filled with food. Notice that even with foundation, they draw out the comb from the top center and expand in all directions from there.
There were some minor spacing issues between frames 5 and 6 (the center frames), and as you can see, they built a small amount of burr comb. I popped it off and re-spaced the frames.
Bee space. Still serious business.
It looks like a schnoz.
Do not want.
Fixing the spacing.
The population isn't growing yet, but there is a HUGE amount of brood. Hive one has 4-6 comb faces packed with eggs (SO MANY EGGS!) The laying pattern looks solid, although it'll be easier to tell once the brood is capped.
The pollen stored in the opposing cells make the eggs much easier to see.
The oldest brood is in a small cluster on the inner face of center frames and is nice and fat and healthy looking.
OMG, those two bees are TOTALLY kissing.
They're also TOTALLY in the way.
Git.
Much better!
The stickyboard under the hive is catching no mites, but a whole bunch of wax scales. For the curious, Hive 1 went through about a gallon of sugar syrup this week.
Wax scales and dead bee legs.
Hive 2 is doing just as well, but is on a slightly different path. I let Emily take the lead on this one, so I stood back, watched and took pictures as she went through the hive.
Hive 2
Emily is brave.
The bees were in an extremely pleasant mood, so we ended up working without protective gear. I don't recommend going veil-less under most circumstances, but once you've gotten into a new hive and checked their mood, you can get away with it for the first couple of weeks. Keep the veil handy though. Bees are fickle and you'll want to pop it back on the instant you detect any signs of agitation. Facial stings are uncomfortable.
Naked beekeeping.
Hive 2 (also unnamed so far!) has drawn out slightly less comb and has laid fewer eggs, but the brood that they have is wonderfully solid and a couple of days older. They've drawn out about 3 full frames and 2 half frames, but they already have a fist sized patch of perfectly capped brood.
See the shadow?
It's brood! Capped brood!
Covered in bees.
We spotted Hive 2's queen for the second time. She seems to be a lot less shy than the queen in Hive 1, who has yet to show her face.
Fat bottomed girls, you make the rockin' world go round.
Hive 2 is consuming significantly less sugar syrup than Hive 1, but they seem to be bringing in quite a bit of fresh pollen.
So many different pollens! I have no idea what they are from, but they sure are pretty.
A special guest post by Robert O'Neal, my dad and fellow beekeeper in Ohio.
I. FIRST SWARM
I received a call from mom that there was a swarm in a tree above Baba and Dido’s [my grandparents] house. I asked how high up and she said maybe 15 feet. I couldn’t get home for a couple of hours so we really didn’t get there until after 6:00. We drove over to the house and the swarm was indeed in a tree but 30 feet high.
Big swarm, tall tree.
Luckily it was in a scrub cedar a couple of feet from other scrub cedars on each side. We got Mr. Ritchie [our neighbor] to come over and formulated a plan to cut the tree and lower it by utilizing a pulley and rope attached to the pickup.
Mr. Ritchie and my Dad scheme to get the bees out of the trees.
This worked out great at first. Mr. Ritchie cut a wedge in the trunk and as we lowered it down, it moved steadily in an arc until ….the remaining trunk broke and the bottom slid 10 feet along the ground sweeping the top of the tree in a down and inward arc that stopped when it landed on a juniper, throwing most of the bees all over the bush. Undaunted, we went inside and had Martinis.
By the time the Martinis were done, the bees had gathered again, for the most part, and with Ritchie’s help we cut enough juniper branches to reach them, gathered as many as we could into the nuc box and left it on the ground next to the bush. It was getting dark at that point and I determined I had better leave it open for the next day not knowing how many bees we gathered and how many remained.
I went back the next morning and it looked like normal hive activity with bees flying in and out. That evening we transferred the nuc box to our house where I set up a hive transferred the frames, dumped as many bees as I could into the hive body, closed it up, and then left the nuc box open to clean out on its own. I checked the hive on May 21st and found that it had a comb, honey and eggs. After a quick inspection, I closed it up and left it alone to do what bees do best.
