Hey, Bees..Bad Timing!

There's a well-known beekeeper poem that comes to mind today:

A swarm in May — is worth a load of hay.

A swarm in June — is worth a silver spoon.

A swarm in July — isn't worth a fly.

 With all these back issues in the past year, I've been a terrible beekeeper.  So I was so excited to see that my first hive survived their first year.  In fact, they seemed to be flourishing.   But here we are at the arrival of Spring and the weather has been awesome and I still haven't been able to get out to check on the hive. 

 

So you can imagine how mortified I was when J. showed me this picture that he had captured while checking on the chickens tonight.

 

Yep, the bees have swarmed up into the new sugar maple that we planted last year.  I'd say they are in a mass about the size of a bowling ball and J. says they're about 10 feet up.

 

I'd love to catch them and put them into a second hive that I had prepared for the day I could split the hive.  Question is...it's dark outside now.  Will they stay there overnight or will they be gone in the morning?  And can I even move them with this bad back of mine?   Surgery is in 36 hours!

 

I guess I can't be too sad if they are gone when the sun comes up.  Swarming is a natural lifecycle of bees and it just shows that the hive was really strong and outgrew their home.  Hopefully, the old hive should still be viable and working on getting a new queen up and running.  J. certainly isn't going to check given his bee-phobia and there's no way I can do it until I've recuperated. 

This swarm may have to be the one that got away.

 

Feeding Bees in Winter

 

My beehive has been without human intervention for most of the year, since the issues with my back have pretty much kept me from doing any heavy lifting or even standing for more than a couple of minutes at a time.  And who wants to sit down next to an open, active  beehive?  I'm not that confident yet.

I've been monitoring the bees busy comings and goings from the hive all summer and fall and am pretty sure that they had filled the second super with stored honey, but not knowing for certain could translate into a lot of dead bees.  The turn into January is bringing Old Man Winter's icy fingers - this week is going to be extremely cold and with possible snow.  I couldn't bear not knowing if the bees were OK.  Reluctantly, J. agreed to help me check on them and give them some supplemental food, if they needed it. 

It was fairly sunny but cold (39 degrees), which isn't an ideal time to open a beehive.  Ideally, it would be a minimum of 50.  I certainly wanted to take care of this as quickly as possible to prevent the hive getting too chilled.  After removing the outer cover, I saw a thriving colony just below the inner cover.  This had me worried, as bees move up the hive as they eat their stores and bees near the top might indicate that they are running low on food.

Removing the inner cover and exposing the frames, I could easily see that they had filled all the frames with honey with the exception of the outermost frames.  From what I could see, they still had plenty of honey stores.  Bees cluster together in the center of the hive to keep warm in cold weather and, when I removed the inner cover, the top of the cluster spilled out onto the top of the frames a bit.  The weather makes the bees calm and non-aggressive, but that left-most bee (the one facing left) gave me a friendly buzz to let me know our meddling in the chilly weather wasn't very welcome.  Shortly after that, she landed on my hand and sat there.  Was she trying to decide whether or not to sting me?

Working quickly, I added a medium super on top of the hive (it was all I had - in fact, it wasn't even painted yet!)   This will give the bees room to reach the food we were adding.  Then I misted water onto both sides of a sheet of newspaper that was folded in half and placed it on the top of the frames.  It did cover some of the bees, but they moved back down into the hive and out from under it.  Next, I poured sugar on top of the newspaper just enough so that it was covered and then misted the sugar with water.   Then more sugar (about half a pound) and more misted water. The sugar will soak up the water and form a hard crust. 

This kind of feeding is called "mountain camp feeding".

Finally, the inner and outer covers went back on, and we added some heavy rocks to keep everything sitting tightly together since the bees haven't had time to "cement" the new super in place.The bees will eat through the newspaper to get to the sugar, and the newspaper also protects them from any condensation that might drip down from the covers.  A wet bee is a chilled bee, so I was careful to not mist any of them.

According to the Farmer's Almanac, the weather is supposed to turn milder later this month, so I will check them again in a couple of weeks when the weather is warmer to see how much of the sugar they've gone through. If necessary, we'll repeat the process and possibly add a pollen patty as well. 

This hive is less than a year old and I really want to see it survive. I think I've done the right thing after all my research.  Any experienced beekeepers out there that are willing to share some advice for this newbie?

Indian Summer is Here!

It's late September and it should be cool sweatshirt and shorts weather.  Summer isn't ready to go yet, I guess, because it's still sunny and in the 80's.  While we were out working on the final wiring on the panels, I snagged these pics of my girls out and about enjoying the local flora and soaking up some sun.

A Bee Update

Let me start this post off by saying that I'm worried that I've been a bad beekeeper.  You see, I haven't been back in the hive since I put the bees into it about 8 weeks ago.  Chalk it up to being a beginner, but I ordered a medium super rather than a deep from Mann Lake and then had to re-order, which delayed me getting everything ready.  Then, of course, it had to be assembled and painted.

 

And, honestly, I've been a little scared about getting stung.  I guess everyone goes through that.  So I decided I had to put on my big girl's panties and get to work.

 

First, I puffed some smoke into the hive entrance and then under the cover to calm them down.  This was my first time using my new smoker, but it was pretty easy to figure out.  I used cardboard packing from our solar project as the kindling.

 

Then I took off the outer cover and the inner cover to find that they had built wax on the bottom of the inner cover and were busy eating some of the honey stored there.

 

I suspected this meant that they were pretty crowded in there and that I was late in putting on another super for them.  I was glad to see so many bees on the top of the frames.  They were busy licking themselves and were totally calm and ignoring me. Whew!

