Second year beekeeping-every day is a challenge

     Well, it's been four months since I've added an update and what a "long, strange trip it's been." The summer started out with two strong hives and one brand new hive and then both of last year's hives swarmed.  The hive that I always called the "over achievers" seemed to be coming back slowly while the "party girls" never did get itself back on track. The former produced a new queen but the latter never did so I drove to northern Massachusetts and bought a new queen-just in time to celebrate the English monarchy's Diamond Jubilee.

I hoped that she'd be my own long reigning queen but two weeks later, there was no sign of her and the hive looked even weaker. The hive may have killed her or she might have just flown away but one way or another, it was a failure. I tried various other techniques including taking several frames of capped brood (baby bee eggs)

from my new hive (which thankfully is amazingly strong) and put them into the struggling hive. The reasoning behind that is to add more bees to the weak hive and help it build itself back up. That didn't work and then two weeks ago I went in for the weekly inspection and found this:

which on closer look is:

     This is where you say, "ick, ick, ick" as many times as I did!! This is called "wax moth" and is a moth that will infest hives, lay its eggs in the wax and then will virtually eat its way through the hive.  If the moths try to enter a strong hive, the bees will drive them out but in a weak hive, the hive just doesn't have enough soldiers to protect it and the hive may succumb. I followed all of the other Bee Club members ("beeks") suggestions.  I took out the infected frames and destroyed the most damaged and then froze the frames with only minor infestation. (Not to worry, I didn't put them next to the ice cream-I cleaned out the freezer, tied the frames into a plastic garbage bag and froze then by themselves.) Unfortunately, another week has gone by and the hive looks even weaker than before. I think the party girls are just runing out of time.

     The good news is that despite also getting infested with these damn moths, the "over achievers" hive seems to be rallying. I may have gotten to them in time or I may just be lucky or I may just be wrong, but right now, they seem to be struggling to their feet.

     And then, there's the new hive. You aren't supposed to get honey in a hives first year but apparently the new hive didn't hear that. So far I've harvested about 40 pounds of honey and there are almost three weeks left for them to store and cap some more.





     On a happier note, in addition to honey, beekeepers also can harvest wax from their hives. When you take the cappings off the honey-like in the above picture-you end up with a pile of wax which looks like this when you rinse off all the honey:

      You can't just melt it as is since it has pieces of bee bodies and other impurities from the hive mixed in. You need to expose it to high heat but not so high that it will burn. At the same time, you want to filter it so that just wax remains.  What is recommended is that you put it all into a stocking, and hang it in a solar melter and let nature help.  Solar melters are easy to construct from an old foam cooler lined with aluminum foil.

                         What's left is pure wax:                                                                

 and the leftover detritus:

      So right now, I have 40 pounds of bottled honey, a couple pounds of wax for making candles, one amazingly strong hive and two hives for which I have great concern.

     Sigh............to be continued.



Spring HAS sprung!

     April is coming to a close but the short, mild winter has caused our region's hives to appear as if it's a month ahead of what the calendar is saying.
     I did the first "real" inspection almost a month ago and my hive's personalities have completely reversed from a year ago. The "party girls" are quickly filling their frames with honey and their queen is laying eggs at a rapid rate. I noticed that the upper box was full of bees, eggs and honey and the lower box's frames were mostly empty. That indicates that the bees ate all the stored honey from the lower box and then moved up into the upper box to work and eat. I reversed the two boxes so that they'll live on the first floor (so to speak) and lay eggs and store honey in the now empty second floor. This is good for them and good for me as the queen will increase their number by utilizing the empty frames to lay more eggs.  They were extremely aggressive-to the point of following me into the garage and even coming over and dive bombing me an hour later! I checked them again about two weeks ago and both boxes are crowded with bees so I put on a honey super to give them room to grow-and hopefully have an early harvest. Bees will swarm if they feel too crowded so an empty honey super (see below)

gives them work and space. They'll take empty wax frames, build comb on it and then fill the comb with honey.
   The "over achievers" hive has actually lagged behind. I believe that I mentioned being worried about them in the last post, and when I did the March inspection, I found them to have almost no stored honey and the laying pattern was weaker than the other hive. I put a feeder on this hive and within two weeks (and about 6 gallons of syrup) they'd caught up. I think (as I feared) that there were so many bees in this hive that they had consumed all their honey stores and were on the brink of starvation-they actually went through a gallon of syrup the first day! PHEW, caught that in time.
   And last weekend, my third hive was set up and the bees arrived on Saturday-a beautiful 60+ day, perfect for installation. Well, should have been perfect however..........I got the bees home and they were very active in the box with few dead ones at the bottom etc. The deal is that one takes the queen cage out of the package first (it's suspended in the package by a cord)  and she is installed in the empty hive before liberating the rest of the 3 pounds of insects). I unstapled the cord holding the cage, took off the lid of the package only to find that the queen cage wasn't at the other end of the cord but had fallen into the general population. Great, so now I need to first figure out where she was (all the bees cluster around her so you can't see her or the cage) and then reach into the package of bees to get her out.

