Cape Beekeeping

Discouragement

2011-11-27T21:46:00.004-05:00

Well it is the end of November already….. And I have not written a blog post since May. It’s not that I was lacking material to write about (the bees always provides that). It’s just that by the middle of June I was discouraged with the progress of my efforts.

Perhaps some of you may have better suggestions for me regarding my beekeeping efforts.

As you can probably tell from the post title, this year was another bad year for me and the bees.

In late winter we always hope for a productive year, but for the past three years the bees have not produced honey for us.

Left: Bees feeding on sugar candy and pollen patty

The season started slowly. It was a rainy spring, and the spring lasted much longer than usual.

Spring actually arrived a few weeks early. But the cold wet weather kept the bees inside the hives and not collecting honey and nectar.

Right: Foraging worker bee

During the summer we had just the right about of sun and rain, no drought, plenty of flowers, plenty of work for the bees to do, but I could tell that the nectar flow was sporadic.

One day the bees would be flying like crazy, the next there would be very little activity.

As I look back on the season I cannot point to one thing that went wrong. It must have been a culmination of many factors.

My biggest problem this year was robbing. I thought it would be smart to start the new colonies way across the property from the old ones. The new location would offer more sun light during the winter months.

Left: Weak hive being fed sugar syrup from a division board feeder. These feeders were robbed out by strong colonies nearby

This was an attempt on my part to decrease the winter losses by allowing the hives to warm up a little more on sunny winter days than the older hives have the darker old location (we’ll see how this works). I also thought that by moving the new hives away from the older hives there would be less opportunity for robbing to start.

Well I was I ever wrong.

The new hives which had a smaller population of bees were continually robbed out not only of any sugar syrup I was feeding them, but also of any stores of nectar that they were collecting themselves. Without stores of honey and pollen the new colonies would not increase.

I tried feeding the sugar syrup into the small hives first, then the larger hives…. I tried feeding the sugar syrup into the larger hives first, waiting a day, then feeding syrup to the smaller hives.

I even resorted to building a feeding station away from the hives, that all the bees could access and get syrup.

Nothing I tried worked…. Yes the bees from all the hives would come and take 5 gallons of sugar syrup from the yard feeder in two days, but as soon as it ran out, the strong hives would return to robbing out the weaker hives.

I also did not like feeding wasps, hornets, and yellow jackets with my precious public sugar syrup feeder.

So the fat hives got fatter, and the weak hives got weaker and died out.

Although the larger hives produced a surplus crop of 60 pounds of honey, I could not trust the honey since it was probably mixed with sugar syrup.

I fed all the honey back to the hives.

All this robbing was not conducive to increasing our hive numbers. New packages, hive splits, and nucs brought on site from other locations were all destroyed by the robbing bees.

Only three hives survived the summer and will be over wintered.

Then there was the small hive beetle…… I’ll talk about that next time.

And there's next year..... There's always next year.

May Bee

2011-05-30T21:29:00.001-04:00

The long holiday weekend finds me posting my first blog post for the month of May.

Left: A worker bee collecting pollen and nectar from our peach tree.

For some reason we have experienced a 90% loss of our over wintered hives this season.

Two hive have died in the month of April alone. Not usual once they make it through March

The longer than average, and cooler, spring has not helped us much. We experienced cool rainy wet weather for almost two weeks in the middle of May, not conducive for brood rearing by already weakened hives.

Last week however, the cold wet weather broke, and we are now experiencing warmer days. That means happy days for the bees who are now able to fly and collect the much needed nectar and pollen for the spring buildup.

Today I started rearing a small number of queens.

Right. Newly grafted plastic cell cups. These cells were wet grafted using royal jelly saved from queenrearing in 2010.

It takes 16 days for a queen to grow under the proper conditions. I took newly hatched eggs from three of my hives and wet grafted them into artificial cell cups. Wet grafting is the process of placing a small drop of royal jelly in the bottom of each artificial cell cup, and floating a young larva onto it. (a 50 / 50 mix of plain yogurt and water will do as well for a priming medium)

Eggs from the different hives were grafted into different color cell cups. Red, yellow, and black cups were used. This will allow me to tell which hive the larva was grafted from later on.

The cells were placed into a cell bar and installed in a cell starter hive.

I create my cell starter hives by taking a 5 frame nuc box with a division board feeder half full of sugar syrup, add a frame of nectar and a frame of pollen.

I have modified the nuc box so it has a screened bottom. The entrance is closed so the bees will not be able to leave.

Before I graft the artificial cells, I shake nurse bees (from frames of open brood) into the 5 frame nuc box. I use at least three frames of nurse bees, and two frames of bees from adjoining frames. Of course before I do all this I find the queen, in the contributing hive, and make sure she is not shaken into the cell starter hive!

I took my grafted cell bar frame and installed it in between the pollen and nectar frames.

The trapped nurse bees will have nothing to do but feed the young larva. Because the cell starter is queenless they will build queen cells out of the young larva.

I will wait 24 hours and check to see how many of the grafts were accepted.

Our package bees were delayed from the supplier down south. Many orders were canceled. They must have been having a difficult time there as well.

Last week we finally received our new bees. They had a long trip from Florida, traveling by night, the truck would stop for the day to allow the bees to fly. It took several days to make the trip, and the trailer of bees arrived late one night. About 20 volunteers enjoyed unloading them off the trailer.

We must have been quite the site to the neighbors….. a mass of beekeepers with flashlights (and head lamps) scurrying round a dirt road, walking to and forth, unloading over 200 packages of bees. I know I received at least one strange look from passer buy on the main road. What are you doing walking at the side of the road in a full bee suite? They must have said!

That being said I brought my bees home and installed them the next morning. They were not happy to see me….. I guess they were grumpy from they’re long trip. Several met me with the message I should leave them alone. But…. Then… You have to show them who’s boss! (bees don’t listen well)

Left: A cell starter colony mad up of a division board feeder, a frame of pollen, grafted cells, a frame of open nectar, an undrawn frame, and nurse bees.

The first nucleus of bees was installed without event. Five full frames of bees, honey, and brood were installed on previously drawn out comb. They were very active, fliying the next day in the warm sun.

I noticed that the second nucleus of bees had a recently emerged queen cell, capped brood, but no eggs or larva…. I did see a queen though.

Right: A well feed queen larva. The nurse bees have added royal jelly to the cell. The larva floats on the royal jelly and eats it as it grows. It will take 16 days for the queen to grow from an egg to a fully developed virgin queen.

She must have emerged during the long trip from Florida… But had she mated? Or was she still a virgin, unable to lay worker eggs? I would have to wait to see.

Two days later I checked the hive…. No eggs or brood…. But the queen was still there. Perhaps I would have to replace her with a laying queen…. If one could be found this time of year…..

Two days after that I checked the hive again…. Yes, there were new eggs laid in many cells. I guess this queen might just be fine. Perhaps she had mated during the trip north, while the truck was stopped in another state, and had managed to find her way back to the truck before it continued on.

Perhaps she has a little Pennsylvania or Georgia influence in her now! If you know what I mean!

Maybe she will be just fine…..

Maybee

Pieces Of April

2011-04-25T17:16:00.001-04:00

It is the last week of April and the flowers are just starting to bloom!

Three weeks ago we had our first Crocus pop its head out of the ground and open up so the bees could collect some fresh pollen.

Right: Worker bee brings white pollen back to the hive

We have had a lot of rainy weather, which is typical for this time of year, but the temperatures have been cooler as well. My year to year records show that we are running about three weeks behind last year, and about a week behind “normal” with the spring foliage.

On warm days the bees are flying, bringing back small bundles of yellow and white pollen on their hind legs. This could only mean that there is brood rearing taking place inside the hive.

Left: Warm days finally allow the bees to fly and gather nectar and pollen.

This is the time of year that the bees need to quickly build up in number s in order to take advantage of the spring honey flow we have here on the cape.

Starting mid May to around the end of July is our only real honey producing time here on Cape Cod.

This year the cooler temperatures have hindered the buildup. At least in my hives!

Right: A worker bee collects pollen from a white Crocus flower

This weekend I will begin to feed them sugar syrup, which will help stimulate brood rearing as well.

I guess when the queen sees supplies being brought into the hive she feels comfortable enough to begin laying and laying eggs.

Left: Another worker bee collects nectar

Our scheduled delivery of packaged bees from down south have bee delayed for a second time this season. I have not heard the reason why, but perhaps they are having as much trouble with their bees as we are here in the North East.

Temperatures reached the high 60’s yesterday and today allowing an increase in the bees activities.

With the forsythia in full bloom there is much pollen to be gathered. My peach tree is just starting to bloom and I know the Red Maple is not far behind.

Right: Pollen patties and sugar candy placed in the hives allow the workers to feed even on cold wet days when they cannot forrage.

My battle with the mice in the shed continues.

Each time I pick up a box, or a bucket I find the evidence of mice damage. Chewed gloves, newspaper, and table cloths litter the corners of the space.

I found one dead family inside the garden tool box.

How they managed to get in will remain a mystery forever.

But these things too will pass. And for now I am anticipating a good honey season.

After the last two bad ones, it is the least that mother nature can do,

Middle Of March

2011-03-15T21:40:00.001-04:00

It’s the middle of March and the snow drops are just starting to pop open here on Cape Cod. Spring is just around the corner!

After enduring a long cold winter, mice, mites, small hive beetles, starvation, falling trees, and poor food stores, the bees are just now beginning to emerge from their winter cluster.

:Left: Small Hive Beetle, dead on the sticky board.

In March? Realy?

The queen should have started raising young by now, and the new bees will be taking fights for the first time. How many of them emerge fly a little too far from the hive and become too chilled to make it back home?

Right: Bees were finally able to take flight during warmer days here and there over the past couple of weeks.

We lost 50 percent of our hives to this long winter. We did not receive our January thaw as we do most years. Temperatures remained in the 30's for six weeks or more. But then, I don't have to tell most of you that!

Of the remaining hives two are very weak. The Kona queens I introduced last year seam to be longing to return to the warm Hawaiian weather they came from.

They did not do well here.

Of course they have done better than the dead hives… That’s it… Look on the bright side!

Left: My storage shed.... Filled with beekeeping equipment, boxes, frames..... And mice!

One hive that started the winter with plenty of bees, frames of pollen, and frames full of honey was found dead a couple of weeks ago.

I had given them candy feed towards the end of January.

At that time they were robust…. 7 frames of bees. When I dissected the dead hive I found thousands of dead bees only two inches away from capped honey. There were still 6 frames of capped honey in the hive and three frames full of pollen. Why did they die? During the cold weather they probably just could not shift over to the food stores. What a shame!

Right: The mice are so bold as to build nests in plain sight!

Sometimes you cannot figure out what went wrong. Is it natural selection? Or just a stupid beekeeper?

But yes…. As beekeepers often do, I spend a lot of my time during the winter thinking and dreaming about the bees. Perhaps answers come during those long months. I do have something up my sleeve… Perhaps I can do something about the weather!

The mice have been taunting me all winter as well. Despite my best attempts at thwarting them I continue to find chewed items around the storage shed. They love the newspaper wrapped wax foundation. An expensive item to snack on.

Right: Outside temperature 34 degrees.... Inside temperature 60.

Perhaps I've found a way to control the weather!

One family even had the nerve to build a home right in plain sight, as if to dare me to try to do something about it!

But bright days are ahead! The weather is warming. The days are getting longer. The first flowers are poking there sleepy heads above the ground. The bees are starting to fly…

Yes the bees are starting to fly!

So you think you are helping?

2011-01-30T18:31:00.004-05:00

In the middle of December I quickly checked the bees and found that they had consumed almost all the candy feed I had installed in the hives in November. At that time I added more candy assuming that it would be consumed in about a month (January).

