Urban Hive Moving: Hatch Edition

As mentioned in the last article on urban hive moving, some of us in the city are forced to keep bees in locations that would cause our forebears to do a spit-take.

You have your bees WHERE!?

Our urban community is uniquely creative when it comes to hive placement, and places the importance of keeping bees far above the relative convenience of doing so. I've seen urban apiaries that can only be accessed by climbing a 20 foot ladder leading up to unwalled, open air attic with roof access through a double paned window barely large enough to fit a hive through, let alone a person.

Getting bees in to these locations is hard enough, often requiring the hive to be brought through the access point piece by piece, but what about getting them back out? Once the bees have made themselves at home, you can't really remove the hive piecemeal... or can you?

In fact, this is exactly what is done to move hives out of a limited-access location. Split the hive(s) up into manageable pieces, and they are much easier to move. Obviously, this has its downsides and limitations. In order to divide a colony into manageable bits, it has to be warm enough outside to open and manipulate the bees without chilling the brood or breaking up a winter cluster. On top of that, splitting a hive means you'll have to have enough small (4-5 frame) nuc boxes to split the hives into. Cardboard and plastic nuc boxes are both commonly available and cheap.

Itty-bitty hive, itty-bitty hatch, still a pain.

For the most part, moving a hive through a hatch follows most of the procedures outlined previously, but with a few modifications.

The first change is to compress the colony as much as possible the day before the move. The smaller the number of frames occupied by the bees, the smaller the number of nuc boxes needed to move them. The easiest way to do this is to evacuate and remove any and all honey supers, reducing the hive down to the broodnest. Attempting to compress the hive any further or for any length of time risks triggering swarm preparations, particularly in spring or summer.

Once the hive has been compressed down to the broodnest, it can be split into nucs. This should be done in the evening, after most of the foragers have returned home, and with heavy smoke to limit the number of flying bees. Ideally, the arrangement and orientation of the brood frames should be maintained as much as possible. The entrances of the nucs should be sealed and ventilation provided so that the bees can get plenty of air. Most of the cheap cardboard/plastic nucs are perfect for this purpose, as they have pluggable entrances and plenty of ventilation.  Make sure to carefully secure the lid and entrances of the nucs to prevent any escapes.

After the hive has been divided into small, discrete pieces, it can be easily carried down a hatch, while making sure to keep them level. When moved to the new location, the nucs can be recombined and treated as any other newly moved hive.

Urban Hive Moving

Moving beehives is one of those things best avoided, but sometimes it just has to be done. Choosing an apiary site is an imperfect science at best and 'perfect' locations are about as common as henteeth. Pretty much every site is a compromise in some respect and this is particularly true in the city. Beekeepers in the city don't have a lot of space, so we often have to take what we can get. People change as well; beekeeping is not for everyone and sometimes the only way to find out is to try it. If you decide it isn't for you, you're going to have move your hives one way or another.

Bees? In MY elevator?
It's more likely than you think!
Moving a donated hive to the Brooklyn Grange last week.

Accepting these apiary compromises means that we, as urban beekeepers, also have to accept that we might someday have to move our bees, either because we want to or because we must. With this in mind I generally recommend that people do not put bees on property they rent.

Situations change, often when it is least convenient.

Personally, I prefer to (and do) keep my bees in permanent, established community gardens and on top of buildings owned by people I know and trust. Still, if it was a choice between no bees and keeping them somewhere potentially inconvenient, I know what I would do.

So say that you have a hive and you need to move it. How do you do it? It depends on a few factors. What's the weather like? How far are you moving them?

Conventional wisdom says that you can move a hive two feet or two miles. Anything more than two feet or less than two miles and the foragers get confused and try to return to the original location they oriented to. Obviously this is a problem as there isn't a hive in that location any more. You end up losing most of your foragers, or about a third of your hive population. So what do you do if you need to move your hives more than two feet (which is probable) and less than two miles (which is likely)?

Beehacks. (Beehacks?) More on that later.

This guide will assume that you have easy access to both hive sites, either because they are ground level, or easily accessible via stairs or elevator. I'll be writing a follow-up for locations featuring roof hatches or otherwise limited access.