 

I carefully pried up the frames with my hive tool to find that all 10 frames are full, with the outside frames with drawn comb and almost full of capped honey.  I was definitely late to the party because, from everything I've read so far, you're supposed to add another super when 7 or 8 of the frames have drawn comb.  If they get too crowded, they can decide to swarm.

 

So I added another deep super on top and replaced the inner cover on top of it.  When I went to replace the outer cover, I accidentally banged it into the hive.  Ahhh!  It caused a buzzzzz and a couple of bees came up to investigate but no catastrophe happened.  Whew!



That's a whole row of honeysuckle next to the hive.  This honey is going to be yummy!

 

After having done some more research, I now realize that I should have pulled some of the drawn comb upward and added some empty frames to the bottom brood box.  We've got some rainy days coming, so I'm going to wait a couple of days and then check on them when it's sunny again.  I'll be looking for comb being drawn in the second super and, hopefully, the queen will have made her way up to start laying there.  The fact is....the bees are going to do what the bees are going to do and there's nothing I can do about it.

 

If there are any experienced beekeepers reading this, I'd welcome any advice you have as to what I should be doing differently!  Thanks,

 

 

This post is part of this week's Home Acre Hop. 

 

The Bees Are Here!

The past week and weekend has been a whirlwind for me - I got an unexpected job offer for an excellent opportunity that I'm really excited about and I must have been so excited that I ended up sick with a temp that went as high as 103.8 degrees.  If it had gone any higher, I told J. he was going to have to drive me to the hospital.  Luckily, it came down within 24 hours.  So forgive me for the long silence since my last post.

On Thursday, I got a call from Joli at Heartland Honey that the bees were in and could be picked up either Friday or Saturday.  Since I was on vacation Friday and all of next week, I decided to make the drive down to pick them up on Friday. They come in a little box with screen sides, and I was deathly afraid they would get out and come after me on the 30 minutes drive home.  We buzzed along all the way home...

The whole kit and kaboodle!

The bee hive that I won came in pieces and had to be put together, but it wasn't too hard and it came with everything I needed except for the wood glue.  Just wood glue and screws.  Then two coats of good exterior latex paint.  Bees like light colors, so I used our leftover house paint that's called "Plantation White".  Zippide doo dah, zippidee-ay!  My, oh my, what a wonderful day!  (If you don't get that Chevy Chase reference, click here!)

Gluein' and screwin'.  Oh, and some clampin' too....

Having read that early evening was the best time to install the bee package, I tried to stay in bed as long as I could.  My temp was down to 102.9 when I suited up to take the hive out and put them in.  Yep, I felt terrible, but I would have felt worse if I didn't get them in there and they started to die off.

J. carried everything out for me and helped find a spot in the corner of the yard where they won't be bothered.  The first thing you do is remove the inner three or four frames.  Then spray the bees with syrup water (ratio of 1 water:1 sugar).  This calms them and gives them something to eat as they lick each other clean.

The top of the package has a can in it that contains more sugar water.  When you remove that can, the bees can get out, but you need to remove it to get the queen out.  She's suspended in a cage so that the other bees can't sting her before they accept her.  (These are not HER bees yet...)

You suspend her in between two of the frames and then shake about half a cup of the bees on top of her. Then the rest get shaken into where the frames were that you removed.  Replace the frames gently, add the inner and outer cover and....voila!  You now have bees.

Not all the bees will come out of the package when you shake it and that's OK.  The rest of the bees in the box will eventually follow their fellow bees' pheromones out and into the hive.  When I checked on them today, everyone had made their way out.

In a couple of days, I'll have to go in and release the queen from her cage.   The bees are feeding her through the cage and they need to get to know her before accepting her as queen of the hive.  All in all, this has been a pretty cool experience so far.  We'll see if I say the same thing when I get walloped with a stinger.  Hopefully that never happens!

I'm sharing this with post with this week's Homestead Barn Hop and the Backyard Farming Connection. Go check 'em out!

The Latest Buzz

Finally!  A chance to sit down and catch my breath this week, even if it was only to spend the day in a standing-room only Beginning Beekeepers Workshop put on the Midwestern Beekeepers Association.  They announced that they had expected about 60 people to sign up and they had 175, with another 60 applications that they had to turn away.  Who knew beekeeping was so popular?

 

$60 for the 8-hour workshop included a book on beginning beekeeping, all of the slide materials, lunch and snacks.  There were vendors there with all the starter equipment and I came home with a ton of magazines.  You know how sometimes classes like this can be too high-level and just not worth your time?  Not this one.  Wow!  They covered everything from bee anatomy, their behavior, where to put your hives, how to extract honey, how to build your wooden hives, etc.  There were demonstrations with the equipment as well (without the bees, of course).

 

I wasn't in a spot where I could get really pictures, so I'm sorry I don't have any for you.  How about this picture from Wikipedia?  I don't know about you, but it makes me pine for Spring.

Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

So here's the crazy news.  They must have given away more than 50 door prizes throughout the day and I was so bummed when they didn't call my name.  But then they announced they had one final giveaway.  They called my name!  You are not going to believe this, because I still can't....I won a complete hive from Ed Fisher and a 3 lb package of bees from Cecil and Joli over at Heartland Honey.  It was so nice of them to donate those items - the hive alone is worth about $300 and the bees are worth $125!  I met and talked with them (such nice people!) and I am incredibly thankful to them and so happy to get started after I pick up the bees in April.

 

I hadn't planned on getting serious about beekeeping until maybe next year, since we have this solar project coming up, but I guess I'm going to have to make way for some fuzzy winged friends in the backyard.  Next weekend, they're holding a class on how to build a hive, so I'll be joining them.  Right now, the hive is just a box of pieces that need to be glued and  nailed together.  Then I'll need to paint it, find a good spot, and we'll  be ready for our newest residents here at Cranky Puppy.

 

I hope everyone is having a great weekend so far!