Left: A dead bee in the snow about 500 feet from the hive. It is just too cold for them to be flying that far away from home.

With more snow predicted for our area this week, I thought it would be timely to check the hives and add more sugar candy if needed. I made the candy in the morning, let it cool and went to the apiary to install a piece in each hive. Sure enough, the candy feed was gone in most of the hives.

Right: Looking through the hole in the inner cover you can see the bees are still alive.

With temperatures in the mid 30’s I carefully slipped a piece of candy under each inner cover so as not to disturb the clusters of bees. While I lifted the inner cover I took a peak inside to see how the bees were doing.

Right: Many dead bees after taking a cleansing flight in 35 degree weather.

All the hives seemed to have plenty of bees. I did notice some dysentery spots on the top of the frames in the last hive I checked. I had fed the bees sugar syrup and medicated against nosema in the fall, so I did not think much of it.

This morning I went out to look over the hives. This is what I found.

Left: a closeup of the mess.

We have had a long spell of cold, probably five or six weeks where the bees have not been able to fly and take cleansing flights.

Apparently having been disturbed by my candy the bees broke cluster and attempted a cleansing flight.

Right: An even closer look.

Being too cold, many of the bees were not able to return to the hive.

I have included photographs of the resulting mess.

I will have to wait for warmer weather before I can check these two hives to see if any of the hive will survive the rest of the winter.

And I thought I was helping them.

Bees And Snow

2011-01-26T22:35:00.002-05:00

It is the middle of winter here on Cape Cod. In fact we are getting another snow storm as I write this blog post.

Left: Icickles hanging from the cover of the hives.

Already the cold winter has claimed the life of one of our hives. It seems that they starved only inches away from stores of honey and pollen. The weather must have turned cold for too long of a time. The cluster of bees could not move to a new location.

I cleaned out the dead bees and placed the hive bodies in storage. There are 8 frames of honey left in the dead hive along with frames full of pollen. A new package of bees in the spring will take advantage of the hard work done by the deceased hive.

Right: Bees were flying and still gathering pollen in the middle of November. They needed all the food they could gather after the bad summer season we had last year.

As I mentioned earlier we are experiencing an unusually snowy and icy winter this year. The snow from one storm turns to ice just before another one hits. Of course we have been fortunate compared to other towns further inland where they have received much more snow. Our deepest accumulation has only been 6 inches or so, compared with feet of snow inland.

The bees have been consuming much bee candy this winter due to the colder temperatures. It was nice to see them flying in December, on the two days temperatures climbed into the 40’s.

I have one nuc hive I am trying to over winter in one hive body that seems to be struggling. It contains one of the queens I raised last summer. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they will make it.

Left: A cluster of bees feeding on bee candy places on the tops of the frames of comb. This candy will last them about one month.

This time of year I start to get a little stir crazy. I find myself sitting and dreaming about the bees and spring. There is not much beekeeping activities to do other than wait for the new catalogs and the bee journals to come in the mail. Well... a glass of mead while reading a bee journal isn't all that bad..

What new products will we find and be trying out this season?

There it is again…. As the snow falls….. I’m dreaming of summer!

Board Bees Bad Bees

2010-10-03T11:27:00.001-04:00

Well it is already October and the beekeeping season for 2010 is over.

Left: Honey on the hives in July Right: Same colony at the end of August

And I for one am glad to see it go.

A very early spring brought a very early end to the honey flow, which lengthened the amount of time that there was a lack of nectar and pollen this summer. It does not make a beekeeper happy to see his large, ready to collect hives, sitting with nothing to do.

Our nectar flow here on Cape Cod starts towards the end of June and ends the first week of August.

This year however it started two to three weeks early, and ended two to three weeks early. This resulted in a longer period of time between the spring and fall flows, (almost two months).

Left: A colony started in spring never moved up into the upper hive body. This colony has not produced enough stores to survive the winter.

This combined with late and poor goldenrod nectar flow resulted in starvation conditions for our hives. Hives with 50 to 60 pounds of honey on the hives in July were starving by the end of August.

Of course I am partly to blame for this. We had such good success building up colonies in the spring that there were many more mouths to feed when the nectar flow stopped early.

We have been feeding our hives sugar syrup and pollen substitute since the third week in August. Although the bees are doing well now, and there are plenty of stores in the hives because of the feedings, the additional sugar syrup and the length of time of the feeding has created other problems. namely, a large increase in the small hive beetle population in the hives. I haven't even mentioned the Varroa Mites!

Right: Small hive beetle larva crawling out of the hives onto the bottom boards. The feeding of sugar syrup for such an extended period caused an explosion in small hive beetle. Varroa Mites can be seen on the bottom board as well.

Additionally our five new colonies never moved up into the upper hive bodies. Frames and new foundation were never drawn out or filled with stores for winter. This forced us to combine these weak colonies in order to ensure their survival. The queens of the weaker colonies were killed and their colonies were combined with other weak colonies.

Left: Colony being prepaired for winter. Crisco oil and sugar patty to fight Tracheal Mites, Pollen patty to provide polen when none is being collected, Menthal oil towel to fight Tracheal Mites, Small hive beetle trap, Apastan strips to fight Varroa Mites. Sugar syrup is being fed with a division board feeder in a different hive body.

So, now that the hives are well fed, and in good shape to survive the cold, damp, cape cod winter, it is time to reflect on this past beekeeping season.

Hmmm… What would I, could I, have done different…… right now I just don’t know!

But I will have plenty of time to think about it over the next few months.

Hot and humid days

2010-08-03T01:37:00.002-04:00

It has been over a month since my last post.

During the last week of June I placed 13 queen cells into queen-less nuc hives. These queens, once emerged, would mate naturally and start to lay eggs in about 14 days and build new colonies.

Above: Four mating nucs ready for queen cell introduction.

The jars will be filled with sugar syrup to feed the nucs.

Unfortunately this year’s early spring lead to early hot and humid weather.

The main honey flow stopped a month early, and because we were feeding sugar syrup to the nuc colonies, robbing ensued. Many of the mating nucs and new queens were destroyed by strong colonies that came and killed bees while robbed them of their honey and syrup.

Only 3 mated queens survived.

Left: Virgin queens in queen cages. These queens are being taken care of by nurse bees. They have been placed in a queenbank colony.

As part of an experiment I had taken eight of the queen cells and arranged them so the virgin queens would emerge into queen cages. These cages were placed into a queen-less, brood-less hive. The queens emerged into the cages and were taken care of by the surrounding nurse bees. Because the virgin queens would be in the cages, they would not be able to mate.

Right: A closer view of the banked queens. A special frame with wire guides hold the cages in place. The plastic cell cup seals the top of the cage.

I have had some success over the past two years rising queens. One of my strongest hives this year is lead by a queen I produced last summer. She is the daughter of the queen from my strongest hive the previous year. I have noticed that the most uncontrollable part of queen rearing is the mating process.

Above: You can see the open queen cell inside the cage

as well as the queen. Nurse bees surround the queen and

feed here through the cage openings. I'm sure they are trying

to find a way to get her out!

You can pick the best stock to breed from, graft the youngest larva, place them into the strongest cell starter colony, then place them into the largest cell builder, move the cells at the right time into mating nucs, have the cells emerge successfully….. Only to see your beautiful large, genetically selected queens fly off to mate with…. Well, any drone that comes along!

It is all left to chance at that point.

Above Left: A screw lid jar is used to put the queen to sleep with carbon dioxcide. It only takes a few minutes

Above Right: CO2 is dispensed through water so the flow can be seen and regulated.

It is apparent that the week link, the place where you loose control, in the process is mating. So I started looking into the process of instrumental insemination of honey bees. With II the breeder can control the mating process and select the specific genetic material to mix with the genetics of the virgin queen.

Above: Insemination device I have been working on. CO2

is fed through a hose to keep the queen asleep.

My intent was to take the caged virgin queens and use them to learn about the instrumental insemination process.

Above: Working out the "bugs" in the system

Need smaller hooks and glass tips.

For several months I have been learning, designing, and building the equipment I believed to be required. I read books, blogs, web pages, and watched videos.

Left: This queen was put to sleep, placed in the instrument, manipulated, but not inseminated. She woke up about 15 minutes later.

Needless to say my first attempts have had some successes and many failors….

Right: Second queen was put to sleep, manipulated, and woke up. She was not inseminated.

But I have learned a lot.

I will share more in future posts.

.

Queen Cells and Counting

2010-06-29T22:25:00.001-04:00

In my previous post I described the steps I am taking this year with my queen rearing project.

As of my last post I had managed to get queen cells into cell builder colonies.

Above: 18 queen cells being removed from a queen-right cell builder colony.

Some of these cells will be placed into queen-less mating nucs

Sunday afternoon I moved the queen cells from the cell builder hives into individual queen-less mating nucs. Usually I move the queen cells on day 14 (10 days after grafting, and two days before emergence on day 16) to the individual nucs.

Above: As an experiment I kept 3 of the cells in the queen-less cell starter colony.

As you can see I ended up with larger cells.

I moved them a day early (day 13) this year, because, last year I had 16 cells destroyed when one of the cells emerged early.

Step 7 Continued:

Ok, So at this point I had 21 cells, 18 in a queen right cell builder colony, as I described last week. On the 14th day (10 days from grafting, and two days before the queens emerge) the cells should be individually placed each into its own queen-less mating nuc.

Left: By adding a frame of brood to the queen-less cell starter colony, I converted it into a queen-less cell builder colony that built larger cells.

Most of my mating nucs are regular deep hive bodies that I have divided into four compartments, each with its own separate entrance. Each compartment will hold two frames. Each compartment has a cover and a sugar syrup feeder.

To make up the nucs I take frames of bees and open larva from my hives and place them into the nucs. The nurse bees will stay with the brood to take care of it.

Above Left: Cells from the queen-right cell builder. Right: Cells from the queen-less cell starter.

\I place one frame of bees and brood, and one undrawn frame into each compartment. I then introduce a queen cell (with cell protectors) into each nuc.

You can see that it takes a lot of bees to raise queens. If you have 10 queen cells you need 10 mating nucs. If you have 50 queen cells you will need 50 mating nucs.

Above: One of the cells from the queen-less cell starter, converted to a cell bulder.

You can see that there is still alot of royal jelly in the cell.

Step 8: Wait and allow the queens to emerge. Each queen will emerge on day 16 (10 days from grafting) into a nuc.

This nuc will become a little colony.

The bees will take care of the new virgin queen. In about a week she will take mating flights and mate with up to 35 drones (male bees). She will fly back to the hive, and if successful will start laying eggs in about another 7 days.

Above: Cells from the queen-right cell builder

You can see there is no royal jelly in the cell.

Did the workers rob the royal jelly to feed to worker larva in the queen-right colony?

All the cells came from the same cell starter. All the cells were over filled with royal jelly before they were placed in the cell builder colonies. There is a difference!

This year I did not move all the cells into the queen-right cell builder. I left three cells in the queen-less cell starter colony. By adding a frame of emerging brood (no eggs or larva) to the cell starter I converted it into a cell builder colony. It was interesting to see that the queen-less cell starter colony built much larger cells than the queen-right cell builder colony.

It is obvious that the large number of nurse bees in the queen-less cell starter colony made a big difference in the quality of the cells. I expect I will get larger queens from the larger cells. In the future I plan to abandon the use of the queen-right cell builder in favor of a queen-less cell builder assembled specifically to build cells.

Right: Red plastic cells and yellow plastic cells each contain larva grafted from different queens. The cell color tells me which queen mother the cell is from.

