Tag Archive for: beekeeping

Warm water, and What Not to Do in Your Hives

Winter preparation of hives is the concern on everyone’s mind right now. Hopefully, everything is done already. The brood should be in the bottom hive body, and honey and bee bread consolidated in the box(es) above. The queen excluder should be removed, so that the bees can’t accidentally abandon the queen in moving to upper honey frames.  A shim should be in place on top of the uppermost hive body to allow for sugar or candy boards, with an upper exit in front, not in back, of the hive. Mouse guards need to be in place. Solid bottoms/sliders should be in.

The reason we do all of this early is so that the bees can propolize everything together so that there aren’t drafts going through the cluster. Now, what is most important for us to do in our bees is…nothing. Don’t worry about them being cold, bees can handle cold. Don’t try to help them with cold in any way that would decrease ventilation. Don’t separate hive bodies, don’t break the propolis seals. Don’t disturb the bees. Do go out and tip the hive forward, just enough that you can feel how heavy it is. This is your point of reference for later in the winter as to whether they need supplemental feeding.

Also, the bees are still collecting water, but they need warm water. I put warm water out, but it gets cold quickly.  The bees fill up on it, the cold paralyses them, and they fall in. This is the perfect time of year to use the ash from your wood stove to keep the bee water warm. Each morning, shovel the warm ash out of the wood stove, into a metal five gallon bucket. A metal deep pizza pan with warm water goes on top. The pizza pan keeps the wind from blowing ash all over and potentially starting a fire, while the ash keeps the water just warm enough for the bees. Enjoy watching the bees at the water, dump it out in the afternoon.  T

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Finding clues in brood frames, hive inspection.

First clues to search for in a hive inspection

capped honey bee brood

capped honey bee brood

eggs and honey bee larvae in royal jelly

eggs and honey bee larvae in royal jelly

capped honey

capped honey

the queen

the queen
The 1-2-3 of every hive inspection
1) Is there a queen, and does the brood look all right?
2) Does the colony have enough food?
3) Does the colony have enough room?
1) The Queen
The top left photo shows capped brood.  Capped brood alone does not tell us that there is a queen present.  It tells us that there was a queen present 9 days ago.  (brood gets capped 9 days after the egg was laid).  Once there is no capped brood we know that the queen has been missing for 21 days, since that is how long it takes for brood to go from egg to emergence.
1b) Does the brood look all right?
The top right photo shows larvae on the left side (those wormy things floating in royal jelly) and eggs on  the right side.  Eggs that are standing up straight were laid today.  Eggs laying half-way over were laid yesterday.  Eggs laying on their sides are 3 days old.  Seeing eggs in any position is good enough to think that there is a queen present.   Just seeing the queen, bottom right photo isn’t really enough for me.  I want to know that she is laying, and that the brood is looking good, so I always want to see the eggs, larvae, and capped worker brood.  If you see a queen and only capped drone brood, she may be brand new and not laying yet, or she may have run out of sperm, a drone layer.  This is a good reason to mark your queen, so you know if a supercedure occurs.
2)  Enough honey?
The bottom left photo shows capped honey.  See how the texture of the honey cappings look shiny compared to the leathery brood cappings?   If your hive has capped honey, you should not be feeding anymore.  Even a couple of frames of open nectar is plenty to tell you to stop feeding.  If there is no nectar or capped honey, feed 1:1 sugar water in a safe manner that will not induce robbing.
3) Is there enough space?
Is there plenty of room for the queen to lay eggs?  If the bees are putting nectar in the brood chamber, they need more room.  Put a sheet of drawn comb or a frame with foundation between the brood and honey frames, not in the middle of the brood chamber.
    3b) Is there enough room for honey?
Frames 1 and 10 should be honey.  Frames 2 and 9 should be honey and bee bread.  Frames 3,4,5,6,7. and 8 should be brood.  Frames 1 and 10 will be the last to be filled.  When frames 2-9 are finished, move 1 and 10 into the 2 and 9 spaces, and add another hive body.
Top bar and long hives should have honey at the door, bee bread next, followed by brood.  Keep moving the first honey frame back and adding bars or frames behind the last brood bar so that the bees can draw it for brood if they need more room for babies.
The goal in good beekeeping is to help the bees do what they want to do.  They want lots of babies, they want adequate honey stores for winter, they want a defensible space, not too big nor too small.  Check for the 1-2-3 every time you inspect so that your hive remains healthy and well fed. (every other week)
Many thanks to Carol Tyrrell for her consultation on this tip of the day!  Happy Beekeeping!  T
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Attempting to solve a “hopeless” honey bee problem

