The Cultured Home

Here is what I found in today’s inspection:

Tango hive:  (new top bar hive)

Humid inside!  I need to drill some ventilation holes in the bottom, and maybe another entrance hole.  There is comb drawn on 7 bars, 5 of which are completely drawn.  Some capped honey is on the end, but otherwise it’s relatively light on nectar–the bees have been using it to generate wax.  This is fine now, but it means that I’ll need to feed them through the bloom dearth that hits in late May.  Capped brood is visible, with a lot of eggs.  The queen has been busy.  I did see her but I had not set out to find her.

I removed the empty syrup can which came with the package.

Oscar hive:  (observation hive)

The frame behind the window has not been maintained by the nurse bees.  A few come up to feed the brood, but not enough.  Many of the cells have larva that are dry.  Many eggs did not hatch because they got chilled for lack of nurse bees and were removed 4 days after the frames were put in.  A host of drones had been stuck last week behind the queen excluder between the top window and the bottom 5 frame nuc box.  I released them, and the kids caught many of them as pets.  They are now inside the house in various tube & cardboard cages.

At least 7 capped queen cells were in the bottom 5 frames.  Hooray!  I moved one frame up to the top position, so I can see when she hatches out.

24 hour mite drop on Wednesday evening, 4/21 was 18 mites.  Contact paper was not sticky enough to hold the mites, so the next day I used a plastic board coated with coconut oil, which seems to work better.  A 30 window yielded 13 mites Friday morning, 4/23.

It was a little tricky getting the access tube re-attached to the hive when I finished because it was full of workers trying to get back “home”.  No major problems, and only 3 bees were released inside the house.  They were promptly squished.

Alpha hive:  (The original queen & half the frames that I split from)

The bees have pulled comb and completely filled two of the empty frames I put in last Friday.  Worker brood, drone brood, eggs, capped honey, nectar & pollen are there in abundance.  I have them in 2 western boxes now, but they have not yet moved down into the bottom box.  All looks great here.

Bravo hive:  (one of the new nucleus hives; 5 frames of a western box with a separate entrance)

Well populated with young bees, and even many foragers coming and going.  It is adjacent to the original alpha hive, and has benefited from “drift” from the returning foraging worker bees.  3-6 queen cells visible, some open and some capped.  One was broken open because it was attached to adjacent frames–I’m glad there were spares!  This also looks very good with stores of honey, nectar, pollen.  There are a lot of capped drone brood.

Charlie hive: (the 2nd of the new nucleus hives)

Same as bravo hive above, except I didn’t inspect the last two frames which I could see had been waxed together by the bees.  There were a couple of queen cells in frame #3, and I expect there are several others in the last two frames.  I didn’t want to risk breaking them.  All looks great on this one too.

Notes:

Overcast but fairly warm ~60F.  Inspection done at 12:30 PM.

My goal has been to keep about 6 beehives.  Last year I started with 2, ended with 1, and learned a ton about beekeeping.  That one hive is doing great, and there’s still about 3-4 weeks left on the major spring “bloom”, so it’s a good time to split the hive before it swarms.  The queen will stay in her original home, the “Alpha hive”.

I moved 6 frames into my ulster observation hive, which is a regular 5 frame deep nuc box with a special 6th frame top behind glass. I’m calling this new hive my “Oscar hive”.  It comes into the house, but the bees can access the outside through a tube connected to the window.  Officially it’s a homeschool project, but I’ll enjoy watching it as much as the kids will!

These bees walk through the tube to get outside the window.

Last year I got a hive box that is split in half, with 5 frames on one side and 5 frames on the other, with a divider board between them.  Each side has it’s own entrance and top feeder.  I moved 8 full frames and 2 empty frames into this box, equally split between the two sides.  These two new hives I’m calling “Bravo” & “Charlie”.

My top bar hive has now been dubbed the “Tango hive”.

Each of the new hives get frames containing a mix of capped brood, larva, unhatched eggs, nurse bees, and honey.  I reoriented the old hive so the entrance faces a new direction, and put the split hive box adjacent to it so returning foraging worker bees will have to decide which hive was theirs, with a portion “drifting” into the new hives.

Each half of this box is a small "nucleus hive".

