(*) I totally stole that title from my friend and fellow chicken and beekeeper, Kath, who blogs at This One Good Life. She too had to do what I did today.

Neither Hive 4 and Hive 5 , both installed on May 5, were doing well. In Hive 5, the split off Hive 3, I’m pretty sure the bees killed the new queen the moment they had a chance. No eggs in there whatsoever, but a strong population, and some new bees still eclosing from the brood frames I had put in: in other words, a colony worth saving. Hive 4, the new package, had a bum queen. While there should already be nice patterns of brood in all stages, there was one measly patch of eggs and some larvae on one frame, and the bees didn’t seem to take any interest in those. Neither did they take interest in the queen.

So today I picked up two brand new queens from my supplier. Installation in Hive 5 was easy: it’s only one box and I was pretty sure, after several searches, that there was not already a queen in there. So in went the new one. The bees were very interested, crowding her cage. I hope they make it  this second time around. Installation in Hive 4 was more difficult: they have two boxes, and there was still a queen in there. I located her, caught her (the workers weren’t in the least bit interested in her panicked reaction) and stuck her in a cage. Then I installed the new queen. Fingers crossed.

I brought the old queen in. We studied her a bit, then I chopped off her head and put her body in alcohol. The idea if to extract and preserve her queen pheromone to trap swarms.

Queen Bee Floating

Speaking of swarms, Hive 3 is extremely strong. There’s already a super on it for Spring honey. Unfortunately on a previous inspection I found the queen walking around in it and eggs. You don’t want grubs in your honey, of course. Also, brood comb wax gets dark and gross with the skins of pupating bees lining the cells. You want your super honey comb to stay clean and light-colored.

I went in and looked through the super, frame by frame. I found lots of honey, some almost ready for capping, and no queen. I set it aside and went in deeper. The queen was in the second last frame in the lowest  deep (that’s 28 frames into my inspection!). She looks so good, that queen, big and round, and judging by the care her attendants give her and the amount of brood in that colony she’s still good in her second year. I carefully put the frame with her on it back in, replaced the second deep, then put on a queen excluder which will prevent the queen from going up, then the honey super. I’ve only once tried the queen excluder and back then none of the bees even wanted to go through it to go draw out the super. But this super is already drawn out, so it might be different this time.

I also found many swarm cells! Last year’s swarm of Hive 1 severely weakened the mother colony and it made hardly any honey, then didn’t make it through Winter. So I’d like to prevent a swarm this time or, if I can’t, catch it. I’m ready with my swarm box!

My poor Amie. For months she and her orchestra colleagues worked on four pieces for her concert at Jordan Hall today. On Friday she had the sniffles, on Saturday she went rapidly downhill, and this morning it was obvious she couldn’t go. She spent the day in bed, reading, watching Youtube and napping.

In the morning I went to pick up my package of bees from my bee supplier, who gets them in Georgia. He drives down there with a trailer, brings back a thousand or so packages (10.000 bees each). After driving around with live bees most of the day, I can only imagine the stress when taking a tight bend. Anyhoo, weather and high winter losses slowed bee production considerably, so Rossman Apiaries in Georgia hasn’t been able to keep up with demand. The package pickup was delayed three times until today, the worst of all days, of course, what with the concert in the Big Town looming. But off I went, brought home one package with 10.000 bees and a marked (Italian) queen as well as a small box with an extra queen (a Carniolan) and some attendants.

Amie checks on the Carniolan Queen

The right-most bee is the queen. Carniolans are darker. The white stuff is the sugar plug, which the bees will have to eat through to get to her, initially to kill her, because she’s not their queen, but by the time they’ve eaten through, her pheromone should have conquered them, and they’ll accept her (hopefully).

First I installed the package (“hived the bees“) which took me half an hour.  Then, seeing as I wasn’t going anywhere, I went into the strong hive and stole three of its most valuable frames, i.e., frames with capped brood plus all the bees that are on it (but make sure the queen’s not). I also took two frames of honey and pollen. Stuck all of these in a box, sealed it. Drove it more than 2 miles away to a friends’ yard, where I set up a hive box, installed the new queen, then transferred the frames and (unhappy) bees and supplemented with more drawn out, empty frames. That’s a split! Soon I’ll be back to three hives.

My friends’ place is like a spa for overworked bees, though of course they still get to work. I’ll collect them in two or three weeks time and move them back to the ole homestead.

On my way home (finally in a bee-less car) I smiled, driving past the Library, because of this:

I live in such a bee-loving town! The speaker is me, by the way. Wait a moment, it’s the day after tomorrow!?!

