First Pollen!

The bees were bringing in their first pollen of the year. And these photos are from March 16th!


Mouse guards knocking pollen sacs off! Opps.

Opened the lid of a hive

Last year they started collecting pollen April 9th, and I thought that was earlier. It is going to be an interesting season!

Excellent Weather

(This post was lost by Blogger, and was promised to be repaired. Apparently I am one one the 0.16% of people who lost my posts. This was originally posted on Thursday).Finally some spring time weather has arrived. We are out in the fields cultivating to prepare for planting.
I opened up my hives and inspected them and treated them against American Foulbrood disease with a premixed powder.

Low activity, no pollen coming in!

Why are there no eggs dropping?

The green hive is quite disappointing. I am frustrated with the bees and the queen. She is not laying yet and the bees are not taking in any pollen.

Lots of activity, pollen and nectar coming in.

The white hive is doing very well. I treated them with the premix AFB treatment and I also reversed the top super (heavy) with the bottom super(fairly light). The idea is that the bees will better fill the hive when doing so. Some beekeepers disagree with doing so. In between the frames the bees had laid some drone larvae. The bottom picture has a varroa mite circled.

Can you guys see the mite?

The blue hive is just buzzing with activity. I took out some frames to inspect and this is what I saw. So many bees. They too have a few drones buzzing around the hives.

Lots of bees on the frames. The queen has been busy laying!

To my surprise, I found some swarm cells at the bottom of the frames! This is not necessarily an indication that the bees are planning to swarm. There were no eggs in these cells. Crazy to see though.

Swarm cups on the bottom of the frame.

Let's hope that this post does not get erased and lost!

Queen spotting and hive reduction

Yesterday I checked out the hives at my place. Lots of pollen was coming in. I gave my strong hive an additional 1lb pollen patty.

Lots of pollen coming in today.

I did an inspection and found the queen! She was on a frame with lots of freshly laid eggs. This was all very exciting. She was laying eggs in the middle of the top box. She is the daughter of my "super hive" queen that succumbed to my poorly designed ventilation box this winter.

Dark coloured queen!

My green hive is an entirely different story. It is still suffering. I opened up the hive on a nice day and saw that they still were only covering 3 frames. The honey that was inside was going stale and there was almost some mold starting in the corners. I took the 3 frames of bees (in which I found their queen) and placed all of the bees in a 5 frame american nucleus hive. I took one monster of an uncapped frame of honey and placed it in the hive. This smaller arrangement should be easier on the bees. They will have a smaller volume of air to keep warm. Hopefully the queen is able to start laying so that they can get out of their current rut.

Nucleus hive replaces the big hive.

Pollen finally arrives

The weather has been cold and rainy all year. There has not been many days for the bees to get out and forage. But finally there has been a couple of +10C days.

Bees have found a pollen source!

Seeing the bees collect pollen is a very welcomed sight.

Newspaper combine: Queen introduction

My blue hive queen has been doing poorly since the beginning of the year. The workers have been attempting to replace her but no supercedure cells resulted.  I found the queen Thursday evening and pinched her to kill her (Yes, it is very heart breaking to do this; I hate it). I then went to my other bee yard and took three pollen and honey frames from my big hive; which I had determined was pollen and honey heavy. I replaced these frames with brand new undrawn frames so that they can take some time to draw those frames out and their queen will have more room to lay.

Frame with pollen and some honey. Notice variety of colors (different flower sources)

Pollen in center and mostly uncapped honey surrounding

Thursday night I also went out to close one of my nucleus hives with  some wire mesh. When I went out there I saw that a skunk was rubaging through the grass in front of my big hive. I went back to the house to get the camera (shotgun would have been more appropriate) and this is the poor picture I took.

Skunk at my hives!

I followed it around for a bit to figure out where it was from but it took off and left a pretty nasty scent. I went back to the hives and put a wire mesh on the entrance to the nucleus hive that I was going to combine with my other hive.

The next morning I brought the bees and all my gear to the other bee yard. I placed the single sheet of newspaper down and put a small slit in the middle of the paper with my hive tool and then put all of my frames into the top box.
When I was placing the nucleus frames into the top box I was inspecting them while holding the frames generally above the box. I heard a very faint thud. The sound of bees falling and landing onto newspaper actually. It turns out that the very thing that I was looking for, fell right down into the box. It was the queen. Not a word of a lie. Had I not been holding the frame above the box, she would have fallen on the ground and all of my work would have been for nothing!

Saturday, this is what the newspaper looked like! It looks like the two hives are pretty much combined!

Lesson for the day: Always inspect frames while holding them above the hive box!

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!

Varroa Mite Count : 48 hrs later

 

The trays were retrieved 48 hours after they were put in. As you can see a bunch of debris fell through my mesh floor and landed on my sticky wax paper. Note: the left tray is turned around the wrong way!

 I found a bug crawling around in the pollen etc... and took a picture of it because I was worried that it may be a hive beetle. I looked into my reference books (ie, Beekeeping For Dummies); and found out that it was definitely not a hive beetle.

Take a look at the different sources of pollen that the bees were collecting over the last 2 days. It looks like there must be four or five different sources. I tried pollen for the first time tonight. It was actually really good. I am going to have to make a pollen trap to collect some pollen for my own consumption.

The tally:
The Green hive: had a whooping 90 mites in 48 hours. Which makes a 24 hour count of 45. This is not good. It means that I will have to treat and I was planning on actually making a partial split of the hive.
The White hive: had only 10 mites in 48 hours. Which is actually really good but I think it is wrong. Well, the count is correct but I had reversed the boxes on April 5th; so the brood is primarily in the top chamber and the mites would be dropping down into the bottom box and would likely reattach themselves to passing bees at a much higher rate. I am likely going to start treating as soon as possible.

Varroa Mite Count

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is an important part of keeping bees healthy and minimizing treatments.
Tonight I popped off my landing boards and pulled out the plywood tray to clean off. Take a look at what was on that tray!

This shows everything that has fallen down the screen. Take a look at all that good pollen! I threw all of this into the field nearby. It is good practice to always discard of comb and other bee products far enough away from the hive so that you do not attract skunks or other pests.

There was also a lot of mites on the bottom board. They are those shiny little football shaped critters. I think that my removable tray is so far away from the bottom board that the mites are unable to make it back in the brood nest. As you can see; bottom trays act as a passive mite "treatment".

This is what the hive looks like with the sticky paper in place and the landing board off. I will take the paper out in 2 days and do a mite count to see to what degree my colony is affected. Until then...

Pollen is out!

It is St.Paddy's day today and it looks like the bees are in luck!

Last year, the bees were not able to find any pollen until April 5th!

This is incredible. I have not seen any flowering plants. There was 2 feet of snow here last week. There are still a couple of piles around.
Any guesses as to what it may be from?