Two Queens in the Big Daddy, Hives Everywhere!

When I first started reading about beekeeping, I kept reading about how CCD and all these bee diseases are killing off bees. The statistics were something like 30% of the hives in the US would die off each year. Well, it doesn't take a lot of smarts to realize that too many years of that and pretty soon there's no bees left. I've come face to face with how beekeepers have been "mostly" able to deal with this. You see, I started last year with one hive. As of right now, I have three hives and I did not buy more bees. If we're getting technical there are 4 hives in my backyard, but one of them is my friends and he's keeping it in my backyard just for this season (while he builds a fence on his property to hide the bees from renters). The key is that beekeepers make more hives each year by splitting hives or catching swarms. Now, I already mentioned that my Big Daddy hive swarmed earlier this year (even though I had tried to split it). So I had split the one hive and that gave me hive #2. Well, for a while there after the split and the swarm, I noticed that the Big Daddy hive was queenless. So I bought a queen from a local beekeeper. I put the queen in and then I put on a queen excluder. Now, previously I wasn't a big fan of queen excluders. They make it harder for the bees to get up into the supers in order to lay down the nectar and make honey. However, I was getting the queen up in the supers laying eggs. Now, I'd like to keep my supers just for honey and have the deeps be for the eggs and brood.  This is where the queen excluder came in. I figured if I could keep the queen out of the supers for long enough, the bees would be able to lay down nectar and the brood in the supers would hatch out and then things would end up being fine. Queen excluder goes in: fwoosh, chunk. Supers placed back on top. Then a week later, I'm inspecting again, and what do you know, I'm still seeing eggs in my supers! So now, I've got a queen below the excluder and a queen above the excluder! My bees were making me angry. Well, at the time, we had thought that my friend's hive was queenless. So we were able to catch the queen above the excluder (marked) her and placed her in a queen cage. However, upon moving her over to check out his hive and introduce the queen cage. I saw eggs! We then found his queen, and so we marked her.

Instead of killing the queen above the excluder (now in the queen cage). We took the brood in the supers, the queen, and a small number of bees and placed them in a nuc. Thus was born hive #3. This nuc will remain a nuc and will be an insurance policy (queen replacement) for hive #1 and #2 if necessary. So, this splitting of the current hive of bees and providing or allowing the bees to raise a queen is how the US bee population has been able to survive so many years of 20-30% losses.

My Self-Designed Honey Label

So, I sat down to update this blog and add some pictures of what I've done with the bees so far this spring, and I got sidetracked by designing a label for my honey. I must say, I feel that it turned out very well. I didn't really find anything to inspire me. I started with a close up picture that I'd taken of a worker bee on the stones on the ground by my beehives. I then used Adobe Photoshop Elements to design the label. I cropped the picture, applied the Ink Outlines Filter and adjusted the levels. I then chose a font, and filled the font with a matched color from the bee. I used a hexagon clipping mask to further clip the picture to the shape of a honeycomb. I then looked up the requirements for honey labels from the National Honey Board (www.honey.com). The rest was adding text drop shadows and stroke outlines.

Let me know what you think!

Cleveland Swarm Removal: How to Remove a Bee Swarm

Remember honeybees are at their most gentle when they are in a swarm. They are only there temporarily until they are able to find a new home. If you live in the Cleveland area, give me a call and I can come collect the honeybee swarm. When you call please give me the following information:

-How long has the swarm been there?
-How large is the swarm? Basketball size? Softball size?
-Are they honeybees?
-Have they been sprayed with an insecticide? (bad)
-Where is the swarm (address--in a tree, side of a house, etc.) and how high?

Thanks

Justin
801.783.9256

Summer means Swarms!

So my bees swarmed on May 15th this year. Even though I split the hive, I didn't have enough drawn out deep frames so, the frames that I put back in were just foundation. This didn't help with the space issue and so my bees swarmed. I got a call around lunch time from my wife asking me if I had time to come home because the bees were buzzing around like crazy and were really loud. I knew right then and there that they were swarming. So, I told her to try to watch to see where they would land. Unfortunately, the buggers landed super high up in a tree in my yard. I'm talking 60-100 feet up. There was no way that I would be able to reach those bees.  So I've decided that I've got to set up a bait hive a bit lower in the trees in order to help catch future swarms. I think there was a large swarm and a small after swarm. They swarmed on a Tuesday. I kept checking to see how long it would take the swarm to move on. They were still there Wednesday and that Wednesday night it got pretty cold. I thought for sure that I'd find dead bees below where the swarm had been hanging out, but nope. They were fine. However, they didn't take off for wherever it was that they found for their new home until sometime late Saturday or early Sunday morning. This either means that 1) it was hard to find a decent place near where I live or 2) there were multiple competing options that may have interested the swarm and so it took a bit longer to reach a consensus on which spot to ultimately choose. I'm reading Honeybee Democracy and so it was cool to have a swarm to be able to reference to. 