Then I am also dealing with a broody hen. I’ll write about that tomorrow, because it requires pictures and it’s too dark to take any now.

Having discovered that two of the three colonies have died over the winter, I dismantled them to have a closer look at the cause. For Hive 2 my first assessment that there were next to no dead bees in it was correct. I counted 55. Here is one frame that was a good tip-off:

See those black specks in the bottom cells: dead varroa mites. This colony probably collapsed due to what our bee inspector calls “Varroa Mite Syndrome”. Varroa Destructor has been identified as one of the factors in colony collapse. I treated in the Fall, but possibly too late.

The second dead hive, the one that was supposed to go into its fourth year, perished due to starvation. There were many dead bees on the screened bottom board, and I could easily locate the remnants of the cluster, all the way in a top corner, far away from any honey. There was a lot of honey, but not close enough to the cluster.

I put all the good honey and pollen frames from the two dead hives on top of the surviving hive (after reversing its brood boxes: the brood was all in the top box). That colony should have plenty to eat now. The frames that were half filled out or that didn’t look too good (oozing, sweating honey, a grayish tint to the wax) I put in another box in front of the surviving hive, figuring the bees can distinguish what is good and what isn’t and will rob out the former – which they did.

Secondly, I had four brood boxes to clean. And boy, do they need cleaning, especially those that have done service for three years now. The bees have glued propolis and wax all over the rim on which you hang the frames. Removing, replacing and especially sliding frames along these rims becomes near to impossible with so much gunk around. The frames too got a good scraping.

In other news I also sowed the medicinal seeds that had been stratified in the freezer, plus those that needed scarifying. Ouch! In the end I found a way that was quicker but no less hard on the index fingertip. The seeds that need “vigorous scoring” I left for another time.

I had been feeling rather starved of bees. Usually, by this time, I’ve done a short hive inspection or two, but with this extended cold period, I’ve not had a chance to work the bees. Until Monday.

My friend K picked up her two bee packages in the morning and I met her at her home to help with the hiving. It was pretty cold, around 45F, not a temperature the bees would enjoy, though they’ll break cluster for short flights around 50F. These bees were already stressed: they had arrived the evening before from balmy Georgia, had been cooped up in their box for three days. For this reason we set up her hives in  K’s garage, and after the hiving she closed the door to keep the bees warm. When the temperatures rose two days later she moved them to their permanent spot. What a pleasure it was to work with the bees again, and K was thrilled – though she got stung twice.

Today I had the opportunity – good weather,  a break in my day – to check up on my own three hives. One (hive 3) I already knew to be dead: flies don’t crawl in and out of a beehive unpunished. It was confirmed. Unfortunately also hive 1, my original one, has expired. The weird things is: either had at most a hundred bee corpses in them. Usually, with starvation, the bees are piled on the bottom board or stuck inside the cells. Not so here. All were gone.

Hive 2, the one which gave me  60 lbs of honey last year, is going strong. Its bees were robbing the honey from the two dead ones.  I didn’t have a chance to do a thorough inspection, but will at the earliest opportunity. I can feed it the unrobbed honey frames from the other two.

I” split that colony if it continues strong, and I ordered one bee package, to be picked up on 22 April, with a marked queen.  Soon there will be three again.

In order:

1. comb that the bees drew out, filled with honey, and capped with a thin cap of wax,
2. comb after uncapping, oozing with honey (here’s a video of uncapping),
3. comb after extraction (see video). Extraction is never total: there is always lots of honey left, more or less depending on the viscosity of the honey and the determination of the robbers (us),
4. so you give the extracted frames back to the colony for “cleaning.” Is that clean or what!? The bees are excellent cleaners!

I really wanted y’all to see this. This is a crazily drawn-out (filled with honey and capped) frame.  Two things: the color and the shape.

Some of the comb is darker because the bees first used it for brood, and only after that did it became honey storage. The more comb is used, and especially when it is used for brood, the darker it gets as more junk is left behind on it. All the lighter colored comb around it was only used for honey storage.

Sometimes the honey is darker making the wax look darker too. Other dark spots may be cells filled with pollen.

This comb ripples and bulges because I probably didn’t push the frame tightly enough against the next frame. This violated the “bee space,” which is on average  around 5/16 or 3/8 of an inch. The bees will build excess comb in a space larger than that. If it’s not too much, they’ll make their comb a little deeper, making it uneven, like on parts of this frame. If there’s too much extra space,  they’ll build a whole “new” wall of comb, like the strip in the middle, which is actually mostly detached from the (plastic) foundation so it has cells on the back of it and the bees can crawl behind it: in effect, a “frame” on its own.