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.