I've also been receiving some calls for collecting swarms. So if you live in Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights, University Heights, Beachwood, or the surrounding area and you see a swarm of bees and would like someone to remove it for you without killing the bees give me a call: Justin: 801.783.9256 honeybee swarm removal. I even built a swarm bucket with a 10 ft pole to help with reaching high swarms. It still wouldn't have reached my super high one, but with a ladder and the swarm bucket I could get some high ones. I bet I'll eventually build a bee-vac but that's for another year. Unfortunately, every time I've gone out the swarm has already left or the swarm has left before I've been able to get home from work. None of them waited it out as long as mine did, perhaps because mine was so high up in the trees, they felt like they could take their time. The good thing is that I still have plenty of bees in my main hive. However, the swarm left that main colony queenless. When I inspected the bees following the swarm, the hive was incredibly nervous and quick to fly and angry (many stingers in the gloves). So I had my wife pick up an Italian queen from a beekeeper in a nearby city. I got a decent price: $20. I haven't checked since I requeened, but just from the entrance behavior of the bees, I'm fairly confident that she took. I've got a queen excluder on right now with an Imrie shim above it. The Imrie shim is supposed to give the bees an upper entrance to the honey supers. I'm thinking of adding another one as well. I'm excited to see how the honey is going. I'm anticipating that the three supers that I have on now should be moving along fairly well with the capping of the honey.

I've been feeding the hive that I split. The cool thing was that when I had gone through after the split and sought to remove swarm cells in the large hive, I kept killing the swarm cells. Well, one of the last ones I opened just to see how far along the queen was and the queen literally crawled out of the cell. She started racing along my glove and so I quickly moved her over to the split that I had made the day before and placed her in there. When I later inspected, I saw a beautiful queen laying. She must have taken! Gone out and mated with nearby drones and come back to start hive number 2. I later moved them from the nuc and they are now in a 10 frame Langstroth in a single deep. My plan is to keep 2 hives and a nuc as an emergency queen raising machine. I'm hoping to catch a swarm for the nuc sometime this summer. Hopefully someone calls again.

Spring Hive

Cool weather spring. You can tell that I rotated my deep hive bodies as the 2nd deep is slightly darker than the first.

Safe when you see the Lion's Tooth

Ever wonder why the small yellow "weeds", actually a wildflower, are called dandelions? Apparently the word is French, dent-de-lion meaning lion's tooth. This doesn't refer to the flower, but rather to the leaves. If you look at the leaves of the dandelion one can see the saber tooth shape of a lion's tooth. So, I've heard that beekeepers need no longer worry about their bees starving once they see dandelion's blooming. Dandelions have been blooming for a couple weeks here now, thanks to the uncharacteristically warm weeks in March (in the 80s). Things have cooled down quite a bit, recently though. Apparently dandelions are source of both nectar and pollen for bees. You won't ever see dandelion honey though, because mostly this nectar/pollen goes toward rearing of young bees and because it's one of the first spring flowers that bees are able to collect (temperatures have warmed enough), there isn't a lot of extra to go around (for the beekeeper to steal). With the cooler weather, I have worried some that it has been too cold for the bees to fly and I hope that the trees that are blooming are still providing enough nectar, and there are enough days with flyable weather (at least in the 50s).

Dandelion at base of my hive. You can see the hive stand above the bricks.

Funny story, last fall I took some pictures and video (will need to post here) of my daughter (5 yrs old) playing with a drone. When the hive kicked out the drones, I grabbed one and took it inside to let my kids play with it. For some reason it didn't fly around much, must have been nearing it's end, but that was best. This enabled my kids to be able to play with it as it crawled around, quickly buzzed off somewhere nearby and landed, only to be picked up again. My daughter thought it was great. I let her know that boy bees can't sting. Well, the other day my wife called me and told me that my daughter had been stung. Initially, I was somewhat concerned (first time any of my kids had been stung). When I got home, I asked my daughter what had happened. Evidently, she was outside and had found a bee. She tried to pick it up and it stung her. When I asked her how she had been stung, she said, "I found a bee and tried to pick it up, but it was a girl." Yup, I let her know that there are a lot more girl bees than boy bees, and it's best for her to just assume they are all girls and let Dad find the boy bees. I also let her know that the girl bee stung her because it was scared of being picked up, and if she lets the bees mind their own business, the bees will do the same with their stingers. I think my daughter handled it pretty well though, she knew exactly why she had been stung--she'd tried to pick up a GIRL bee, if only it had been a BOY. :)

Brood in the Supers

As soon as I saw that the trees here in Ohio were blooming, I decided I should put my honey supers on. I want to make sure that I catch all of the honey flow that I can. Everywhere that I've read, it is important to have enough place to put nectar so that you can end up getting more honey. This is because bees will place down nectar and then they have to evaporate it down (kind of like with maple sap to make maple syrup). Well, if there isn't enough room to place down the watery-nectar, you won't get as much honey.