Doesn't that look like fun? Luckily, one good rap of the package on the ground and the majority fell to the bottom and the cage was easy to see and relatively easy to get out. Needless to say, some of the other bees were freed at the same time and they weren't terribly excited with me, especially after the rapping, but it was all good.
     Now, a little side bar and a beekeeping "dirty secret". I HATE getting stung and will do just about anything to prevent it. There, I've said it. I go to our bee club meetings and people talk about going into the hives bare handed, or without a helmet/veil or in a tank top and short sleeves and I think that they clearly don't have the same aversion as me to the stings! Last year, I was stung a couple of times and it made me uneasy when working with the hives 'cause I was afraid of the next event. So this spring, I splurged on a wonderful one piece, thick mesh, suit that is impossible for the girls to get through.

(Yes, I look like an alien but hey, it works!)

And with my new suit, I've noticed a huge difference in the way I work at the hive and also the bees level of aggression while I'm in there. Our instructors told us that bees will pick up on your mood and clearly they have. Now that I'm calmer, they're calmer as well.

     O.k., back to my installation. So once I got the queen in the new hive, I poured all the bees into the hive and turned to put my brand new feeder on top. I had already filled it with syrup and some medicine for the new hive, but when I put it on I realized that I'd ordered the wrong size and this one was too small. It left an inch gap on either side of the hive and would be disastrous to leave on as water and predators could get into the hive. I had to run into the house (in my full regalia) and grab an old feeder out of the basement, put it on the hive and pour the syrup from one to the other. I closed up the hive only to notice that I'd set the hive up backward so the bees were in a modified Hotel California kind of situation: they could check in any time they liked but they could never leave. So once more, I lifted the new hive up, turned it around and called it a day.

Then

Now

    It's now a waiting game to see what the weather does as that will influence nectar flow and honey production. The honey super on the party girls hive was being built out very slowly but I've read on our club's Facebook page that the experts say to expect that in the drought we've been having. No rain means no plants growing thus no nectar. It's raining today and is supposed to rain most of the week so that will be a boon to the bees and will lessen the worry of brush fires that our region has already had.





Down Time

Winter in New England is usually a down time for beekeepers.  The bees are holed up during the frigid weather and our instructors told us that these cold months are the time to catch up on reading our bee journals and getting our equipment ready for the spring.

 Unfortunately, we seem to have decided to skip winter this year and have had unseasonably warm weather-I would imagine our average temperature has been in the 30-40 degree range.  Last year our area had so much snow that roofs were collapsing and this year we've had exactly one "storm" and it left less than 6 inches of the white stuff.
Because of this and the surprisingly great number of days in the high 40s and lower 50s, we've seen a lot more activity at the hive entrances than we should.  The problem with that is that if the girls are out flying around, they're going through their stored honey faster than they would normally and run the risk of starving in the months of February and March, when there is still little pollen and/or nectar available. Our bee association Facebook page has been abuzz (sorry) with talk of feeding pollen patties or not and trading recipes for fondant versus sugar bricks.  Sugar bricks are made with a lot of sugar and a very little bit of water and fondant is made with sugar, water, and corn syrup:

I've been adding one or two of these plates of fondant to the hives each month since the middle of December and they are being devoured. The bees are none to happy that I'm opening their roofs and letting the cold air in but they cover my gloves, and the fondant as soon as I start to lay it in the hive.
When you put the fondant in the hive, you break each circle up into   6-8 pieces so that there is a greater surface area for the bees to utilize.
My overachievers hive is the one that I'm now more worried about because there are markedly more bees in the top of that hive than in the top of the party girls hive. The theory is that the bees start in the lower hive body and then eat their way up to the top hive body and by the time they've exhausted their stored honey then it should be spring and time for them to forage in the wild. By December, I was already seeing bees in the top hive body at the over achiever hive and now there are a vast number in that area. Maybe the large number is there because I'm feeding them and they're waiting there for the fondant but only time will tell. The party girl hive has some bees at the very top but not a huge number. Hopefully this means that the rest are doing what they're supposed to be doing and hanging out below and doesn't mean that many of them have just died off and that's the reason for the lower numbers that I'm seeing.
Ah, being a beekeeper is full of uncertainty!!! I'll have to wait until April to really be able to get into the hives, look around and access how each colony made it through the winter.
In the meantime, I'm keeping an eye on the hives to see how much sun they're getting now that so many trees have been taken down around them and readying my new hive.  I may have mentioned that our club holds raffles at their meetings and at one this summer I won a new hive set up! I'm quite excited and have ordered another box of bees so that I can expand my apiary from two to three hives.  I was tempted to go ahead and use some of my extra equipment and make it an even four but since checking on the hives in full gear in July and August is hot and uncomfortable........I think three sounds just right.