Swarm Hive: doing incredible

I got the chance to open up my swarm hive. This hive is the hive I used to donate 5 frames to make my nuc boxes. It has built up its hive back up incredibly. These are some really good genetics and really good honey flow!

Top cover is placed beside the hive box.

 As the pictures indicate, the bees are running out of room and storing honey in every little corner they can find. I need to add another super onto this hive before it swarms on me.

Honey was exposed when the top cover was removed

This is looks like dandelion honey. It would make sense because of the recent long bloom. The bees were really sucking it up. Click on the picture to see their long tongues going into the honey. I need to clean these top bars so that there is no honey or comb in between frames.

At my other bee yard, I removed my honey super and found a fair bit of comb tying the frames together. This is really annoying to any beekeeper. It sticks all the frames together and really impedes on being able to inspect a hive. But this comb obviously serves a purpose to the bees, it is what I would call ladders for them to walk on and get around more quickly throughout the hive. It all secures everything so that the hive is more stable. (They do not realize that the frames are rigid enough to support themselves).

Comb built up through the queen excluder

The return of my horrible frame! It looks like they did another horrible job to my frame. I am going to have to pull it out and recoat it with wax or put in new foundation. What a pain! At least they are having fun.

Poor comb building! Wax coated plastic foundation is not always readily accepted by the bees.

The bees are doing well. I hope my nucs are producing queens. I have yet to find any egg laying.

Nucleus Hives : Emergency queens emerged

I had the chance the other night to check on my nucleus hives and the one hive has had some emergency queens emerge (the queen cells are opened) on the bottom but their was no evidence of a laying queen. The queens that emerge will go for their mating flights over the next couple of days and once they are done with their flights, then they will begin laying. I want to see the brood pattern of a laying queen to determine how good she is. I am no longer in a rush to requeen my hives.

Frames are mostly covered by bees and all drawn out except for outside frame sides.

Notice the bee space between the wax foundation

I also had the chance to take a look at the honey supers which I had added May 16th. These frames were brand new and completely empty on that date. All of the frames are now mostly drawn out and filled with honey. I would say they are a good third done filling that super; which is insane. I am going to have to start making more frames!

Mesh Bottom boards open

We have been experiencing very nice weather here for the last couple of days and it is supposed to continue like this for the next week. We are having daytime highs of mid 20s and lows of above 10C. With this in mind I took a look at my hives and sure enough they were fanning their entrance quite extensively, even at 7:30 in the evening! I can not imagine how much they were fanning earlier in the day when the sun was on the hives and it was warmer.

Honey bees in the fanning stance. They pull a lot of air out of the hive to keep it cool.

Once I removed the solid bottom board underneath the mesh landing board, the fanning bees all stopped. The next photo was literally taken a minute after the above photo. The bees quickly realized that they no longer had to waste their energy batting their wings. I hope they can do better things like collect nectar.

 I pulled out the solid plywood bottoms and placed them in front of the hives. There was a lot of pollen and wax cappings and mites on the plywood. I took the plywood to the field and scrapped them off right away and called it a day.

I suppose I did take a look under the cover of the white hive to see if the bees were working in the honey super. All the frames were covered in bees. I did not have a smoker, but I imagine they were drawing comb out.

Nucleus Hives : Emergency queen present!

Today a full inspection was done on all of the hives in my home yard. The green hive appears to have a lot of honey in the top box. They may actually have too much honey in it and it may be hindering their ability to raise brood. It may also be causing them to be too crowded and make them want to swarm. Both of the large hives had many swarm cups in them but none of the cups had any queens in them.

 The Nucleus hives both have a few emergency queen cells formed up. The picture bellow shows a double queen cell. As in there are two queens currently developing side by side. (One higher and the other lower).

 This is a better view of those queen cells. See how the bees just chose a few cells to transform into queens in the middle of the frame? They choose which eggs to develop based on how old the eggs are and they begin to immediately feed it royal jelly.

Emergency queen cells

 This was what my little yard looked like at the end of the day. Notice the queen excluders and the honey supers sitting on top of the big hives. It is time to collect honey!

Large hives have honey supers added

Nucleus Hives : The beginning

My swarm hive from last year is doing very well and it looks like they are trying to supersede the queen. I want to keep these genetics so I have decided to try to make 2 nucleus hives from her. I do not know how old she is but I figure she is at least 2 years old. The nature of swarming is that the old queen leaves with half of the bees and bees rarely swarm on their first year. To make 2 nucleus hives from her I figured out which frame she was on and set that aside. I then took 2 frames of very young eggs and some capped brood and pollen frames with bees still covering the frames and placed them in my 5 frame nucleus box. I put empty frames to fill in the rest of the space. I did the same thing with the other box but took 3 frames this time. I placed the queen back in the original parent colony and replaced the frames that I took with drawn out comb. I then took these nucleus boxes and brought them to my other bee yard (my house). I have 2 full colonies here and they will have enough drones to breed with the queens that these nucleus hives produce. These nucleus hives will detect that they do not have a queen and they will start feeding some young larvae some royal jelly and they will raise emergency queen cells. These queens will emerge in 13 days. The first queen out will kill all of her rivals by tearing apart their cells and stinging them to death.

 Here is what the nucleus hives look like. I put some blocks in front to reduce the entrance so that my strong colonies do not rob them out. 

The bees were moved at the end of the day and therefore took new flights the next nice day and re-orientated themselves with their new surroundings.

They quickly can find pollen and honey and a good source of water. I was happy to see a lot of different colored pollen on the bees; this indicates that there are some good sources out there and that the bees have a lot of resources. I will check the hives soon to see that they indeed have started some emergency queen cells. This is the first time I have ever done this; so I am excited to see how it turns out!

This happened May 10th, 2010. I am running behind on my blog posts!

Wind and snow storm!

The past weekend I have had to deal with some pretty nasty weather. Friday night we had a massive wind storm with winds reaching 60 to 70 kph. This is what I noticed the next day.

 Yes, the wind knocked my trellis right down. It was also too windy to attempt to put it back up.

 It luckily missed most of the growing plants. I really need to do a thorough cleaning job to my flower beds and I should likely plant some flowers in them.

 The next morning there was snow overnight. Just a light sprinkling but it definitely is the thought of snow and the fact that it was cold enough for the snow to stick around for most of the day.

The following day I was able to get my brother to help me push the trellis back up onto its' 4 feet and we put in some stakes and screwed the sides to it. When the weather permits, I will replace these ugly stakes and those side boards with something a bit better looking.

First Spring bloom

This is from a few days back. I am just getting the time to update my blog. When we got home from the hospital everything was in bloom.

Here is a web album that shows a lot of pictures of what it looked like here at the end of last week. It was gorgeous.

I also took off my formic acid pads from my hives. They will be needing honey supers added on top so they do not have the urge to swarm.

Twins have arrived!

My wife and I welcome the arrival of our first children. Yes, children. My wife gave birth to our twin girls on Thursday April 29th.

Everyone is home now and doing well. I already know that these girls are going to make great beekeepers.

Posting may become more irregular; like my sleeping patterns.