So here's how I am hoping to get more honey this year:

1) I'm putting 9 frames instead of 10 in my honey supers. Now, this is somewhat counter-intuitive. Less frames in the honey supers can actually give you more honey (at least 9 vs. 10). This is because the bees will draw out the wax on the frames to be thicker. You'll then get more honey per frame than you would with 10 frames. Evidently this also makes it easier to uncap.

2) I have my honey supers already drawn with wax. The honey supers are already drawn out, this means that the honey flow will go entirely for making honey and not for making wax. This should equate to more honey.

I decided after this last inspection to rotate the hive bodies. The bottom hive body had bees and a small amount of brood, but not a lot, and I'd rather them utilize that hive body than be tempted to adulterate my honey supers. The presence of brood in 2 of my honey supers (the shallow that I left on over the winter, and the medium honey super) made me go out and buy a queen excluder. As soon as that comes, I am excluding my queen from those honey supers. To make it easier for the bees to get in to the supers, though, I'll put in an Imirie shim. This will create an upper entrance for returning foragers to immediately go up and enter the honey supers. My hope is that the queen excluder will allow the current brood to hatch, and then the bees will refill those cells with honey. Once that natural honey barrier is formed, I should be able to remove the queen excluder.

Honeybee on peppermint flower. Yum! Peppermint honey?!

During the first inspection of the year, I flipped over the inner cover. During spring/summer/fall, the inner cover notch faces up (no upper entrance). At this point, the bees had been using that upper entrance solely. The bottom entrance was open, but no one used it. So as soon, as I closed that up. There were a bunch of confused bees at the end of that day and throughout the next day. The bees would crowd that upper entrance area, but then little by little a couple bees were seen down at the bottom entrance fanning their Nasonov glands and releasing the hive scent, essentially signaling, "Here it is! I found it!" Well, then I saw a line of bees walking down the face of the hive from top towards the bottom entrance. They would then enter. It probably took 20 minutes or so for the busy crowd of bees to re-orient to the open entrance at the bottom of the hive. It was very cool to watch the bees adapt this way and learn about the new hive entrance.

They Live! Early Spring...Bees Love it!

I must say that the bees have got to be just as excited as I am that spring came early this year. I cannot believe it: the last couple days have been approaching 80 degrees and it's mid-March in Cleveland. I just barely planted my seeds indoors and it appears that I could have planted them outdoors! I need to plant outdoors soon (spinach, lettuce, onions, etc.)

I did start feeding my bees in mid February. It had been a relatively warm winter and I was somewhat concerned that they would be running out (considering that I saw bees at the top of the hive). I'd say that I fed about 20 lbs. of sugar up until a week or so ago. There is now enough blooming that I feel the bees should be fine. I put two medium supers on top of my 2 deeps and 1 shallow that I kept on in the winter. Unfortunately, there are some eggs in that shallow (tempting me to buy a queen excluder to keep the queen from re-laying in my honey super. The bottom deep was basically empty. I didn't rotate the hive bodies then. I still haven't rotated the hive bodies. I'm not sure yet whether I will. The bees by the end of the winter were using the upper entrance, and after my inspection, I flipped over the inner cover and that upper entrance went away. The next day the bees were busy re-orienting to the bottom entrance. Bees were climbing down the face of the hive after they had tried flying in to the top entrance only to find that there was a bucket of syrup blocking the inner cover hole. Bees were lined up on the bottom of the entrance fanning and exposing their Nasonov glands to give off the hive scent. It probably took several hours to get all the foragers re-oriented to the bottom entrance, but now, they are all used to it like normal. My hope is that by just having to travel through that bottom deep that the bees and the queen will move down to inhabit and use that space. I'd be somewhat irked if the queen just keeps moving up and starts laying in my medium honey supers.

I must say that I am pleased that my bees made it through the winter. I didn't do a lot to baby them through the winter. I ended up draping a tarp over the hive just to keep the wind from attacking the hive too much and to slightly help the temperature stay warmer. I did put some insulation under the top cover (newspaper and insulation) in hopes to reduce condensation within the hive.

I had previously planned on using some Imrie shims this year. I haven't put them together yet, but we'll see if they end up helping. I'm excited to start working with the bees again this year. I plan on doing a split later in the spring once I get the Cordovan queen that I ordered. Then I'll start up hive number two. I'm excited for that as well. Oh, and I think I inspired a friend from my church to start keeping bees. Love it! Bees are incredibly awesome. Now if only I could find a place for some chickens. . . . :)

I must apologize, however, as I did not take any pictures of the hive throughout the winter. In hindsight, it would have been cool to share some seasonal progression on here. I'll have to remember that for next time. I did start a beekeeping project over the winter, though it didn't get finished or as far as I would have hoped. However, technically, I had thought that I would have a month or two of winter still. So, my observation hive is not yet complete. In fact, it's probably closer to just started than just finished. Though I am also excited about that. I can see my kids absolutely loving that! Happy early spring and best wishes to the bees and the blooms! Let's hope this weather holds and that a frost doesn't nip spring in the bud....