Thursday, July 22, 2010

First Honey Supers!

I went in and checked the hives on Tuesday evening...7/20.  The bees were very calm and pleasant...didn't need veil or gloves and minimal smoke.  Couple times I had an individual bee chase me around but I smoked the heck out of her and the hive and that seemed to distract her enough.

With two deeps on, it is a bit more difficult to do a full check of the hive.  First I had to loosen the top deep enough to remove it...and boy was it heavy!!  I then set it aside and started going through the bottom deep.  The frames were pretty much all in use with brood, pollen, honey storage, etc.  Found the queen on one of the frames where it was evident that brood had recently hatched.  I thanked her for all her hard work...  I went through the hive far enough to check out the drone frame.  I need to start practicing swapping out drone frames and freezing them over night.  This is done to kill off large number of varroa mites that tend to favor drone brood due to their incubation period being longer than worker brood.  Killing off drones does not harm the hive really as they don't do much work anyway.  Their only purpose is to mate with virgin queens...

Anyhow, I put the top deep back on and began going through those frames.  Quite a few were packed full of pollen and/or honey.  Nearly all of the frames were in use...time to put on a honey super for sure!  Between the top deep and the honey super I placed a "queen excluder" which is like a grate that is sized to allow worker bees through but the queen out.  This will ensure that the honey frames will be just that...and won't have eggs and larvae mixed in when it comes time to extract...yuck!

I neglected to take pictures this time...:(  Bummer.  I'll go in again in a week or so to see how they progress with the honey super...I'll be sure to take pictures then.

New Beekeeper Anxiety - An 'oops' Moment

These events actually happened a couple of weeks ago when the temps were really hot.  There was a ton of activity at the entrance to the hives.  I got down close to get a good look at what was going on and saw a couple of bees "wrestling".  I immediately jumped to the conclusion that my hive(s) was being attacked/robbed by other hives.  I know now that this was not the case...

Anyhow, one way to stop robbing or to at least give your bees a fighting chance is to reduce the size of the entrance.  By cutting it down to the size of a bee or two, that is much easier for the guard bees to defend and keep out intruders.  So that is what I did.

About 5 - 10 minutes later, I was surprised to find my hive looking like this:

Holy smokes - it really was being robbed!!!  Not really...but that was my first thought...again completely wrong!  After a little research on the web I found that bees will do this when the hive gets too hot inside...bees will vacate the hive so that it cools off and they'll camp out on the box and "fan" it with their wings.  Pretty amazing, eh?

I removed the reducer and the bees eventually went back inside...  Silly beekeeper...I nearly cooked my bees!


Saturday, July 3, 2010

Birth of a Honey Bee

Went into the hives this afternoon just to see how they were doing.  At first I was concerned that there was some robbing going on as there was a lot of activity at the entrance.  But I think it was just a beautiful day and the bees were real busy.  More "new beekeeper anxiety", I guess.
The visit went quite well.  Was going to try it without any smoke even but after I opened up the first hive and removed the feeder, I had a bee start a staring match with me.  I decided then I better bring in the big guns...

The bees have begun to move up into the second story of the hive.  The middle frames are drawn out and I can see eggs and larvae so the queen even is spending time up there.  There was also a good amount of pollen and what looked like honey.  Most of the frames in the top section though were still quite bare.  I think I might make up another batch of syrup to feed them...that might at least help them draw out the frames quicker.  Before doing so, I am going to clean up the feeders some as they are getting pretty nasty.

I did not locate the queen in either hive but now that I know she is there, I don't need to find her every time.  I found plenty of eggs that must have been just laid recently...tinier than a grain of rice but still quite visible.  Some frames had a strange brown color to them and were pretty bare.  I wondered what that was all about until I saw the following:
You can see the brownish color of the empty cells.  At the bottom, the capped cells are capped brood.  There are baby bees in those cells.  And if you look close, you can see several where the cappings are being eaten away by the bees working their way out.  The next several pictures show the birth of a honey bee.  Happens hundreds of times every day in the hives...but hey, it was my first time witnessing the event.