Additionally I took eight of the cells and arranged them so the virgin queens will emerge into queen cages. These cages have been placed into a queen-less, brood-less hive. It is my hope that the workers will care for the emerged virgin queens.

I have plans for these eight virgins I may share with you at a later date.

Tomorrow 21 queens will be emerging. This weekend I will look in on them to see how the new queens are doing.

I’ll let you know.

Queen Season

2010-06-23T22:33:00.000-04:00

Father’s Day. A holiday to commemorate all the hard working fathers. The perfect time of year to raise queens.

Generally, on Cape Cod, at this time of year, a colony will have built itself up to about 30,000 or 40,000 bees. Over the next month they will continue to increase in numbers to about 60,000. As the bees start to get crowded they start thinking about swarming.

Above: Queen cup frame just pulled from my cell starter hive.

After 36 hours the bees have started building queen cells.

You can tell the accepted cells by the wax that has been added to the cell.

24 cells have been accepted out of 28 grafted cells

Swarming involves building queen cells. A beekeeper can use this natural tendency of the bees to raise his own queens.

It is always easier to work with the bees rather than against them.

Above: Close up of the started cells

Here’s what I have been doing.

Step one.

Create a cell starter hive. Take a strong colony and locate the queen. Place her and the frame she is on aside. Now take all the frames that have open larva and shake the bees into a 5 frame nuc (at least 5 frames worth of nurse bees). What you are doing is shaking nurse bees into this nuc since they would be found on the frames with open larva. There can be no queen or they will reject the cells you put in the nuc later. That is why we located her and put her aside. To this nuc add one frame of pollen, one frame of nectar, and a wet sponge. The bottom of the nuc should be screened so the bees will not over heat. The entrance must be closed so the bees cannot return to their original colony. Put the cover on the nuc for now.

Above: A well fed queen cell which is 36 hours old

You can see how the larva has grown in a day and a half!

Step Two

Choose the hive (queen mother) you plan to raise queens from. You will need her eggs! Of course you will select the strongest, best behaved, active, honey collecting colony you have to pick from. Locate the queen and put her aside. Also locate a frame of eggs and young larva (newly hatched) and brush all the bees off of it back into the colony you are taking it from. If you shake the frame you will also move the larva from the center of the cell it is in.

Step Three

Graft newly hatched larva, 3 days old, into primed plastic queen cell cups. I prime the cells with royal jelly I saved (froze) from the previous year. You will also have success if you prime the cells with a mixture of 50% plain yogurt and 50% water. Just a small drop in the center of each plastic cell will help you float the larva off the grafting tool. The larva should look like a comma. If it looks like a full C shape the larva is too old. Use the youngest larva you can find. Use a damp hand towel to cover the grafted cells so they do not dry out. Graft two bars of 14 cells each, that will be 28 cells all together.

Step Four

Place the queen cup frame into the cell starter hive you created earlier. Place the grafts between the two frames, pollen frame to one side, open nectar frame to the other. Now leave them alone for 24 to 48 hours. Place the frame of larva you took the grafts from, back into the hive you stole it from.

Above: Same cell with wax removed. See all the white

royal jelley in the cell? I will harvest this and freeze it

for use next queen season

Step 5

Prepare a queen right cell builder hive. Open the hive and find the queen. Place her in the bottom hive super with all the empty and capped frames of brood. Place a queen excluder over the box with the queen and put all the open larva, pollen, and nectar in the box. Leave an open space between open larva and a frame of pollen to place your started cells. Leave this colony over night while your cells are in the cell starter hive. This will allow time for all the nurse bees in that colony to move to the upper box. It will be 3 days before any eggs the queen lays in the lower box to hatch and require nurse bees.

Step 6

After 24 to 48 hours open the cell starter hive and remove your grafts. You will be able to tell which cells have been accepted by the bees by the work they have started on the cell. Excepted cells will have wax being added to them. This year the bees started 24 cells out of 28 grafts. Not bad. Take the queen cell frame and place it into the cell builder hive you prepared the day before. This hive will feed and build the cells.

Above: Just a side note. I was pleased with the very

large crop of peas we produced in the garden this year.

Thanks polinators!

Step 7

Wait and count. It takes 16 days for a queen bee to be created. Remember that the larva you grafted is already 3 or 4 days old. The queens will hatch at 16 days old, only twelve days after you graft them. Before that happens you will need to move the individual cells into queen-less mating nucs, or a queen-banking hive.

More on that next time.......

Eggs In Your Honey

2010-06-14T22:55:00.001-04:00

The weather did not allow me to start queen rearing this week, But there was a short window of opportunity to look in on the bees.

Above: Worker bee collecting pollen in my garden

The weather was damp and humid, not the best conditions for opening up a hive.

Bees make great barometers you know. It can be a clear, warm, sunny day, (perfect weather for opening a hive), but if rain is coming in the late evening, the bees will let you know by their attitude.

Right: As I clean out the shed of old bee packages, old comb, and old frames, my debris pile slowly grows.

If you are going to keep bees on Cape Cod you will have to get use to working with them in all types of weather. One minute it will be clear, then, in a minute the weather will change. I don’t know how many times I have started the smoker with blue sunny skies, only to have dark cloudy weather by the time I pull out my first frame of bees.

Left: Another worker collecting nectar and pollen

Saturday, between the rain, the bees were flying, obviously collecting nectar an pollen from something that is in bloom.

Above: A solid brood pattern layed by one of the queens I raised last season.

I opened up the hives to find that the bees were storing honey in the honey supers.

I made a choice this season to not use queen excluders when supering for honey. A queen excluder is a grid of wire that when placed between boxes of comb prohibits the queen from passing between the boxes. The spacing in the grid allows worker bees to move through, but not the queen.

Left: An over productive queen was not able to resist the temptation to lay eggs in my honey super. Look closely and you will see the small egg at the bottom of the cell. Click on the photo to enlarge.

In past years I felt that the queen excluders discouraged the worker bees from moving up into the honey supers, acting as more of a honey excluder than anything else.

Of course you also take the chance that the queen will move up into the honey supers and lay eggs. Not something you want to see, that is, eggs mixed on a comb with your honey.

Right: Opening up the hive to find ripe honey being capped over is what a beekeeper loves to see.

I have one hive that has a queen that is laying so many eggs that she has run out of room in the brood chamber. Sure enough when I inspected the honey super, there she was sitting on six frames of eggs where honey was to be. I took her and placed her in a lower box, then added a queen excluder. In about a month those eggs will hatch out into worker bees and the bees can store honey in the empty comb.

It is nice to see the bees storing honey in comb that I will take as my own in a couple of months. Honey comb is beautiful. The bees collect nectar from the plants and store it in their honey stomachs. Once back in the hive they place the nectar in the comb.

Nectar from flowers contains about 1% sugar. The bees evaporate the water and concentrate the sugar to turn it into honey. Once the honey is “ripe” they cap over the cell with wonderful white wax. The wax seals the honey and keeps it from absorbing moisture from the air.

It is estimated that it takes about 10,000 miles of flying to make a table spoon of honey.

It is exciting to see.

Above: Ripe honey being capped by the workers. You can see the white capping wax.

In a couple of months we will taste that honey.

What honey tastes the best to me?

The honey that’s in my mouth at that particular moment of course!

Strange Ideas

2010-06-09T20:57:00.001-04:00

May and June have been good to the bees here on Cape Cod. For the first time in many years we actually had “spring”.

Right: Two of the packages of bees we installed in May

Typically here the temperatures stay cold (because we are surrounded by water on three sides), until the end of may. Then suddenly it is HOT….. Until September.

This lengthened spring with nice weather has allowed the bees to take full advantage of the honey flow. I guess it is the least mother nature could do for us after last spring.

Left: Empty packages on top of the newly created colonies. In three weeks the bees have drawn all the comb in the first boxes. The second deep brood chambers were added to these hives last week

Both Kona queens were accepted by their colonies, and have been diligently laying a thousand eggs each day for the past two weeks. Their patterns are beautiful. They are laying a solid worker cell pattern. I am pleased. The queens are only limited by the ability of the workers to produce new comb, and the amount of honey an pollen being stored.

I also managed to obtain a Minnesota Hygienic Queen two weeks ago. I recently discovered that this particular strain of honey bee has their roots in the old “starline” strain of bees. The Starline breed was sold by Dadant and Sons many years ago. They were the first bees I kept in my early years of beekeeping. My uncle and grandfather, who got me started in beekeeping, swore by them.

I remember that I did not know much at that time about beekeeping, and made many mistakes. Those starline bees lasted for years without any help from me. Year after year they would product honey, capped with the whitest wax I have ever seen. Alas they are no longer produced.

We will see how their great great great cousins do!

Right: Honey supers (top thin boxes) have been added to the strong colonies. The hive on the far left was the hive that had the two queens last month. Mother and daughter existed side by side for over a month.

The Kona queens are installed in the two far right colonies

The one queen I kept from my queen rearing project last summer is doing outstanding. Honey supers have been added and the bees are busy filling the empty comb with honey.

Honey supers were added to the colonies last week. Within 24 hours the bees were working the comb, storing nectar, which will be turned into honey over the next two months.

I have the habit of obsessing about ideas that pop into my head. An idea will come to me, and I will spend much of my free time thinking about it, sketching it, drawing it, planning it.

This past winter I had two such apparitions, or perhaps I should call them obsessions.

I am about 80% complete with the fabrication of the second. I share here.

Left: My latest bee endeavor.... Any guesses?

Click on the photo to enlarge.

Can you guess what it is?

Yes… It does have to do with beekeeping.

Hawaiian Queens

2010-05-07T18:19:00.003-04:00

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Come Visit!

Last night I was informed that a fellow beekeeper had just received a shipment of queens from Hawaii.

With a quick call, and short driver over to the next town, I had two beautiful Kona Queens.

Above: Two Kona Queens From Hawaii. The blue mark indicates they are 2010 queens

Since they did not have any attendant workers in the cages with them I needed to get them into colonies as soon as possible. From what I have heard from fellow beekeepers the Kona queens have done well here on Cape Cod.

Last week’s inspections revealed that one of the hives was queen-less, while another had dwindled down to about one hundred bees.

Right: a few of our colonies. You can see the two white 5 frame nucs, just created, in the center bottom of the photo. One of these nucs contains the old queen discovered during the hive inspection. The other contains bees, eggs, and larva. They will have to raise their own queen.

As you may remember the queen-less hive is our "nasty" hive, and being queen-less did not help their attitude much. As I opened the colony I had flashbacks of the previous week’s events, and wondered if that nasty little worker bee was still waiting for me inside.

As I looked over the frames I could see that they were attempting to build queen cells, but had nothing to put in them since the hive had no queen, larva, brood or eggs. I found three empty queen cell starts.

Left: The hives are still working the dandilions.

As soon as I placed the queen and her cage on top of the frames the worker bees were all over her. I plan on letting them get to know her for a few days before I remove the cork protecting the candy in the cage. Once I remove the cork the workers will eat through the candy in a day or two and release her. I want to revisit this hive to verify that there is no laying worker before I take the chance and allow them to release her. This will provide a few additional days to help in acceptance.

Perhaps, with a new queen, this hive will settle down a bit. If the workers accept the queen she will begin to lay eggs, and the entire genetics of the colony will change over the course of two months making this hive more gentile.

I opened up the dwindling hive to look at them. Sure enough they had killed the failing queen, and in her place built five queen cells!

Right: Workers gather water for the colonies.

I destroyed the queen cells and place one of the new queens on the top bars in the colony. I will check again in about 5 days to make sure the workers have released her.

While I was out in the apiary I thought I should look in on the hive that superseded the queen from 2007. I opened the hive to find it full of eggs and young larva! The new queen is doing fine.