The first thing you'll need to do is prep the new apiary site and gather the equipment you'll need. You should never move bees unless their new location is completely set up and ready to go, so that you can just set them down, open them up and let them be for a while. Moving can be traumatic, so it's best to give them time to adjust without prodding them any more than is strictly necessary.

In terms of required equipment, the list is short: A vehicle large enough to carry the hives you'll be moving, one or two strong ratchet straps, window screening material, some branches or bundles of grass (*hint, hint*) and a staple gun or strong duct tape (I use Gorilla brand.) You'll want some extra hands as well. Optionally, bring your bee suit, your smoker, sugar to feed with, a hand truck, or a hive lifter.

Once you've gathered your equipment, and gotten your new site prepared, you'll have to schedule a time to move the hives. In the winter, when it is too cold for the bees to fly, any time is acceptable. If it warm enough that the bees are flying (over 50F), you'll want to wait until the foragers are all back home for the evening so that you don't lose your field force.

If you crack open the hive first, they will come to see what has happened.
Can you spot the extended stingers?
Seal them up first, curiosity be damned.

Once the bees are all in the hive, cut a section of window screening large enough to seal the entire entrance of the hive. If your inner cover has a notch as an upper entrance like the one from Brushy Mountain, you'll want to plug it up so that the bees can't escape. If it's warm out, you'll need to smoke the bees so they don't come flying out at you when you open the inner cover.

I only squashed one bee.  I consider it a victory.  Once you start stapling, they'll come to investigate, so make sure that you have the mesh placed snugly and are holding it in place.  Extra hands help.

Take the screen and staple or tape it over the entrance so that it is completely sealed around the edges. The screening will keep the bees in, but allow some air circulation. If you have a screened bottom board, take out the sticky board so that they'll have plenty of air.

Ventilation and curiosity.

With the hive sealed, you can secure it. Run the ratchet straps around the entire hive and cinch them down snugly, but not so tight that you tear into the wood. I like to use two ratchet straps, one front to back and the other left to right, so that they cross at the top and bottom. It's probably overkill, but better safe than sorry.  Make sure that you seal up the hive before you ratchet them down.  They don't like the vibrations and will come out to investigate.

First sting of the year!

Now that the hive is sealed and secured, it is ready to move. If you are carrying it by hand, pick it up from the front and back and be careful to keep it as vertical as possible so that the frames don't come loose. If you have a hand truck, make sure that you set it so that the back of the hive is against the metal frame. If you put the hive in sideways, the frames will tilt, break apart, squash bees, and possibly do some serious damage. If you have a hive carrier, follow the instructions, but remember to keep the hive level.

Notice how the hive is only being leaned back, in line with the frames so that they don't shift.

Load the hive into your transportation and take it to the new location. Unload it just as you loaded it, slowly and keeping it level. Set the hive where you want it and remove the ratchet straps.

Home sweet home at the Brooklyn Grange.

If you've moved the hive more than a couple of miles, you can open the hive and only lose a small percentage of foragers. The vast majority of the bees will take a short flight, realize that nothing around them looks remotely familiar, and reorient to the new location. You don't have to worry about any new foragers, since they'll orient to the new location as soon as they're ready to start flying.

But what if you've moved the hive close enough to the original location that the foraging areas overlap? The foragers will take their first flight, spot a landmark they previously identified in relation to their old hivesite and use it as a guide to fly directly back home. When they get there, they'll find nothing and mill around, confused and possibly cranky, until it starts to get dark. At that point, they'll start looking for the closest hive to take shelter in. Chances are, it won't be yours and you'll end up losing up to a third of your population.

If you don't want that to happen, there are a couple tricks (BEEHACKS!) that you can use to trigger reorientation behavior in older foragers.

The simplest is to just keep the hive sealed in for a couple days so that the bees can't fly. Make sure that the hive has plenty of ventilation and food. Combined with the vibrations and shaking from the actual move, and many of the bees will pay extra attention to where they are and trigger reorientation. According to Michael Bush, author of The Practical Beekeeper, about 72 hours of confinement is the sweet spot. Any shorter and fewer bees will reorient; any longer and the number will plateau.