Each of these new hives should rear a new queen from their young brood or unhatched worker eggs.  It takes 28 days for a new queen to grow from a fertilized egg to a mated & laying queen, and I’ll enjoy watching the progress along the way.

Hopefully this will all go well.

Here is a new queen cup on a brood frame

There are new opportunities every day.

Yesterday afternoon, I inspected my beehive.  The maple trees have been in full bloom for the past few weeks, and the bees have definitely made the most of it.  Their population has more than doubled since the bloom began there’s a lot of fresh wax and it’s loaded with nectar, pollen, & brood.  The hive looks great! 

The bees also think it looks great because I discovered they had built several swarm cells on the frames.  This means the queen and half of the bees are getting ready to leave home.  I have wanted to increase my hives, so now I’ve got the chance to do it.  If I do nothing, then the old queen and about half of the worker bees will swarm away in search of a new home shortly before the new queen hatches out.  However, I’d rather not lose half of my bees if I can avoid it.  Many beekeepers cut out these swarm cells when they find them, but I’m taking it as an opportunity to split them into another hive.  

There were no eggs or larva in the cells yet—they weren’t there when I opened the hive last week.  I can expect a new queen to emerge 16 days after an egg is laid in them.  The old queen should stay in the hive until the new queen cell is sealed up during its pupa stage—8 days after the egg is laid.  That means I’ve got a week from today to split this hive in two.

Addendum:  I’ve since learned that it is normal to have empty queen cups in the hive, and that the queen will not lay in it until it is needed.

Packages of worker bees w/a queen; One of these is mine

The queens came in individual cages, and ran $20 each if you just wanted to re-queen your hive. The whole family was along with me when we got them, and we all got to see how they were delivered.

The queen that I bought was in a tiny wooden box like this, only it was hanging inside the box of worker bees.

Nurse bees tend the cages of single queens waiting for a hive

Nurse bees tend the cages of single queens waiting for a hive

I ordered a new package of honey bees this year through the Puget Sound Beekeepers Association.  For $75, I got 3 lbs of bees (about 12,000 insects, but I didn’t count) along with a queen.  I picked up my new bees on noon Sunday, which turned out to be a nice spring day. 
 
After we got home, ate lunch, and had our usual afternoon Siesta, they were ready to go into their new home.  I put the finishing touches on our new top bar hive (http://www.biobees.com/), and moved it out to a good sunny spot in our back pasture.  Although I had aspirations to build one out of recycled pallets, I was pressed for time, and used the scrap plywood instead.  (that still counts as recycled wood in my book)  The biggest change to the construction plans was the addition of a viewing window to make it easy to follow what happens inside.  

New top bar hive ready for bees

This hive is 15” wide at the top (inside dimension), 6” at the bottom, and 48” long.  There are 34 bars are 17-½” long and 1-3/8” wide, one of which has a divider attached so I can adjust how much space the bees have.  This is my first top bar hive, and I do not have bars with drawn comb.  That means there is a risk that the bees may choose to draw comb in the wrong direction.  To help them choose wisely, I’ve notched the bars so there is a bit of wood hanging down about 1/8” for the bees to hang onto.  

These top bars have a bump so the bees hang straight comb

Installation was pretty simple.  I just opened the box and dumped the bees in.  Because packaged bees don’t have a hive to defend they are quite gentle.  I’m wearing gloves in this picture because it keeps me relaxed when working with the bees, and a calm beekeeper makes for more docile bees. 

The queen cage is in my pocket

I gave the bees 12 top bars of space to get started.  As they increase, I will move the follower down the hive and give them more bars to hang comb on.  Until they have enough stores built up, they need supplemental feed too.  The can of syrup that came with the package is sitting inside the hive on a couple of short sticks as a feeder.  I will remove it in a day or two and feed dry sugar after the syrup is gone.  

A towel keeps the queen from flying away when I open her cage

These bees have spent the last 3 days in a box together with their new queen, so they will accept her without more delay.  That means that I was able to do a “direct release” of the queen into the mass of worker bees.  She could still fly away if she wanted to, so I draped a towel over me to prevent her from escaping.  Once that job was done, the last of the top bars went back in place, the roof went over them, and I left them to their new home.