Guess what else I found! Sure enough, there in the top box, was the old queen, with her faded yellow marking and all!. I put her aside in a nuc box with an additional frame of bees and brood, and continued to look for the new queen. I found her in the bottom box with eggs and young larva! She has filled out since mating and is a good size.

This is the first time I have seen this. Mother and daughter queens existing in the same hive.

They have been coexisting for at least two weeks if not longer.

What a surprise!

I never know what I am going to find next!

One little nasty bee

2010-05-02T22:21:00.005-04:00

May has arrived. The apple trees are blooming and the temperatures reached into the high 70’s this weekend.

The bees were flying , collecting pollen and nectar.

Above: Bees were working the apple blossoms

this past weekend.

As usual I conducted hive inspections Saturday. I was curious to see how the hive with the superseded queen was doing. Upon inspection I found new eggs, and larva.

She is laying, but she is very small, much smaller than the queen she replaced.

I have read recently that queens raised in an emergency situation, such as she was, are not as good. She will do for now until a suitable replacement is available later in the spring.

The workers seem to like her, and she is laying eggs. Another week will tell how her "pattern" is . Will she lay in every cell, or will there be many empty cells?

Left: Collecting nectar

I continue to feed the bees sugar syrup at a slow pace, about a quart a week. I have had conditions in the past where the bees have stored so much sugar syrup that the queen has run out of room, and the colony goes into "swarm mode".

For now we just want to stimulate the queen into laying eggs…. A lot of eggs. The main honey flow is only three weeks away.

Right. Another bee works the apple blossoms.

One of the hives has been experiencing what beekeepers call “dwindling”. The hive came through the winter well, but has slowly been shrinking in size despite my efforts. They were down to about 100 bees so I took one frame of larva, and one frame of emerging brood from one of the strong colonies and added them to this hive to strengthen it. I also shook in two frames of nurse bees. I am hoping that this hive will do a "U" turn and start to increase.

This weeks inspections found another surprise. A very strong colony with no eggs, larva, or brood. This could only mean one thing… the queen has gone missing. They did have two queen cells that I left for them.

This particular hive is one of two packages of bee we received from Georgia last spring. This hive is the meanest in the apiary (it is only moderately aggressive, and then only when they have been disturbed for a while). You can work them for about five minutes before you have about ten guard bees buzzing at you. Of course the condition of a missing queen, and no brood did not make them any happier.

One of the guard bees followed me around the rest of the day. Buzzing at me.

Even the next day he was "waiting" for me in the yard. He was determined to get me!

Left: A guard bee watching over the opening of the inner hive cover of my nasty hive.

I said…. “its not my fault your queen went missing…. Maybe she left because you are so mean!”

I managed not to get stung though.

You Thought You Could Stop Us

2010-04-25T10:29:00.000-04:00

It has been 19 days since I destroyed queen cells in one of our hives. I believe the old queen was failing and the bees decided that, what was best for the hive, would be to replace her.

Right: Emerged queen cell. A new queen has emerged from this cell within the past week. Worker bees are in the process of demolishing the cell. A new queen cell can be seen to the left of the emerged cell. A worker in inside the cell tending to the queen larva.

Last week I found that the bees had built more queen cells and I decided to let them replace the old queen.

I have been concerned that it is too early in the spring for mature drones to be available for mating.

Left: The new queen. Can you find her? I expected to find a virgin queen since it usually takes two weeks for a queen to mate and start to lay eggs. I found new eggs everywhere in the hive. I beleive she is laying

Sure enough, upon inspection, I found that one of the queen cells had emerged. The empty cell was in the process of being destroyed by the workers. I estimate that the new queen emerged a few days earlier.

I searched to find the virgin queen. Sure enough I found her, but I also found eggs…. Lots and lots of eggs. I guess she is not a virgin any more.

Right: Enlarged area of photo above showing closeup of the new queen. I am concerned that she is small. Queen ususally enlongate after mating. I will check her in a week to see how she is doing.

Could this queen have mated and started laying in less than a week? My experience has been that a queen will take up to two weeks after emergence to mate and start to lay. This queen seems to have done it in less than a week.

I am concerned that she seems a little on the small side. If the bees are happy with her I will let her stay until a better queen is available later this spring.

I am now kicking myself for destroying the beautiful large queen cell that was built at the beginning of the month. Sometimes I need to just let the bees be bees. They know their business better than I do.

Left: A worker bee bringing pollen into the hive with the new queen. With new eggs there will be young larva to feed in a few days.

On the other hand however, I have been watching one of my hives dwindle down in size. There is no sign of disease. The queen was very successful last season and the hive was strong all winter. Now they will not survive another week. Why… I don’t know.

The question for a beekeeper always is, When to I let nature take its course, and when do I intervene.

Do you really want to do this?

2010-04-12T19:25:00.001-04:00

Last week I wrote about finding queen cells in one of my hives. April on Cape Cod is just too early for a hive to raise or replace a queen. The weather is unpredictable, the temperatures are low, and the few drones (males) around are probably not mature enough for mating.

Right: Queen cell being produced by a hive that probably has a queen that is starting to fail. If you look closely you can see capped worker brood and capped drone brood. Can you find the queen? She is there.

This hive’s desire to raise another queen could be for only one of two reasons.

Left: A close up of the queen cell. You can see the old queen just above and to the right of the cell. Around her are circled her attendant workers. Perhaps the workers are guarding the new queen cell to keep it from being destroyed by the queen. Or perhaps the queen knows she is being dethroned and is allowing it to happen!

Either they have been overcrowded and feel the need to reproduce (swarm), or the existing queen is failing and the bees have decided to replace her.
The weather was just good enough on Sunday (62 degrees) to make a hive inspection.

Guess what I found?

Sure enough the bees had built two more queen cells. I said "Do you really want to do this now?"

Right. A queen larva, from one of the destroyed queen cells.

I found the old queen. She has been laying eggs, but upon closer examination I discovered that about 5% of the brood was drone brood scattered among the worker brood.

This is one of the signs that the queen may be failing.

A drone, (male bee), is produced from an unfertilized egg. Since queens only mate once in their life, (with up to 30 males), they store the semen within their bodies. When the queen starts to run out of semen she will lay more unfertilized eggs, which become males. Drones are larger than workers so their cells stick out beyond the surface of the comb.

Right: One of my home made small hive beetle traps which is installed under the screened bottom board. You can see all the dibris. No mites and no small hive beetle. There are beetles in the trap, but they are sap beetles.

This queen was introduced into this hive in 2007. That makes her three years old, going into her fourth season. I should have replaced her last fall, but she has been such a spectacular queen. She has out produced all my other hives. I have been using her eggs to produce other queens. I was hoping to stretch her through this last season.

Left: Closeup of the trap and beetles. The trap is baited with a mixture of mineral oil and cider vinegar. I have had alot of sucess catching small hive beetles with this.

Since it takes 16 days to produce a queen from a fertilized egg, killing the queen cells has bought two weeks time. That is, as long as I did not miss one.

Right: A closeup of the sap beetle. They must be attacted to the cider vinegar. These beetles are not a hive pest like the small hive beetle.

This season has defiantly gotten off to an interesting start.

Isn't a little early for that?

2010-04-04T23:04:00.000-04:00

This weekend on Cape Cod was beautiful. Temperatures reached just above 70. This gave me the opportunity to get into some of the hives for a quick check.

Right: A strong hive for the first week of April. With 7 frames of bees, emerging brood, eggs, and larva, this hive needs more room.

Sure enough all the hives I checked had capped brood, eggs, and larva. Their strength ranged in size from three frames of bees up to eight.

One of my hives has been flying very strongly the past week or so. Something told me that I should look at them! I opened up the hive. I found eggs, larva, capped brood, and the queen! I also found two queen cells! I thought to myself… Isn’t it a little early for that?

Left: One of the two queen cells found in this colony. The queen was found with plenty of eggs. She is getting old, going into her fourth season. Are they trying to replace her, or are the planning to swarm? Time will tell.

This particular hive had a bad infestation of mites last fall. This particular hive of bees has had a bad case of mites for the past three years. Each fall I have had to treat them, and each spring they surprise me on how great they come through the winter.

This particular queen is three years old. She was purchase from a breeder from Vermont. She has outperformed most of the other queens in my apiary year after year. There was plenty of worker brood, larva, and eggs. I find it hard to believe they would be replacing her. Perhaps the bees felt congested, with the brood trapped between frames of capped honey (from last year) and new pollen.

I destroyed the queen cells and moved some empty comb near the brood. This should allow the queen more room to lay. I also place an empty brood chamber above them.

Right: A closeup of one of the two queen cells.

An inspection next week will tell if they are happy with the changes, or if there mind is made up to swarm!

Or perhaps this is just an early sign of a great honey season, or lots of swarms!

Spring Has Sprung

2010-03-22T23:26:00.010-04:00

The first day of spring has arrived! And it has arrived in beautiful fashion!

Temperatures rose into the low 70’s this weekend, allowing for a quick inspection of the hives.

The crocus flowers are blooming, allowing the bees to collect much needed spring pollen. The pollen they collect will be used to boost brood production as they “build up” in size in preparation for the spring honey flow.

Right: The first Crocus to emerge on our property, and a week early too!

The warm temperatures over the past few days have been a wonderful reminder of days to come.

Several times I found myself sitting out near the hives just watching them fly in and out, heavily burdened with yellow packages of pollen on their back legs. Some bees were busy dragging out the dead from winter loses, while others just seemed happy to get out and into the sun shine.

I have been keeping a written record of the progress of the hives over the past years, and I am happy to report that the crocus bloom is running about a week ahead of schedule…. An early spring.

I guess the Ground Hog was wrong!

Left: A worker bee returning to the hive with some of the first spring pollen.

As I mentioned the rise in temperature allowed a quick inspection of some of the hives. Sure enough, young brood, and capped larva were observed on two if not three frames of bees. The queens probably started laying eggs sometime in February.

Some cells and already emerged, perhaps these were the bees I watched taking their first orientation flights in the sun.

Pollen patties were once again added to the hives. I have been surprised how quickly they have been consumed. Each colony has been through a patty a week since the beginning of March. In a few more weeks we will begin providing sugar syrup to the hives to imitate the collection of nectar. This will stimulate the queens to lay even more eggs, and cause the hives to build up faster.

Above: With the cover and inner cover removed you can see the new small hive beetle trap installed. The trap is baited with an attactant oil. The bees will chase the beetles, and the beetles should enter the trap to hide, where they will meet there demise. You can also see a new pollen patty just added to the colony along with the remains of the white bee candy. The yellow "frame" to the far right is a division board feeder which will be used to feed the bees sugar syrup next month.

Now is our buildup time. The more bees in the colonies come May. The more honey will be on the hives in August.

Some dead hive beetles were found on the sticky boards below the screened bottom boards. This indicates that some hive beetles are continuing to survive, with the bees, through the winter. I purchased two different types of beetle traps to use in addition to the bottom board traps I have been using. These new traps fit between the frames in the upper hive body. They are baited with an attractant oil. I have not used these before. I hope they work. The next inspection will show if this trap works.

Left: Progress of the mead I started in February. You can see how much it has cleared over the past month. To the right is a photo taken at the height of fermentation.

I plan on drinking this mead while we are extracting honey this Septermber!

The bee candy was once again added where needed, even though there is still abundant honey still in the combs. The bees have now been “trained” to feed off of this candy, although with so much honey left in the comb these hives will have to be watched carefully for swarming in the months to come.

I had quite the feeling of accomplishment this weekend. It is nice that all of the hives survived this winter. Perhaps, after 31 years, I have finally figured out how to prepare them for winter.