You can also obstruct the entrance of the hive. When bees leave the hive, they leave on autopilot. They fly out with not a care in the world and only use landmarks for orientation on their RETURN trip. By obstructing the entrance with something the bees have to fly or crawl around in order to exit the hive, you force them to pay attention and register that something has changed. This change in the hive entrance will trigger reorientation to the new location. Loosely stuffing the entrance with grass so that the bees have to carry it aside works well. So does leaning some twiggy branches in front of the hive and over the entrance. You want to use something dense enough that all the bees will have to fly close through, but not something so thick that the entrance is blocked. After a couple a days, you can remove the branches, or let the bees remove the grass.

After you've moved them, you'll want to give them a couple days (at least a week) to recuperate and adjust. In your first post-move inspection, pay extra attention to any damage caused by the move, and make sure that the queen is laying (if it is seasonable for her to do so.) Queens tend to be a bit fragile, and the stress of moving can sometimes cause bees to ball, or kill, her.

I'll be writing a follow-up article outlining how to move hives that cannot be moved in one piece because they are too heavy or because they are too large to fit through the entrance to the apiary (roof hatches), so check back later this week!

TL;DR
1.) Prep new site and equipment.
2.) Seal up hive entrances with mesh and secure with hive bodies with ratchet straps.
3.) Move hive vertically to new location.
4a.) If moved over two miles, let them loose.
4b.) If less than two miles, keep sealed for 2-3 days, and obstruct but do not block entrance to trigger reorientation.
5.) ???
6.) Profit.

If you want to read about the hive moved in the pictures, check out this blog post at the Brooklyn Grange: http://www.brooklyngrangefarm.com/2012/02/10/got-us-a-donated-hive-today/

Queenright In Red Hook, Part 3

Part 1
Part 2

Wearin' my sexy hat.
Obviously.

So, I waited a couple weeks. While queens take only a few days (15-17!) to develop from an egg to an emerging virgin, it takes them a few more weeks to stretch their wings, take some mating flights, and get to laying.

Hey guys, I think there are bees in there!

AAAAH, BEES!

For the young virgins, this is a delicate time; developing hormonal glands, expanding ovaries, and drones where there were none before. With this in mind, it is often a good idea to leave a requeening colony alone until they've had time to adjust and start makin' babies. In any case, bees are much more relaxed when they have brood to take care of, especially later in the season when they are starting to get a bit more defensive and wary of wandering hands. Waiting is the prudent choice for everyone involved.

Oh.
Nevermind.

The bare minimum time for a queen to develop from an egg to a LAYING adult is approximately 25 days. In the last update, I mentioned that I found queen cells, including some capped ones, meaning that they were well over a week into development. With this in mind I didn't stick my head in the hive for over a month; more than long enough to allow for any variables, like poor weather or trouble finding drone congregation areas (DCAs).

Empty super.
Super.

Diggin' deeper.

I went in hopeful.

I left disappointed.

Well, at least they have plenty of drone comb?

No seriously, drone comb is great.

I went though the entire hive, every side of every frame looking for any sign of a laying queen and found none. No capped brood, no larvae, no eggs. I found the remains of the queen cells, indicating that at least one of the queens emerged successfully, but I found no sign of her or any other.

Hemp.

Nice distribution.

There is no way of knowing what might have happened to her. There are a huge number of reasons that a new queen might fail. She might have been injured in the highlander style deathmatch that sometimes ensues when multiple virgin queens emerge, or all of the queens may have been killed outright. She may have been eaten by a predatory insect (wasp?) or bird on her orientation or nuptual flights. She may have just failed to mate at all; a lack of virile, vital drones to share their genetic material, or a lack of DCAs. Etc., etc., etc.

Crowd control.

Well, at least there is plenty of honey to make it through the winter.

Regardless of the reason, the problem remains the same. A queenless hive has no chance of survival. Even if the hive was not destroyed by predators or stronger hives as its population waned, it would eventually die of attrition. Laying workers are a clever evolutionary trick to flood the area with drones carrying the genetic material of the hive, but drones can not sustain the hive.

Lots of honey, actually.

So what's a boy to do?

Hint:

It's SOOPERHIVE!

Queenright in Red Hook, Part 2

A Beekeeping Adventure in three parts.
Part One can be found HERE.

