Stirring Up The Hive

Saturday, June 29, 2013

From the outside, the bee hive seems to be doing fine.  Bees in. Bees out. Bees in. Bees out. Day, after day, after day.

If you're brave enough to get close to the hive - say within five feet - you can see the sacks on the hind legs of the worker bees filled with stuff. So much stuff it looks like they're wearing a super-miniature tennis ball on their eye-lash-like back legs. Amazing to watch.

But I digress.  As we know, a beekeeper can't just count on the external signs to know whether everything is happening like it is supposed to inside the hive.  She has to open the hive periodically to inspect it.

Twenty days since I last opened the hive, so today was the day to crack it open and have another, closer look.

Gear on. Bee-supply bucket handy.  Smoker lit. Here we go.
 

Having A Look

Is it possible? There are even more bees in the hive this time than last!

The top super is pretty light - other than a couple of handfuls of worker bees -  and goes off to the side with no problem.  The girls are drawing out the comb, but no signs of nectar, nor pollen in the top super.  And, of course, no larvae because the last time I worked the hive, I put the queen excluder on before adding the top super, so the queen can't lay in these cells.  

The second super from the top is heavy and takes some effort pry off and set aside.  I'll take a closer look at it in a few minutes.

As I was taught, I pry loose one of the frames in the third super and set it aside. This creates room for separating and lifting out the other frames.  One by one I have a look and they look great. Loaded with nectar and honey and pollen and presumably larvae. (Though, I admit, my eye still isn't trained well enough to consistently distinguish which cells are larvae cells.)  Some of the honey is capped. Some is not. No sign of the queen in this super.

And Then It Happens

Bees - hundreds of them - are buzzing all around me while I work. Angry at my intrusion. (And in my mind, I'm thinking, I'm safe. I'm wearing all the gear - hat, gloves, jumpsuit, closed shoes. All good. Just a bunch of bees buzzing around me. All good.)

Before I retrieve the second super to inspect it, I realize there's something buzzing around INSIDE my Orkin-man-style bee suit.

Ouch! Ouch again! 

Beeswax! Two bees have infiltrated my protective gear. Yes, I squished them both. Needlessly, I know, because once they stung me, their stingers were gone, and they could do no more harm to me.  But when you're in a tiny panic, well...

I meticulously sealed the velcro that cinches up the veil to the jumpsuit and made a mental note: secure your protective gear all the way next time, goofball!

Rookie mistake. And now, I can nolonger say that I haven't been stung.

There She Is!

Embarrassed about my mistake, but not really hurt, I turn my attention back to that second super. Remove a frame and start working my way through. Same thing: Capped honey. Uncapped honey. Pollen. And bees. Lots and lots of bees! 
At about the third or fourth frame in, on the far side of the frame, I spot her. The Queen, with her marquee red dot!

















Isn't she lovely! Isn't she beautiful! 
 
I hear the Miss America tune in my head as I watch my Queen glide across her honey combed stage, with her entourage in tow.

Nothing left to do now but put the hive back together and close it up. 

Footnote: I have to say, more than just the two bees (that were inside my gear) died during the commission of today's inspection.

There are just so many more of them now!  When I restacked the supers, some bees that were on the edges were squished to death from the weight of the supers.  I tried to swish them into -or out of - the hive, but it's not a perfect science.

Must purchase a bee brush to see if that helps next time.  
 

The hive still stirred up over the intrusion.

So Far, So Good

This morning (Saturday, June 8, 2013), for the third time in 43 days, I inspected the fledgling bee colony hard at work in the hive in my suburban backyard in Forest Acres, SC.  And things in the hive seem to be humming right along.

There could now be twice as many bees in the hive as compared to when I first installed the package in late April.  There is definite nectar and pollen storage going on.  Water from some of the nectar is evaporating, and some of the stored treasure has probably turned into honey.  (Yes, I robbed a one-inch block of the comb and had a tiny taste. Golden and delicious.)

But back to what’s happening in the hive:  There’s even some propyls usage going on because the boxes (supers) and the hive frames had to be pried apart. While I’m not experienced enough yet to really pick out the bee eggs in the cells in their various stages of development, SURELY the queen is laying and the larvae are developing to maturity.  I base this conclusion on two clues…. the sheer number of worker bees in the hive and the math.  Based on how long the colony has been in the hive, at least one, and possibly two, generations of worker bees have had time to mature to worker status.  (A regular worker bee egg takes 21 days to mature.) 

A key task of any hive inspection is to check on the queen.  It took a few minutes, but I found her! Right there in the central section of the top super. Exactly where she was supposed to be.   

My hive system is an eight-frame system, so the bottom two medium-sized boxes (or supers) form the brood super.  This is where the queen lays her eggs.  As the frames in the brood super fill up, the queen typically works her way up the hive structure.  My queen followed protocol. Since the second super literally was full of nectar, pollen and,  I’m assuming, larvae, she has moved up the hive to the third super.  She’s got plenty of room there to lay.  And, the workers have plenty of space to store their harvest. 

But back to the queen. The queen is easy to spot because she has a big red dot on her mid-section.   The queen is also significantly bigger than the worker bees….both in length and girth.  Some day in the future, I should be able to spot the queen without the aid of the colored dot.  Until then, it was worth the extra $5 I paid to the beekeeper - whose whole business model is based on breeding queens – to put the dot on my queen.  As a side note, the color of the dot changes from year to year as a means of keeping track of the age of the queens.  Apparently, red is the color of 2013.

The queen is a big deal. She’s the lifeblood of the whole system. Without her, things go wrong.  Really wrong.  Even deathly wrong for the colony.

You can just imagine that I’m holding my breath during the inspection until I spot her and her tell-tale red dot!  Big sigh of relief when I spot her.

In addition to inspecting the hive today, I removed the top feeder and I added the queen excluder and a fourth super.

The top feeder is a fairly new addition to beekeeping hardware technology. (It didn't exist 35 years ago when my Dad kept bees in our backyard.)  The top feeder is a shallow super that sits on the top of the hive and is filled with sugar water. The design creates a screened "trough" that lets the bees feed on the sugar water without drowning in it. 

Beekeepers use a feeder in at least two circumstances: First, when a colony is newly installed into a hive as a way to jumpstart the hive, until the  bees find their nectar and pollen sources; and second, in the winter when the colony has consumed its food stores, the weather is still too cold for them to forage and the nectar flow hasn't yet started.  There are definite advantages to using a top feeder as compared to other feeding systems. You don't have to open the hive and the bees don't have to go outside to feed. 

Meanwhile, the queen excluder I added is a nifty sheet of plastic mesh, like a grate, on which the uniform slots are big enough for the worker bees to pass through but too small for the queen to pass through.  Above the queen excluder is yet another super, empty except for the eight frames and their foundation comb. 

In a text-book scenario, the worker bees should eventually fill this top super with honey.  Nothing but honey!  Who knows, maybe we’ll get a tiny harvest before the season ends. (Not that I know how to rob the hive...because, of course, I don't. But I'm up for some on-the-job training.)

I’ll keep you posted.