Or perhaps, I was just lucky.

If I knew then what I know now

2010-03-08T22:57:00.001-05:00

This blog post will be an examination of my queen rearing attempts over the past three years with conclusions regarding correct and or incorrect processes.

My queen rearing project began out of a desire to see my bees survive the damp cape cod winters. I had been experiencing a 50% to 80% loss of colonies from year to year.

Left: Example of bee larva of various ages.

I along with many beekeepers have noticed that over the past 30 years it has been harder and harder to keep bees. I have seen winter hive looses, not to mention summer hive losses, increase year after year.

I remember when I was 17 years old with my first hive of bees. They were Starline hybrid bees, and I knew next to nothing about keeping them. The hive survived for years on its own. Now that would seldom if ever happen. A hive that is not carefully kept and attended to will probably die the first season. Trachea, and Verroa mites along with the small hive beetle, as well new bee viruses, not to mention colony collapse disorder have devastated the bee population.

Right: Queen Pupa of the development age from different size queen cells. These queens were grafted on the same day. Their developmental variation is probably due to the age of the larva at the time they were grafted.

In breeding and mass production of queens have weakened the genetic quality of our bees. Queens that would once last four or five years need to be replaced every two.

Left: A steady hand is needed to transfer the fragile larva from the comb into the artifical cell

So what have I done about it? Well three years ago I started learning how to raise queens of my own. With both success and failure.

2007 (year 1). I experimented with two methods of queen rearing. The miller method, and the Doolittle method. I quickly became apparent to me that the Doolittle method allowed me much more control over the queen rearing process.

Right: Larva after being grafted. These larva should be only three days old. Their various ages can bee seen by the degree of curviture of the larva. Three day old larve look like a comma. Some of these grafts appear to be 4 or 5 days old. This would result in poor quality queens.

Positive

I learned how to graft (I was dry grafting at the time) larva into artificial cells.

I learned how to create a cell starter colony

I learned how to create a cell builder colony

I learned how to create queen mating nucs.

I was able to have 10% of my grafts accepted by the cell builder colony (9 out of 90 grafts)

Good size queen cells were created by the cell builder colony

I had 8 queens emerge

Queens were of adequate size.

I had 3 queens mate and start laying

Left: Two days after grafting and being placed in a cell builder, you can see the larva floating in a pool of royal jelly. You can also see how the nurse bees have started to add wax to the plastic cell as they start creating the queen cell.

Negative

Only 10% of my grafts were accepted

No queens survived into 2008

2008 (year2). I continued to experiment with the Doolittle method of queen rearing. I started to learn more about bee genetics and the importance of the Drone (male). I took a queen rearing class and discovered that if the artificial cells were primed with royal jelly, or even plain yogurt, better grafting results could be obtained.

Left: My first queen cells from 2007. You can see how large they are. This is due to the proper age larve being grafted into the cell, and the fact that only 8 cells were accepted and fed by the nurse bees. The cell builder colony was not over whelmed by the number of queen cells.

Positive

I raised queens three times that spring.

Wet grafting of larvae improved my acceptance rate to 90%

Grafting 90 cells yielded 80 queen cells.

I raised 15 mated queens that season.

Negative

Queen cell size was very small. This was partly due to my over whelming my cell builder hives with too many queen cells. I believe that I also grafted larva that was 4 or 5 days old not 3 as I should have. This resulted in smaller cells and smaller queens.

I had a problem creating nucs. I was not as organized as I should have been. I attempted to make splits from nearby colonies. 50% of the nucs created returned home to the mother hives abandoning the queen cells and brood placed in the nuc. The previous year I had used relocated bees to create the nucs. That method worked much better.

Right: Queen cells from 2008. You can see how small the cells are. This was probably due to the number of grafts placed in the cell builder and the age of the grafted larva being too old.

I had problems with small hive beetle larva infesting two of the nucs creating a situation where the bees abandoned the nuc. This was probably due to the low numbers of bees remaining in the nucs thus creating stress within the nuc colony.

Queen quality was poor due to the small cell size. I did not attempt to over winter any of the queens.

2009 (year 3). I continued with the Doolittle method of queen rearing. It was an extremely cold wet spring. The colonies would not buildup and missed the main honey flow (May, June, and July). All the colonies were starving in August, a time where there should have been 60 pounds of surplus honey on each hive. Since there was no promise of honey that season two of the colonies were used for queen rearing.

Left: Grafts from 2009. Better cell size, but still too small.

Positive

I continued having great success with grafting and acceptance of the grafts. This improved to a 95% acceptance rate.

I learned how to create and use, with success, a queen right cell builder colony.

Grafted three cycles of queen cells over a two month period.

Raised 25 queens.

Learned how to bank queens.

One queen was overwintered and has survived.

Right: More small queen cells

Negative:

Queen cells were small again. It became apparent that I was grafting larva that was too old. During one cycle, queens emerged two days before the expected age of 16 days old destroying 19 queen cells.

I had the same problems with creating mating nucs. Many queens were lost because the workers returned to the mother colonies.

I became allergic to bee stings

2010 (year 4). We will see, won’t we!

Flight at last!

2010-02-28T21:00:00.010-05:00

Winters on Cape Cod offer little to brighten the spirit of a beekeeper. It is much too cold to look in on them and see how they are doing. We wait and wait until warmer days, days where the temperature edges above 40, to see any activity outside the colony.

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Left: Hive open on a 45 degree February Day. You can see that much of the candy feed has been consumed by the bees over the last month.
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Will my bees survive the winter cold? Has it been cold for too long? Are the bees starving in place because it has not been warm enough for them to relocate to fresh stores of honey?

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Right: Another open colony. Not as much candy feed has been consumed.
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After weeks of cold, the temperature finally pushed its way above 40 degrees, the bees broke cluster and commenced their cleansing flights. This gave me the opportunity to peak in under the cover to see how the bees were doing and whether or not candy needed to be added to help them survive the winter.

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Left: Bees take to the air for a cleansing flight. Winter bees do not get out much!
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Upon opening the hives it became apparent that the bees had consumed about half the candy I had placed in the hives in January. I was please to see that all of the hives were doing well. Most had 5 frames of bees, not bad for February. The queen should start laying eggs sometime within the next few weeks to start replenishing the workers lost over the winter.

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Right: Close up of bees feeding on sugar candy. This candy supplements their stores of honey to help stretch their food for the long winter.
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With this inspection I am hopeful that all the hives will survive this winter. Of course it is not the end of March yet. March is the month where the greatest bee loses occur. If their number s dwindle to low, the bees will not be able to keep themselves warm enough to survive. Many colonies die only a few weeks away from the bloom of first spring flowers.

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Left: A bee and a hive beetle on a removed sticky board. The dead hive beetle was not there on the last inspection in January. Evidence that there are small hive beetles surviving the winter within the cluster of bees.
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The bees in the hive now, are the bees which emerged last September, five months ago! They have not seen much other than the inside of the colony. They have spent much of their life keeping the colony warm, feeding on the stores of honey and pollen left there by their many sisters the summer before they were born.

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Right: A worker bee rests on the edge of a brick, warming itself in the sun before flying back to the colony
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Now begins the buildup of the colony in preparation for the honey flow in June and July. Starting in March we will begin feeding the colonies pollen, and sugar syrup to further stimulate their increase in numbers. We want the colonies strong in numbers for the honey flow. The more bees collecting pollen and nectar, the more honey will be produced.

March will tell…. March will tell…

Winter Beekeeping - Make Some Mead

2010-02-15T17:35:00.021-05:00

What else to do… What else to do…

I "must" find something to pass away the winter days without the bees……

MEAD…
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Right: Lemon and orange zest and juice along with 12 pounds of honey.
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Honey was for thousands of years the main sweetening agent known to humans.

Life, Courage, Wisdom, and strength were believed to be provided by honey. The Bible, Hinduism, Aristotle, Virgil, Celtics all echo the praises of honey.
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Left: Zest and spices ready to be boiled in the "must"
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There are many types of mead. Dry, Sweet, Wine like, Beer like, mixed with fruit (Melomel), mixed with herbs (Pyment, Hippocras, Metheglin, Cyser).

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Right: Pure water and spices boiling to create the "must". Once cooled the honey and yeast will be added and fermentation will begin!

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In its simplest form, honey is mixed with water and fermented. The amount of honey mixed in proportion to the water controls the amount of alcohol that can be produced in the final drink. It also controls how sweet the drink will be. In this simple form the flavor of the mead will be created by two things… the flavor of the honey used, and any flavors added by the particular strain of yeast used to ferment the must (mixture).
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Left. The empty fermentation bucket after two weeks of fermentation. You can see how mudy the must looks from the yeast.

Meads will taste different if different types of honey are used. A wild flower honey will impart a different flavor to the mead than say a cranberry or orange blossom honey. A champagne yeast will have a different flavor than a merlot yeast.

There are hundreds if not thousands of recipes for mead. Choosing one is difficult.
Back in 1978 I made my first batch of mead. It was just a simple honey, water, yeast mixture. It fermented, bottled, and aged. At just the right moment a bottle was opened and tasted.
Reminded me of kerosene!...... Others liked it.
This year I created my own recipe, actually a combination of two that seamed interesting. I would be using honey from our hives of course. Cape Cod Wild Flower Honey to be exact. I wanted a spiced fruity mead. More of a Metheglin I would say.
I started with orange and lemon zest, and juice, a touch of chamomile, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, yeast nutrient, and tannin in a muslin bag. Boiled in water for 15 minutes, and then rested the must for 15 minute. The must was added to a sterilized fermentation bucket along with 12 pounds of honey. Once the must was cool the specific gravity of the must was taken and champagne yeast was added and fermentation started within hours.
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Right: The "must" is "racked" into a secondary fermentation container fitted with an air lock. The air lock protects the mead from wild yeasts or other thinks that could ruin the mead.
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Why check the specific gravity you ask?
By taking a specific gravity reading prior to fermentation, and comparing it to a reading after fermentation is complete allows us to calculate how much alcohol was produced in the mead. An alcohol content between 12% and 13% will preserve the mead and keep it from turning bad. The bees would not be happy if all that honey went to waste now would they!
The alcohol, being produced, is a byproduct of the fermentation process. Yeast is a living organism that consumes sugar and nutrients from the must, and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide as waste. The carbon dioxide comes out of the must as bubbles (gas).
Its fun to watch the mead bubble away. Especially knowing that for every tiny bubble of carbon dioxide, an equal amount of alcohol is produced.
Eventually the yeast runs out of sugar (food) to eat, and the fermentation process is complete.
Now we will have to wait for the mead to “clear” which means all the yeast settles to the bottom of the container and a clear drinkable liquid can be bottled. Mead takes a couple of months to clear.
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Left: You can see the bubbles created by the yeast. Toasted oak chips have been added to give the mead an oak cask flavor.
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Once bottled, the mead will have to age for a year or so before it will taste good enough to drink.
I don’t think I will be able to wait that long though!
Good Mead web pages:
The Joy Of Mead:
http://www.stormthecastle.com/mead/index.htm
Eckraus:
http://www.eckraus.com/wine-making-mead-honey.html
The wine making home page:
http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/reques28.asp

Minding your own beeswax

2010-01-27T23:10:00.010-05:00

Winter Beekeeping
Minding your own beeswax

It is the end of January, about the most boring time of the year for a beekeeper. There are no bees flying around the hives, no spring flowers, and it is too early to order more bees.

The new beekeeping catalogs have not even arrived in the mail yet!

Right: Uncapping the Honeycomb. The hot electric knife melts the comb and sizzles as it slices its way through the wax.