For weeks, I'd been watching the queenless colony peter out slowly. With no functional queen, and a couple of laying workers in her stead, the colony had no chance of surviving the winter. The existing workers were ageing fast and would eventually all die off, leaving only drones. I was avoiding digging into it too deeply; checking a couple frames in the bottom deep every two weeks for signs of improvement I found nothing but a few scattered drone pupae in 'bullet brood' cells, and hardly any of those either. Yet the colony remained in a fair mood and quite productive.

With no young to feed, the bees quickly filled the hive with large amounts of honey and pollen, and I figured that once the population collapsed completely, I would be able to give all that food to its healthy and queenright sister colony to supplement their winter stores. And so it went. The hive kept on working; productive, but not improving.

Then, it happened.

For the record, that's a billow t-shirt, not my big fat belly.
Image c2011, Paul Smith.

See?  I told you so.  But where did my booty go?
Image c2011, Alex Brown.

I was going through my regular hive inspection routine. Check the queenright hive first, because they're almost always in an excellent mood. Pass around a couple frames of honey, pollen, brood, and bees around the crowd, and explain what is happening in the hive- how a beekeeper looks at the activity within a hive and translates that information into useable data. As usual, everything in the first hive was fine and dandy. The brood was solid, there was plenty of food (honey AND pollen), and there seemed to be more coming in.

Looking at the comb, checking for honey/pollen/eggs/larvae/etc.
Image c2011, Paul Smith.

Showing off for the ladies by showing them my ladies.  Yeah girl.
Image c2011, Alex Brown.

So I moved on to hive number 2. The queenless wonder.

As I had seen previously, the top deep was absolutely PACKED with honey and pollen. The population was surprisingly strong considering how long they had been without brood, but the percentage of drones was very high, clearly up from the normal max of ~10%. The drones in that hive are interesting in and of themselves. I have never seen drones so solidly dark, like they'd been carved from ebony. They're big, healthy things as well. I suppose that without the presence of any worker brood, the drones are getting all the food and protein they could ever ask for.

Magritte strikes back.
Also, lookit all that honey.  Pooh bear just poohed himself.
Image c2011, Paul Smith.

No babies = more stuff for you.  A true life lesson.
Image c2011, Paul Smith.

The bees were in a good mood, and so I decided to pick out a frame or two from the lower deep hive body. I had a nice, curious audience, and a couple of friendly photographers, so I figured I may as well give them the full monty. I decided to pull a frame directly out of the center of the hive. All the combs had been drawn perfectly, so there were no 'hot spots', raised areas of comb that get knocked off when you pull the frame, and it came out nice and smooth.

Exactly what I had been seeing for months.  Some food, some scattered drones in bullet brood cells.  Ick.
Image c2011, Paul Smith.

Just as I expected. A ring of pollen and honey around the edges and a couple of scattered drone cells closer to the center, with a couple random cells containing a couple of side-laid eggs. I flipped the frame over and...

...

Is that a queen?

Shiiiiiiit.

But not just any queen. Jet black and shiny as basalt, she was the size of a virgin queen- only slightly larger than a worker. She was moving fast and constantly burying herself under her daughters. Before I lost track of her, I scooped her off the frame and into my hand.

I opened my hand to get a closer look and she flew off into the wild blue yonder.

Flight weight?

Really?

How inconvenient.

I yelled at everyone to keep an eye on her while I went to find something to capture her with. She was easy to spot in the air. Queens aren't fantastic flyer, even at their lightest, and with the weight of eggs (even drone ones) in her abdomen, she flew ass down and slow as molasses. Normally a queen won’t fly at all, weighed down by her own stores of sperm and developing eggs.

By the time I returned with a suitable container, she had settled on the butt of Paul Smith, a photographer and student at the Columbia School of Journalism who had come down to get some shots of an urban beekeeper for a feature he was working on.

Telling him not to move, I gently scooped her into a waiting pill bottle and popped the lid on.

I handed the queen off to Tobin, Ross Brown's son and budding beekeeper so I could use my hands.
D'awwww.
The queen is fully stretched out here.
Image c2011, Paul Smith.

