Mom always loved you best.

I know you’re supposed to love all of your children the same but certainly hope that it doesn’t hold true for bees as well! I’ve started referring to my two hives as the “over achievers” and the “problem children”.

The latter is the hive that I needed to re-queen and when I was refilling the sugar syrup on Monday, I noticed hive beetle larvae in the feeding tray. After I finished saying “ick, ick, ick”, I fished out the little wormy things, rinsed it out and refilled it with clean syrup. I chatted with my bee association buddies and they recommended hive traps so those are on order now and hopefully will be here when I check the hive again in a week.  More worrisome is the fact that I put the second hive body on nearly three weeks ago and there are no eggs laid in it at all. The bees are busily building out the comb but it is completely empty right now.  I was in the hive for a very quick check Monday-I didn’t get home until nearly 7 and the “girls” weren’t pleased to be bothered so late in the day.  Since it was so late, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time looking to see if the queen was still there and laying eggs but will do a thorough check next week. There has always been less activity around this hive and though I don’t want to label them “slow”……….they just might not be Mensa material.

My other hive is definitely one to make a new beekeeper proud! There are a slew of bees in all of the chambers, the air in front of the opening always resembles Logan Airport, and most exciting of all-I have honey for harvesting!! When I saw that last night, I was as thrilled as if I had produced it myself! Now, there’s not enough honey to allow me to quit my day job and work as a distributor but it’s a start. Each honey super holds 10 frames and each frame is about 5 inches wide by 16 inches long.

(this is just an example of what the frames look like-they're building comb on the upper part of this one)

Imagine three or four frames with honey on each side and you get the idea of how much we have so far.  The first“nectar flow” of the year-when the spring/summer flowers bloom-is just about over, it usually ends right around the 4^th of July. After this flow, seasoned beekeepers tell me that the bees won’t build up much wax because there’s not as much nectar to gather so why bother building storage space?  So they’ll have a little down time where they will continue making honey from whatever nectar they can collect and will fill the comb that has been constructed up until this point.

The next flow will start in August and go through September so I’ll just leave the super on and they can add to it when the next flowers and plants bloom. I’ll plan on extracting the majority of the crop in the fall but might pull some of the frames a bit earlier to have some honey to give as gifts when my family is here in August.

Just like babies

So recently our family was blessed with this beautiful child.

To respect his privacy, I'll leave out any identifiers but he is gorgeous, isn't he? Ok, all that aside, I've mentioned to his mother that just when you think you know him and his routine, he'll change it and apparently bees are the same way.
Now this fact could be true for bees because they have a life cycle of about six weeks. This means that as soon as you get a grip on their personality, they've been replaced by another colony. My circuitous point is that the hive that was always the calmer hive (Jack's hive-the one that was re-queened) is now much more aggressive while my hive-which was so aggressive that I always left it for last-has calmed down to an amazing degree. The good news about that is that even the aggressive hive is calmer than its predecessor so I'm now down to a long-sleeved t-shirt instead of a sweatshirt!
The weather has been wonderful for the last few days-we missed the tornados that hit central Massachusetts on Tuesday-but instead had an impressive thunder and lightning storm. Nonetheless, the girls have been able to get out and are working like crazy which I discovered when I opened the hives and found that both  had consumed all of their sugar syrup. I'm hoping that the reason they're going through so much syrup is because both queens are laying like crazy and they need the syrup to supplement gathered nectar to feed the new bees. On that note, one thing that beekeepers have in common is large supplies of sugar in their pantries.

(shameless product placement-corporate sponsor, maybe?)

So out I went with another two gallons of a 1:1 sugar/water syrup and refilled both feeders.
Now, I have repeatedly been bothered by the number of bees who drown in the feeders despite the little wooden tracks. Then this week, my instructor had sent pictures of a hive where another beekeeper had addressed this problem with screening. I was searching for something that I could use for this purpose and had an "ah-ha" moment . I took the boxes the bees arrived in and removed their screens.

Then I cut the screens into strips and laid them on top of the slats with the following results.

Cool, huh? Hopefully it will help keep the bee death toll down.

Jack's hive is almost ready for another hive body and my hive may be a week or 10 days away from my adding a honey super. As I'd explained previously, each hive needs two hive bodies filled with comb and  honey for their winter use.  Once those bodies are built out, the honey super is added and any honey stored in there will be ours to harvest (and give as presents!). There is a piece of equipment called a queen excluder that is placed between the hive body and the honey super and it does as it's name suggests.

The slats are the right size for the worker bees to come through so they will build comb and fill it with honey. However, the queen is too large to make it through so their will be no eggs/larvae in the honey super and more importantly-in the honey.