Dumping bees out of the nuc and into their new hive.
Home Sweet Home.
II. SECOND SWARM
A call from home: another swarm. This one was in the front pasture next to the barn.
Bees errywhere.
What to do? I told mom to get the nuc box and put frames stored in the barn into it and get it ready. Then the bees got into the barn and started investigating the hive bodies that were in there.
Trying to get in the barn where we store our extra hive bodies and frames.
She took frames and set them next to the foundation of the barn and the bees started to collect on those. By the time I got home she had lifted the frames up and put them in a hive body.
Rockin' out.
It looked like they were all going in and out of the hive and I just let it go until dark, when I closed it up and we brought it over to Baba and Dido’s house. My policy is that if we find a swarm at their house, I bring it to our house, and vice versa.
This one worked well and now mom considers it her hive. That hive has comb, honey and eggs in it and seems to be doing well on inspection on the 21st.
III. THIRD SWARM
I was done inspecting for the day so I went back to the garden and was walking toward the barn when I caught sight of a swarm on the “magic” post. This is a wooden fence post with a small grape vine growing near it that has now attracted four swarms over the past three years- two last year that I caught and one the year before that didn’t work out.
Bees love the magic stick.
I’m basically out of hive bodies so I talked to a friend bee keeper who was down to one hive and told him if I found another one I would give him a call. I had some frames left, so I put them in the nuc box and collected the swarm. I left it on the ground so the bees would hopefully collect in it. Oddly, there were several bees at least that were pretty aggressive and kept bouncing off my veil. I was pretty careful not to stir them up too much and I thought this was a little odd. Then they began collecting on the front of the nuc box.
Bearding the nuc.
The bee keeper friend couldn’t get over until the evening and when he got there, there were many on the front and sides of the box. I suggested we wait until morning to see if they went back in and if they did I would close it up. They didn’t. They were still on the front and sides. I thought they might be too hot so I moved them into the shade and again there were some aggressive bees that kept bouncing off the veil. I looked inside and they didn’t seem to be making any comb. This was Sunday and they appeared agitated.
The bees abandoned the nuc for a while and regathered on a nearby fence post.
Time for your close up!
I set them up on a box with the front of the nuc hanging over so they couldn’t collect on the ground. They did beard some but seemed to be less than when they were out in the sun. They stayed agitated for hours. In fact, I got stung a couple of hours later in the garden 40-50 feet away. It was a bee that kept buzzing around and looking for me and wasn’t going to give up. The bee keeper friend came over that evening, put on his suit and mom put on a suit to help him. He picked it up and put it in a big brown cardboard box and taped it closed. I heard he installed it with good success and we will see what happens.
IV. FOURTH SWARM
Argh! The next day, Baba called in the afternoon to tell us there was a swarm on the apple tree in front of their bedroom window.
Bees and apples, friends forever.
I didn’t have any more frames. I called the ex-bee inspector and he gave me the name of somebody in the bee club who lives near us. I finally got in contact with him and asked if he wanted the swarm. He came over with his grandson and a cardboard box with a green plastic garbage bag. Sure enough they were on the granny smith tree all bunched and happy. First, he sprayed the swarm with sugar water using a hand held sprayer, then he scooped what he could into the bag, and then holding the bag he shook the tree and the bees went wild.
I don’t think the stings bothered him too much but he definitely got a few. He then sprayed the inside of the cardboard box with sugar water and let it sit for a while to gather the remaining bees. He tied off the bag and put it in his truck. The bees left gathered in the box and after a while he took what he could and left.
WRAP UP
In checking all the hives on the 21st, I found that two hives [the original hives] had no eggs but good population and queen cells and my feeling is at least two of the swarms came from them.
The Carniolan mix that I got as a swarm last year was chock full of bees a few weeks ago, but now has a lesser population. If I can get to them later in the week and they still don’t have eggs I am going to have to order a queen to try to save them.