I must admit, I have a terrible weakness as a beekeeper. I can never give up. I see my girls trying their best to overcome some hurdle, and I want to help. After all, they haven’t given up.But, aside from ridiculous empathy for my bees, why put time and effort into a (usually) losing battle?  Because I learn so much about the bees, about the problem, and often, about other problems that can be solved if only we know the solution. The risk as stated by one of my mentors when I told him what I was doing this week, “sounds like you are going to mess both colonies up”.  So, before starting down the rocky road, asses your skill level and ask truthfully how likely you are to make one problem into two, or make the initial problem worse.

This particular adventure started with the solar eclipse last August, the bee-clipse, as it has been dubbed.  I discovered swarm cells in one of my colonies right before the eclipse.  I also found the old queen.  I pulled her and 4 frames of bees and brood, with no queen cells out into a nuc. My thinking was that there was a high probability that the new queen would not mate properly, or would not return from mating at all, I would return the old queen and bees to the hive, and we would go on preparing for winter. Another mentor laughed and said they were supercedure cells, and just wait and see. “Ha! I know the difference between supercedure and swarm cells”, I thought. Oddly, the old queen did not resume laying in her new digs for two weeks. When she finally did lay some eggs, the bees started supercedure cells. The queen did not lay well at all, but only a small patch of brood. Arghhh!

The bees must have killed the old queen, or she died, and neither new queen returned from mating flights. I re-combined the hives. So, now in mid-September I find I have a queenless colony. A friend has the same situation playing out in one of her hives, she says she’ll give me the old queen if her new one mates. We wait. In the meantime, some of my workers begin to lay. This means they will likely kill an introduced queen. The situation is becoming worse every day. Standard advice for a laying worker colony is not to bother with it. Shake the bees out onto the ground in the apiary, remove their hive so there is no home to come home to, and they will assimilate and be nice where ever they are allowed in. Alternatively, I have heard that you can just combine them all with a strong colony, but I have never been brave enough to risk a good queen that way.

Finally in October, my friend sees eggs from her newly mated queen, and gives me her old girl. I learned a trick from Ross Conrad this summer about getting acceptance, and I had successfully used it in a colony that had killed 4 queens. (Messing around in a hopeless situation, that turned out not to be hopeless). I sprayed all the bees with a 4x concentration of Honey B Healthy and 1:1 sugar water and installed the queen in her cage without attendants, waited 3 days, sprayed them all again, including the queen, and direct released her. Ross says he has never gone the extra step and direct releases the queen  immediately. I always add a sheet of capped brood along with the queen in a situation like this to help normalize the pheromones in the hive.  This trick worked here as well, and in October, the colony accepted my friend’s queen, but though she had been laying well previously, she did not lay any eggs in her new home. There were plenty of old bees, but no fat bees to live all the way through winter. This is just something new to watch and learn from.

Since it is a top bar hive, I can open it without chilling the entire brood chamber, which led me to discover this week that there was no brood chamber, but only about 200 bees and the queen remained alive. Another hopeless situation. I had nothing to lose by messing with them. Now we are up to where my mentor told me I would destroy both colonies. The only salvation I could imagine was to take brood and bees from my booming colony across the yard and donate them to my lonely queen. Stopping to assess the risk, I asked myself about the likelihood of accidentally moving the queen from the good colony along with the brood. I decided that I would only proceed if I actually found the queen and could keep her safe. I would hopefully give the struggling queen enough bees to cover a small brood chamber along with a few young and fat bees. Again, the Honey B Healthy trick saved the day. I sprayed all the bees and the queen and prayed a little prayer, and the new bees accepted the queen and her tiny retinue. It remains to be seen whether this will work, or whether I learned how not to make a light bulb, but either way, I win, because I will learn something.  I’ll write and let you know what it is when I figure it out.  T

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