Back in hand, you can see just how small the queen really was.
Image c2011, Alex Brown.

What to do now? The ‘queenless’ hive was not queenless after all! Comparing her to the drones in the hive, it was abundantly clear to me that she had been present but unseen and unnoticed from the beginning, that she was mother of the drones, and the reason I hadn't been able to requeen the hive successfully. The 'laying worker' was actually a true queen who had run out of sperm to fertilize eggs. I don't have a solid explanation for the poor egg placement or the instances of multiple eggs in a single cell. My best guess is that reduced to flight weight, her abdomen was simply not long enough to reach the bottom of the cell. It is also very odd that the workers didn't take the opportunities to replace an obviously failing queen presented to them by my multiple requeening attempts, but no matter.

With the queen removed, the bees would be desperate to replace her. Thinking (and working) quickly, I effected a 'transfusion'. From the "queenless" and broodless problem hive, I transferred five of the deep frames of solid packed honey and pollen they had collected. In exchange, from the queenright colony I swapped in five deep frames of capped brood, eggs, and empty comb in the hopes that the workers from the ailing hive would finally recognize their queenlessness and take steps to raise a new one.  In both cases, I shook all the bees clinging to the frames back into their original hives to prevent any fighting.

Making room in the "not so queenless" hive.
Image c2011, Paul Smith.

Choosing frames to transfer from the queenright hive.
Image c2011, Alex Brown.

I can has babies?  Yes, I can!  A nice frame holding a large amount late stage capped and emerging brood, and even more eggs.  Perfect for providing a boost in population and the raw material to make a queen from.
Image c2011, Paul Smith.

Nice bee 'C', a solid laying pattern by the queen in the healthy hive.  Free of bees, you can swap frames from hive to hive without worrying about them being accepted.
Image c2011, Alex Brown.

But what did I do with the old, unlaying queen, you ask? Usually a dud queen like her gets squished and tossed into some rubbing alcohol to make "Queen Tea", a pheromone heavy brew that you can use to anoint swarm traps with queen scent. It's an old-school trick, and a great way to recycle extra queens, but obviously necessitates killing the queens. Ick.

Instead, I opted to put her into a retirement home. Taking an extra 8 frame hive body full of honey and pollen, I transferred a couple thousand bees from her original hive into a single story nuc. In the hopes that she'll continue raising viable drones to populate the local drone congregation areas (mating fields) until she peters out completely, I released her into her new home.

Putting together a retirement home for the sterile queen.
A bit of a downgrade in terms of space, but better than my hive tool to her face.
Image c2011, Alex Brown.

Letting the queen loose on the top bars of the 8 frame nuc.
Notice the lack of other bees on the top bars.
Image c2011, Alex Brown.

I don't think that I've ever seen bees form a court so quickly. Within seconds, the workers shaken into the nuc had formed a perfect circle surrounding the queen and marching her down between the frames. With pheromonal pull like that, it's no wonder that they refused to replace her.

The beginning of the court.  Approximately 10 seconds after release of the queen.
See how little she is?
Image c2011, Paul Smith.

Another view, a few seconds later.  A perfect court around the dud queen.
She is practically the same size as a worker and differs mainly by colouration.
Image c2011, Alex Brown.

Hot, sweaty, and feeling clever, I closed up the hives.

Whoof.
Image c2011, Alex Brown.

The following week, I cracked the hive open and found exactly what I had hoped for; a multitude of queen cells in various stages of development. Some were even capped. We’ve got queens. But will they be any good?

Hell if I know!

I guess we’ll find out in PART 3 of Queenright in Red Hook!

YES.
LOOKIT THAT FUCKING QUEEN!
Image c2011, Micah Garen.

This weekend, during my FREE Public Hive Inspection at the Added Value Community Farm in Red Hook, I'll (we'll?) find out if the new queen survived and managed to mate.

For the *live* conclusion of the tale, stay tuned or COME OUT and find out first hand! The fun will start at 11AM, across the street from IKEA.

Cross your fingers for better weather.


Can't check bees in the rain!

Queenright in Red Hook, Part 1

A Beekeeping Adventure in three parts.