Suddenly you remember that bucket full of wax cappings, from the fall honey extraction, sitting in your basement । AHHH a bee project at last!

Beeswax was being used by people more than 5,000 years ago. The ancient Egyptians used wax for embalming and making waxen figures.

The Romans used wax tablets to write private messages on. The message, once read, could easily be smoothed out and erased by running your fingers over the message etched into the soft wax.

In the fourteenth century having beeswax candles was a sign of nobility. Beeswax candles burned more cleanly, burned longer, and smelled much better than the cheaper candles made from mutton fat.

That is actually one of the things that hooked me on beekeeping when I was in my teens. No not nutten fat…. It was that sweet, sweet smell of beeswax. There is only one thing better….. That’s the sweet smell of melted beeswax and hot honey on extracting day.

Left: Frames of honey comb sits in the uncapping tank. Wax cappings can be seen at the bottom of the tank. The screen at the bottom of the tank allows honey to drain off the cappings and into a holding tank.

I use the beeswax produced by our bees for candles, lip balm, and hand cream. But before the beeswax can be used for these items it must be cleaned. How do you clean beeswax…. Well I tell you my secrets.

You may not know that beeswax is produced by glands located on the underside of the worker bees. These glands become active when the young bees reach a certain age. It takes a lot of energy (food) to produce wax, and some colonies are much better at producing it and building comb than others. The wax that the bees produce is the construction material of the hive. Wax is molded by the bees to create the comb that is used to raise young bees and store the pollen and honey they use as food during the winter months. It is interesting to note that although wax production and comb building is the work of younger bees, If by chance something were to kill off all the younger bees, the older bees would suddenly become able to produce wax again.

So how do we get the wax from the bees?......

We take it of course.

Right: Melting the wax cappings in an old pot containing water.

Bees are avid builders. They will build comb everywhere. Where you want it, and many times where you don’t. The hives we use are designed to encourage the bees to building comb were the beekeeper wants it..... In the frames of the hive.

We start with a sheet of wax in the frames as a starting point for the bees. The bees will then produce wax and build out the frame by building the comb. Bees will also produce comb between boxes and on top of frames. This wax is removed from the hive during inspections. Some of the wax we use is collected in this manner.

Some of the comb is used by the bees to store honey, hopefully a lot of honey, although some years not enough. When the honey is "ripe" the bees will “cap” it with a layer of very white wax. This layer of wax protects the honey from absorbing moisture from the air, and thus preserves the honey until it is needed by the bees.

In a good year the bees will produce an abundance of this honeycomb allowing the beekeeper to “steal” some of it for his own personal use. We can’t take all of it, even though we want to, because the bees need to keep about 50 pounds for themselves in order to survive a typical New England winter.

In a good year the bees will produce about 60 pounds of surplus honey per hive. I have had hives produce up to 90 to 100 pounds of surplus honey.

Left: Dibris left on the cheese cloth after the melted wax and water is poured into the disposable container.

The frames of honeycomb are removed from the hive and taken to the extracting room to have the honey removed. This process includes using a hot electric knife to cut off the white cappings exposing the liquid honey. The frame can then be put into an extractor (basically a large centrifuge) and the honey is spun out of the frames.

At the end of the process you end up with frames containing empty comb, liquid honey, and the beeswax cappings. The empty comb will be placed back in the hives the following season allowing the bees to just refill them without having to rebuild them.

Right: Clean wax floats to the surface while the water and dibris settles to the bottom of the container. This process must be completed three times to clean the wax enough for use.

The wax cappings along with all the burr comb can then be processed into usable wax. There are probably many ways to clean and render the wax. This is just my method.

Remember that wax is flammable and care must be taken when heating it!

I use an electric heating element to melt our wax. I always mix water with my wax when melting it down. This insures that it will not over heat and burst into flames. The water also helps “clean” the wax. Once melted I pour the wax and water through two layers of cheese cloth into a disposable container. The wax and water is allowed to cool. Once cool the container can be cut open releasing the dirty water and the solid wax. The wax will have many impurities left in it, and this process is repeated two additional times before it is clean enough to use.

Left: The reward for all the hard work. Sweet smelling clean bees wax ready for use in candles and balms.

It is a lot of work!

But the sweet yellow beeswax reward is well worth it!

Candy for the Bees

2010-01-16T15:51:00.009-05:00

It is mid January here on Cape Cod, and we have had our first thaw day of the winter. Today’s temperature managed to climb into the 40’s. That meant that it was warm enough for the bees to take their all important cleansing flights. You see bees cluster at temperatures below 40 degrees.
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Left: Making Bee Candy. All ingredients mixed in the pot on top of the stove.
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That means they group together in a tight ball. By moving their wing muscles without moving their wings they generate heat to keep the inside of the cluster of bees between 80 and 90 degrees. The bees will remain in this cluster and slowly move around the hive in order to access the stores of honey which is their food.

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Right: Heating the mixture to 245 degrees F.

Remember to hold it at this temperiture for 3

minutes.

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If temperatures remain too low for too long a period of time then the bees can run out of food and starve to death only inches away from stored honey. To help them survive conditions where they cannot relocate to other areas containing food, beekeepers will often place candy above the bee cluster. This provides them with additional food stores in the event they run out of honey where they are clustered.
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Left: Mixing the Candy in cool water. It is ready to pour out when it cools to 200 degrees F.
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When temperatures manage to increase above 40 degrees the bees can break cluster and move around freely. They will take cleansing flights to rid themselves of the waste that they have been “holding in” all winter. Glad I’m not a bee!
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Right: Harden candy in the cookie sheet

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Since the temperature was above 40 degrees today I decided to open up the hives and check the status of the bee candy I had installed in the hives in late November. In fact, each of the hives had eaten all the bee candy in a four to five inch diameter area around the cluster.
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Right: Hive being prepared for winter. Notice pest strips between the frames which need to be removed before winter. Additional items seen include menthal oil paper towels used for tracheal mite treatement, and sugar grease patty used for varroa mite treatement. After the pest strips are removed this hive will be ready for winter candy feed.

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I installed additional candy as required in each of the hives.

Since it was warm enough, and I was disturbing the cluster of bees, they started their cleansing flights.

By the time I was done installing the bee candy I had brown drops of bee droppings all over me. Such are the hazards of beekeeping.

Here is my recipe for bee candy:

Ingredients:
5 lbs granulated cane sugar, 1 pint corn syrup, 1 & 1/3 cups water

Equipment:
Candy Thermometer, Cookie Sheet, Four oven mitts, Mixer, Sink with cold water

Directions:
1. Line the cookie sheet with wax paper and set aside on two oven mitts. Make sure the cookie sheet is level.

2. Take all ingredients and place in a pot. Mix until all ingredients are moist. Place on medium high heat. Place the candy thermometer on the side of the pot.

3. Heat the mixture until the temperature on the candy thermometer reads 245 degrees. Hold the mixture at that temperature for 3 minutes.

4. Turn off heat and immediately place the pot into the cool water (using the other two oven mitts). Use the mixer to mix the candy until the temperature drops to 200 degrees.

5. Pour mixture into the cookie sheet and allow the candy to harden and cool. While the candy is still warm make slices to form 8 or more squares.

6. Remove the candy from the cookie sheet and place pieces in the hives above the cluster of bees. Check monthly to see if more candy is needed.

Bad Bees

2009-10-31T13:58:00.009-04:00

October 2009

Bee season summery.
Well. My last post on this bee blog is almost a year old. A year ago I stated that I would do a better job keeping up with monthly blog posts. I guess not!!
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Left: Beautiful pattern of brood layed by one of my queens.
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The 2009 honey season, here on Cape Cod, was a complete bust. Our nectar flow on the Cape is in the spring. It rained so much this spring that the bees could not take advantage of the abundant nectar that was available. This resulted in very little honey being produced by the bees.
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Left: Larva and Eggs ready to be grafted into plastic queen cups
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A hive of bees needs about 50 pounds of honey to survive the winter here on Cape Cod. In an average season the bees will produce about 110 pounds of honey. 60 of that will be taken by the beekeeper, and 50 left for the bees for winter. The honey production was so poor this year that, in August, the bees had no honey in the hives and were in danger of starving. A couple of hives actually had no honey or nectar at all in the hive. Usually at this time there would be at least 60 pounds of extra honey in the hive in addition to the 20 to 30 pounds that would be stored near the brood or young bees.

Never in my 32 years of keeping bees have I ever seen a condition like this. I was forced to feed each hive of bees about a gallon of sugar syrup to sustain them. Fortunately it has been a good fall for the bees and we have been able to feed them substantially. The goldenrod has produced abundant pollen as for them as well. Even today bees were bringing in bright yellow packages of pollen to store for winter.

The verroa mite infestation has been the worst I’ve seen in years. This year I have gone back to treating the hives with chemical strips. The pesticide strips are designed to kill the mites but leave the bees alone. Thousands of mites are dropping out of the hives. Small hive beetle has been an issue as well. Fortunately not as bad as last year where I actually had bees leaving hives because they could not deal with the small hive beetle larva, which looks like groupings of small worms living in the combs.
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Left: Queen larve foating in royal jelly. This larva was grafted into this cell 48 hours earler. The larva is 6 days old
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The most disturbing incident however took place in March while I was installing two packages of bees we received from Georgia. Upon shaking the first package into an empty hive, I received a bee sting on my knee. As usual I brushed off my knee thinking that a bee just stung me from the outside of my pants leg. I finished installing the bees in the first hive and then continued to install the second package of bees in the second hive. Then I notice that my hands were burning. I thought to myself “That’s strange I don’t remember using these gloves for chemical or anything that would burn my hands”. I continued picking up and putting away my beekeeping equipment and noticed that my knee where I had been stung was still hurting… A lot. So I lifted up my pant leg and sure enough there was the stinger still in my knee pumping away. I removed it and noticed that one of my contact lenses felt strange. Then I started to itch all over. Sure enough… After keeping bees for 32 years, I now had developed an allergic reaction to the bee sting.
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Left: Queen cells produced as part of my 2009 queen rearing project. This summer I raised 12 mated queens.
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I got to take my first ride in an ambulance!

A Happy Beekeeping New Year

2008-12-30T22:30:00.008-05:00

Well as you can tell, I have not been a consistent blogger in 2008, only one entry. Well I’ll use the excuse that I was too busy keeping my bees! Or should I say… building them.

Left: A wild swarm of bees we removed from a picknic table at the local conservation area. As you can see, this swarm was very small.

As you can see from previous entries, I started 2008 with only 3 surviving hives, out of 10 strong wintered over hives from the previous fall. With much effort I built those three hives into 8, while harvesting 60 lbs of honey, and rearing about 20 queens. Some of those queens failed, some are now reining in my hives, and some of the better queens were sold to fellow local beekeepers here on the cape. We had a great time with the bees this year.

Right: A swam of bees we removed from a storage shed at the Otis Air Force Base.

The bees are sure amazing architects!

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Some of our adventures included gathering two wild swarms. One was found in the middle of a local conservation area, attached to the corner of a metal picnic table. The site was right against one of the capes largest ponds in the middle of nowhere. The swarm was probably two miles from the nearest beehive. I think the swarm was from a wild hive.

Left: A close up of the swarm, now acutaly an established colony. Where is the queen? We did find her (by luck) and put her into the new hive. Click on the photo for an enlarged view

The other swarm was gathered from a storage shed at the Otis Air Force Station, right next to the airstrip. The swarm had established itself inside the storage shed, accessing their new home through rusted holes in the siding. Comb had been built attached to various packs and boxes which contained who knows what. We spent a good part of a day removing items to access the bees. They had built beautiful curved comb attached to the metal siding of the shed, and everything else. In a way, it was a shame to remove them. It took us a while to cut out the comb and attached bees and install them into a hive. What a challenge. Bees were flying and honey was dripping everywhere. We neglected to bring a bucket to put the extra honeycomb in, so we used an empty rifle locker. Bees were stuck to everything!

