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.