Those of you who have made it to my public hive inspections at the Added Value Farm in Red Hook have heard the story about how one of the hives is a bit of a dud. A few weeks after I installed the hives, the queen started to fail, and then a month or so later, stopped laying completely.

Fact:  Girls like bees.  Or they're scared of them?  I always mix that one up.
Image c2011, Valery Rizzo

I made several attempts to requeen the hive, first by providing them with frames of eggs and very young larvae from its healthy sister. No new queens were made. In fact, many of the eggs were seemingly ignored; several frames of new brood were underfed and allowed to die.

Hmm.

Weird.

At least I like bees.
Image c2011, Valery Rizzo

I like talking about them too.  Or maybe I just like the sound of my own voice.
I can never remember.
Image c2011, Valery Rizzo

Then, I tried to give them a new queen provided by Mark Negley, the original provider of the nucleus colonies I started the season with. Caged, I hung her between some brood frames for a week and came back to check on her. The bees were feeding her through the cage rather than trying to bite at her; a good sign that she had been accepted by the workers, so off came the cap covering the candy plug and back in the hive she went. The next week I dug in to the hive expecting to see plenty of new eggs and young larvae.

Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

No sign of the new queen other than the empty queen cage.

Huh.

Gita helping me to inspect the queenright hive.
Image c2011, Valery Rizzo

Dennis having a look-see.  Again in the queenright hive.
Image c2011, Valery Rizzo

Well, if you don't succeed, try, try again, right? Time for another queen. After inspecting the hive to ensure that nothing had changed, I inserted another caged queen from a different source. A week later, I went back and found that the bees were completely ignoring her. Even when set in a cluster of bees, they just ignored the cage like it wasn't there.

Worse, I found eggs.

But not good eggs. Drone eggs. In worker cells. On the SIDES of worker cells, and often in multiples. This is one of the classic signs of a laying worker; the condition in which several workers of a queenless colony develop working ovaries due to the lack of inhibitory queen and brood pheromones which, in a queenright colony, prevent workers from laying. Unfortunately, because a laying worker is not a true queen, she doesn't have the capability or instinct to mate, so she can only lay unfertilized (haploid) drone (male) eggs. In the wild, this is a clever evolutionary trick; it allows a colony that was unable to raise a new queen or lost its virgin queen on a mating flight to propagate its genetic through the male line via mating with virgin queens from other colonies.

Actually, all the pictures in this article are from the queenright hive.
I just wanted to show you all the pretty pictures.
Also, lookit all 'dat honey!
Image c2011, Valery Rizzo

See?  Brood.  Definitely not from the hive in question.
A little of the capped stuff, but mostly eggs in those cells.
Image c2011, Valery Rizzo

However, in the bee yard, especially an urban one, a laying worker is often a death sentence. In the country, there is a method that many people use to fix a laying worker colony. Since a laying worker is just a regular worker with active ovaries, she is impossible to distinguish from a regular worker and remove physically, but as laying workers develop from young bees who have never left the hive, you can weed them out (along with all the other young non-foraging bees) by physically removing them from the hive. By shaking out ALL the bees in the hive several hundred yards away from the original hive location (too far for young and un-orientated bees to find their way back), you can eliminate the laying workers and the older bees will fly back to the original hive location. You can then requeen the weakened (but laying worker free) hive using the normal methods.

Nice lookin' capped brood.  Smile for the camera, babies.
Image c2011, Valery Rizzo

Bees.
I have them.
Image c2011, Valery Rizzo

Too bad you can't do that in the city. There are few locations large enough to get a couple hundred yards away from the original hive, let alone the fact that it seems rude to shake out thousands of bees and allow them to wander around the city queenless, homeless, hungry, and increasingly cranky. In the end, I decided to let nature take its course and let the hive die out. I figured that I would be able to use the honey and pollen they had collected over the summer to reinforce the healthy hive and give them a better chance of surviving the winter. I returned the second caged queen to the hive in the hopes that they would accept her and allow her to take over from the laying workers.

She was not so lucky.

During my next inspection, I found her and her attendants all dead in the cage with plenty of food remaining in the candy plug.

And so it went for several weeks. Then, something happened…

MY FACE IS BEES!
Image c2011, Valery Rizzo

Stay tuned for Part 2.