Right: My first attempt a queen rearing this spring. See how small the cells are. I destroyed all these cells and started over. These cells were dry grafted. On my next attempt I primed the cups and got a 85% acceptance rate.
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The biggest challenge I had this year was keeping the bees in the mating nucs. I had about a 60 percent success rate with keeping the bees in a nuc. Some would abscond, or return to the parent colony, or migrate to a neighboring nuc. I had two nice queens, and established colonies abscond due to small hive beetle infestation. As we discussed at the bee association, this pest is increasingly becoming a problem. I believe my beetle problem came with the packages of bees I received from Georgia two years ago. They have increased unchecked for two years, and I saw many of them in my hives.

Left: Removed queen pupa. These queens are all the same age. You can see how the cell size effects the development of the queen. Larger queen cells mean larger queens. Larger queens mean more overies and better laying.

I was just thinking today that the 2009 beekeeping season has already started. The work we do in preparing the hives for winter will have a great effect on the condition of the bees this spring. This year some of the hives have been wrapped in black building paper. It is my understanding that the wrapped hives will be about 5 degrees warmer than the unwapped hives. We will see how this works out.

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Right: This is what it is all about.... The beekeepers reward.... Honey right from the extractor. We harvested 60 lbs this year.

My new years resolution is to maintain this blog. If you read this, post a message. Let me know what you think.

Right: My friend, and fellow beekeeper, Gene and I on extraction day!

And have a happy new year!

The queens are coming the queens are coming

2008-06-07T16:57:00.014-04:00

Well this is my first blog entry of 2008.

It has been a very difficult beekeeping season for me. We started the winter with nine very strong colonies with young queens. By May we were down to four. That’s over a 50% loss of hives. Of those four, one is very weak, two are average, and one is extremely strong.

Left: A dead hive. This hive was lead by one of the queens I raised last summer. Most of the time you can never figure out what happened. This hive stayed in the bottom box and never moved up to the upper box where there was plenty of honey and candy feed. They starved to death inches away from abundant supply
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That’s beekeeping. Everything was picture perfect in the fall, by spring the story changes.

Of the six queens I raised last year, only two have survived. One survivor was given to a local beekeeper last fall. The other is leading the week colony in our bee yard.

Left: A cell builder hive with two cell cup holding frames installed. These bees do not have a queen, and will quickly turn the grafted cells into queen cells.
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The honey flow is occurring here on Cape Cod, it started about two weeks ago. The bees are quickly storing nectar in the cells, ripening it into honey.

I have been watching my colonies closely for signs of swarming. So far all I have seen are queen cell cups, the cells that queens could be raised in. There have been no attempts by the bees to swarm this year. I have found that if you stay ahead of the bees, and provide them with young queens (introduced in the fall), and plenty of room ahead of schedule, they stay contented in their hives.

I have had no signs of disease or mites in any of the colonies this spring. That’s encouraging. You can see from past blog posts that last year we battled the worst infestation of verroa mites I have ever seen. It is interesting to note that the worst infested hives last year are the strongest this year, even though all the hives were treated.

Right: A frame of young eggs and larva from my strong hive. These young female larva are the offspring from my strongest queen. I want more queens like her.
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With swarm season on, we received our first call to collect a wild swarm of bees from the local conservation area. The swarm was hanging off of the corner of a picnic table. You can’t find an easier location than that!. We just put a hive under them, and they dropped right in. This will help make up our winter losses.

Right: Some of the 75 grafted queen cups I made today. They were installed into the cell builder shortly after this picture was taken.
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With swarm season on, it is time to try my hand at queen rearing again.
Last week I set up a “Cell Builder” hive. A cell builder is a queenless hive which contains emerging bees, nurse bees, brood, pollen, and nectar. In other words a strong young hive which does not have a queen. Since they do not have a queen, and no young larva to use to raise a queen, they will be primed for my grafts. Grafting is a method of queen rearing where you transfer four day old larva into special cells. These special cells are then built into queen cells by the bees.

Today I inspected all the hives, took young larva from my strong hive, and graft 75 cells cups. These cell cups were then installed into the cell building hive. I’m sure the bees were happy to see the young larva, and have the opportunity to raise some queens.

Left: A closeup of the grafts. You can see the small 4 day old larva floating on a layer of royal jelly.

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In 24 hours I can look to see how many of the larva they accepted, and decided to grow into queens.

Winterize

2007-10-30T21:53:00.000-04:00

Well it is the end of October. We have been preparing our hives for winter since the honey crop was removed on September first. I have come to learn that next years beekeeping begins now in the fall. In order to have strong hives next spring the colonies need to be properly prepared in the fall. I will say it again… The success of next years beekeeping depends on what we do now.

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Above: A hive top feed being installed on a colony. You can see that a pollen substitute patty, and a Crisco and sugar patty has been installed in the hive. The pollen patty ensures nutrition. The Crisco and sugar patty treats varroa and trachea mites.
Some people are beehavers. They have bees, there bees die, they get more bees, they have them, those bees die.

Some people are beekeepers. They keep there bees healthy year after year.
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Above: 2:1 sugar syrup being poured into the hive top feeder. The bees will collect this sugar syrup and store it for food to be consumed this winter.
I have been amazed that our mite problem still exists in the previously treated hives. Once high levels of varroa mite levels are detected, treatment of the hives began immediately. It takes 3 weeks to treat with formic acid pads, and with the weather getting cooler the formic acid vapors will not be as effective as they were in early September.
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Above: Robbing was so bad this year that I had to install weather stripping between the feeders and the cover to prevent bees from stealing the sugar syrup.
Our winter preparations in October and the first two weeks of November include the following.

1: Colonies are inspected for health. Is the colony strong? Is the colony health? Is there an adequate number of bees to insure the colonies survival through the winter months. Have the bees produced enough comb to store food. Sometimes the combs of bees need to be rearranged so that all the drawn comb and honey stores are located in the upper brood chamber. Empty frames and un-drawn frames of foundation are moved to the lower brood chamber. Since the bees will over-winter in the top box, this should be the location of most of their stores.

2: The hives are inspected for adequate winter stores of pollen and honey. If there is less than 50 lbs of honey in the colony the hives will be fed with a 2:1 ration of sugar syrup. Two parts sugar to one part water. All our colonies are fed sugar syrup and pollen substitute to insure they have more than enough supplies for winter.

Robbing has been a big problem this year. One drop of syrup outside the hive causes thousands of bees to go searching for the syrup. Once this starts hives will attempt to rob other hives of their winter stores. The battle is amazing to watch, but it is not good for the bees. Because of this problem we have installed entrance reducers on all the hives to help them protected themselves against robbing.

3: Mouse guards and entrance reducers are installed on all the hives to keep mice from building nests in the dry cozy hives.
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Above: Formic acid pads installed over a colony in order to reduce the varroa mites.
4: All colonies are evaluated for varroa mites. If varroa mites are found in large numbers the colonies are treated for varroa and trachea mites using formic acid applications.

5: Ventilation will be provided above the colonies to allow moisture out of the hive. By placing two square toothpicks under the back side of the inner cover, a ventilation space is created. This ventilation will keep moisture from building up on the underside of the cover which would drip on the colony. The cold will not harm a healthy cluster of bees, but cold damp conditions will. I also install a layer of newspaper above the ventilation space. This newspaper will absorb any moisture that may collect, keeping it from effecting the colony.
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Above: Entrance reducers and mouse guards are installed on the hives to prevent the entrance of mice. The mice love to spend the winter in the dry hives. Once inside the mice will destroy the comb to make room for it's nest. You can see the bees bringing in the fall pollen.
6: Review this past seasons beekeeping notes. Identify what went wrong and why. Correct these deficiencies.
Learn by your mistakes!

The Great Extraction

2007-10-03T19:01:00.000-04:00

On September 1st we removed and extracted the honey from our hives here on the Cape. As suspected and commented on in previous posts it was a very lean year honey wise.

With the potential to produce 350 pounds of honey our hives produced only 28 pounds. Some beekeepers in our area did not get any honey from there hives this year. The combination of a very cold spring, and a very dry summer created no abundance of nectar. What little the bees collected was used to keep the hive running.

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Right: A frame of capped honey

The process of extracting honey consists of first removing the honey supers from the hives. To achieve this, bee escape boards are placed between the honey supers (boxes) and the brood chamber (where the bees raise their young). Over a few days the bees leave the honey super and are unable to return to it through the escape board. The honey boxes can then be removed.

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Left: Uncapping the honey comb with a hot electric knife

Honey is produced by the collection of nectar from the local flowers. The nectar contains about 1% sugar. The bees collect the nectar and store it in the cells of the comb. The water is evaporated from the nectar leaving only the sugar behind. Once the honey is “ripe” (completed) the bees cap over the cells with a white wax. The wax capping seals the cells and keeps the honey from absorbing moisture from the air. The honey is now sealed in a air tight container of wax. Normally the bees would save the honey and use it as food during the winter months. The cell would be uncapped when the honey was needed as food. Fortunately for the beekeeper bees are hoarders of honey. They will produce much more honey than they need to survive the winter.

The Beekeeper can take for himself what the bees will not need. Yum.

The extraction process starts with the removal of the white wax cappings. A hot electric knife is used to cut the wax cappings off the comb exposing the liquid honey in the cells. Frames of honey which are not capped are not extracted. Uncapped honey may contain excess water which will in time cause the honey to ferment. Only ripe capped honey comb is extracted.

Once the frame of honey is uncapped it is placed in a centrifuge (extractor). The comb is spun in the extractor and centrifugal force causes the liquid honey out of the comb and into the extractor. The empty combs are then removed and stored to be used again next season.

Right: Our two fram hand crank extractor

The best part of extracting is the sent of hot honey produced by the electric uncapping knife. The smell is indescribably sweet.

Once the honey gate is open liquid honey pours out into a series of screens designed to remove any wax which may be in the honey. The honey drips through the screens into a honey bucket. Each bucket holds about 60 pounds of honey.

The honey is stored for 24 hours which allows any small particles of wax to float to the top of the honey bucket. The honey is then poured from the bottom of the pail through a honey gate and into the bottles.

Each years honey is different from the previous years, depending on what flowers the honey was collected from. As you can see, this years honey was very dark, compared to last years honey which was very golden.

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Left: Extracted liquid honey pouring into the filter screens

Once the honey is removed from the hive, preparations begin for the over wintering of the hives.

But more about that next time.

Escaping Bees and Counting Mites

2007-08-30T22:40:00.001-04:00

Well it’s now the end of August here on Cape Cod. It has been a great summer, weather wise, but the worst honey production year I have seen since I started keeping bees in 1978.
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Left: The dreaded Varroa mite. The mite population increases through the summer months and can reach damaging numbers.
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We are averaging about 10 lbs of honey per producing hive, and only 3 out of 7 hives are producing any honey. Last years yield was 60 lbs of honey per hive. This honey season has been a disappointing one. As a beekeeper, at this point, I can not see what could have been done better to produce more honey. The biggest factor was the spring weather. It was cold too long for the bees to build up in numbers and to take advantage of the spring honey flow. Then when the spring honey flow finally started, three weeks late, it was over too fast.
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Right: A screened bottom board with a sticky board installed. The screened bottom board allows Varroa mites to fall out of a colony and not climb back in. The sticky board is installed to collect the fallen mites in order to observe their numbers.
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August is when the Varroa mites show up in their greatest numbers. Detected in Kentucky in 1991 they have quickly spread throughout the country. A few years ago the cape lost about 80% of its bee colonies because of the Varroa Mites. The mites attach themselves to the bees, feeding off of them, weakening them, and spreading disease.
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Right: A sticky board being removed from the screened bottom board after a 24 hour period. The mite levels found on the board will reveal if there is a mite population problem inside the hive.
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A week ago I conducted a 24 hour mite drop count on all the colonies. Since I maintain a screened bottom board on most of the colonies, a slide in sticky board was used to collect falling mites over a 24 hour period. The sticky board is then removed and the mites counted. If only a few are found then it is an indication that the mite population is low within the colony. My mite count was in the hundreds in two of the colonies, with high counts in a third, and low counts in the others. I have never experienced mites in these numbers before. The trend was that the over-wintered colonies had a much higher mite count than the colonies started in 2007.
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Right: Enlarged area of the sticky board. Among the debris are great numbers of varroa mites. Not good news.
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Before the hives can receive any type of medications or treatments the Honey must be removed from the hive. I installed escape boards which allow the bees to exit the honey supers, and not return. Within two to three days almost all the bees will have exited the honey supers into the brood chambers below where the queen is. After removing all of the honey, I was able to start formic acid treatments. Formic acid is found naturally in the colony. Adding formic acid pads inside the colony raises the formic acid level within the colony. This increased level does not hurt the bees, but kills both Varroa and Trachea mites. The treatment lasts 3 weeks after which the hives will be tested again for Varroa mites to insure their numbers are under control. Once the formic acid pads are removed, the acid levels return to normal.
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Left: Closeup of the sticky board. Oil spray (like pam) is used on the board to keep the mites in place once they fall onto the board.
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Since honey production was so low this year, the hives do not contain much honey for the bees to live on through the winter. We have started feeding the bees with a 1:1 ratio of sugar and water. The supplemental feeding has started early this year so the bees will have enough time to store it in the brood chamber.
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Left: The bottom of a bee escape board. The bees can come down through the round hole, and out the small openings, but are to dumb to find there way back. Once placed between the honey supers and the brood chamber this board will evacuate the bees from the honey super in three days.
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I am hoping that there will be an abundance of Goldenrod bloom this fall. The Goldenrod is the last major producer of nectar and pollen for the bees before the frost and cold weather set in.
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Right: Installed bee escape board.
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We will be extracting what honey we can this weekend!

That’s always fun!
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Left: Bees feeding on pollen patty supplements. This stimulates brood production.
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Lightning Management

2007-08-11T22:22:00.000-04:00

Well it is August, a dull time for bees on Cape Cod. The main nectar flow has been over for two weeks, so there is not much for 60,000 bees to do but sit around and watch the honey ripen. Once the bees have evaporated the proper amount of water out of the honey the cells of comb will be capped with a beautiful layer of white wax. The wax capping will protect the honey until it is needed by the bees for food this winter.
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Right: Honey bees collecting water. The water will be used to cool the hive on hot summer days.
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On hot days the bees will be busy collecting water to keep the hive cool, and searching about to find what little pollen and nectar they can. For the beekeeper it is time to estimate how much surplus honey has been produced by the bees, that is how much honey the bees have produced for the beekeeper. We will be extracting honey towards the end of August. This will leave time to feed the bees if necessary, examine them for disease and treat them accordingly

This was a poor honey production year. What should have produce 350 lbs of honey will only produce around 50. The cold spring did not allow the colonies to build up in size enough to take advantage of the spring honey flow. Perhaps the fall Golden Rod will produce some extra honey for the hives, but not for the beekeeper. Honey production was so low this year that supplemental feeding will be necessary to ensure the colonies have enough honey stored for winter.
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Left: Thats me, working the bees in the thunder and lightning.
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Last week I was caught in a thunder and lightning rain storm while working the bees out on one of the cranberry bogs. Needless to say I was a little concerned for myself. There was lightning and loud thunder all around me. The bees didn’t seem to care about the danger I was in. They were actually calm during the whole ordeal.

I wasn’t.
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Right: Beautiful brood pattern layed by one of my home grown queens.
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My queen rearing project has produced four nice queens. You can see from the photograph that they are laying a nice solid pattern of brood. Today I introduced one into a colony who’s queen is failing. Earlier this morning I prepared some queen cage candy by mixing 1 cup of powdered sugar to about 3 table spoons of corn syrup to make a bread dough like candy. This candy is placed into one end of the queen cage, and the queen and some attendant workers placed in the other end, covered by a screen. The plans is, that once the cage is introduced into a queenless colony, the bees will eat the candy out of one end, releasing the queen into the colony. It takes about 3 days for the bees to eat their way through the candy. By the time the queen is released, her “queen sent” has been passed through the entire colony, and she is accepted as their queen. If not, they kill her and try to raise their own queen.
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Right: Queen cages filled with queen cage candy, ready for use.
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This time of year is a difficult one to try to get a colony to accept a new queen. They are very protective of the hive. Because of the lack of a nectar flow, colonies of bees will try to rob weaker colonies of their honey. The bees are very sensitive to any intrusion into the hive this time of year.
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Right: A queen in her cage, ready for introduction into a colony.
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Maybe they somehow sense that in a few weeks a lot of their honey will be missing from their hives, and found on my pantry shelf!
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Left: A bee on my shirt
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The Queen has returned

2007-07-22T23:07:00.000-04:00

After introducing the queen cells into mating nucs 10 days ago, I finally got to the mating yard to look at the results of my grafting attempt of July 1st.
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Left: The mating yard offered to me by two fellow beekeepers, Paul and Claire.
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With much anticipation I opened the first mating nuc, and pulled out the queen cell and queen cell protector. It had emerged!

My next step was to inspected the two frames of bees in the mating nuc to see if the queen had successfully bee accepted as part of the hive.

In order for her to have been successful she would have to have completed the following.
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Right: Opening the first two frame nuc to see if the queen had emerged from her cell. You can see the plastic cell protector resting between the two frames of bees.
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1. Successfully emerge from the queen cell.
2. Be accepted by the bees as leader of the hive
3. Conduct two to three mating flights where she would have to successfully mate with up to 15 male bees (drones)
4. Finder her way back to the hive without being lost or eaten by a bird
5. Start to lay fertilized (female) eggs.

Sure enough I found her on the first frame I checked. Could she have begun to lay eggs? Sure enough she was on a frame containing eggs and very young larva. Success!
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Right: An unmarked mated queen was found in the first mating nuc. 6 mated queens were produced from my second grafting attempt.
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Needless to say I was pleased.

I had brought yellow paint (the marking color for 2007) so I could mark any queens I found, but as I attempted to pick her up to mark her back (Thorax) with the paint, she flew away onto a bush. I rushed over and tried to pick her up, but she flew out of my hand into the grass. I quickly went to grasp her but she flew into the dirt, I went over and picked her up, and she flew away into the cranberry bog.

I was not pleased.

Would she return? Was she lost forever?

Sure enough after a few minutes she returned, and I was able to mark her. I guess she was not about to go through all that work only to have me mess it up.
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Right: A marked queen. The newly produced queens are marked in yellow. Yellow is the standard queen marking color for 2007.
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I continued to check the other mating nucs. Out of 9 queen cells 6 hatched and mated successfully. One of the mating nucs had an empty queen cell, but no bees or queen were found inside.

Perhaps they did not like their new home and decided to find a new place to live.

Of the 7 queens, 6 are large healthy looking queens. One however is on the smaller size.
Here is the summery of the July 1, 2007 grafting attempt
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Left: A closeup of the marked mated queen.
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July 1: >90 grafts are made into plastic queen cups.
The queen cups are placed in a queen cup frame and placed into a cell builder
hive

July 3: >Queen cups are inspected. 10 cells have been started from the grafts.

July 15: >8 cells are introduced into two frame mating nucs containing bees. Two cells are
destroyed. One accidentally when removing it from the cell cup frame, the other
is dissected to see if the queens are developing

July 22: >7 queens successfully emerge, mate, and start producing.

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Right: Activity outside the mating nucs. Four, two frame mating nucs are contained in one standard deep super. Each two frame nuc has a seporate entrance.

Now we will watch and evaluate them. Over the next two months they will show their true colors.

I will be looking for a nice brood pattern (laying pattern), and a quiet disposition from her offspring.

Looking for genetic diversity

2007-07-12T17:16:00.000-04:00

To continue documenting my progress with raising queens let me first say this….

It ain’t been easy.

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Left: A queen cell frame containg 7 queen cells. Out of 90 grafts 10 queen cells were made by the bees.

Out of 90 grafts I made two weeks ago, 10 were accepted by the bees and made into queen cells. The cells that were produced by the bees were smaller than the two cells I got from the 30 grafts made on my first grafting attempt.

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Right: A close up of two of the queen cells from my second grafting attempt.

Grafting is the process by which a small 3 or 4 day old worker bee larva is transferred into a larger artificial cell. This cell containing the grafted larva is then placed into a queenless hive. The bees, being queenless, will attempt to raise a queen bee in these artificial cells by adding wax to the artificial cell, and feed the larva royal jelly. If all goes according to plan, 12 days after grafting the cell a mature virgin queen will emerge from each cell.

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Left: A grafted cell 48 hours after the graft. You can see that the bees have already started adding wax to some of the cells.

As I stated earlier, out of 90 grafted cells, only 10 were accepted. On my two attempts I am averaging about a 10% acceptance rate. This could partially be due to the dry days I have grafted on. It is said that there is a better acceptance rate when the relative humidity is around 70%.

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Left: A queen cell in a plastic cell protector. The cell will be removed from the frame and placed in a small nuc hive containing two frames of bees and brood, but no queen. If all goes well, a virgin queen will emerge from the cell and be accepted by the bees.

Yesterday I harvested the cells and placed them into small nuc hives containing two deep frames of bees. The queen cells should be emerging today. We will see in a few days if it has been successful.

So far this is where my attempts have failed. My two original grafted cells failed to emerge. Looking back this was probably due to the fact that I transferred the cells into small nuc hives on the 8th day after grafting when the cells were just capped. We had two cold nights after that. The small amount of bees in the nuc hive may not have been able to keep the cell warm. Now that the temperatures are consistently in the 80’s, that problem should go away.

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Right: A frame of bees. This frame has young bees emerging from the cells. A 2007 queen laid eggs on this frame. It was a solid beautiful pattern of brood. You can still see some of the original solid pattern of brood in the left part of the frame. Every cell is filled with brood.

As part of this queen rearing exercise I have introduced a new queen into one of my hives. She is a northern queen from a survivor stock of bees. A survivor queen means just that. The bees have survived for a number of years with out medications or any special help. Next year her genetics will be added to the gene pool in the area. Any queens mating with here offspring may inherit some or all of her ability to survive.

I was offered a mating yard across town by two local beekeepers. The area has a large number of managed hives so there should be plenty of male bees for the virgin queens to mate with. In addition there is a good amount of genetic diversity, something I am looking for in this experiment.

It is my hope that increasing the amount of genetic diversity will allow a greater combination of matting possibilities.

Who knows, perhaps we will get a spectacular queen.

The "mother queen's" daughter

2007-07-01T16:25:00.000-04:00

This weekend I checked the nucs to see if the queens had mated. Neither of the two miller frame queen cells were accepted by the nucs. At least the queens were no where to be found.

One of the two queen cells produced from my first attempt at grafting. 2 out of 30 cells were accepted.

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It was obvious that the queens had emerged from the queen cells, but the queens did not return from their mating flights. I did find one emergency queen cell in one of the mating nucs. These bees must have rejected the queen in favor of one that they are raising themselves.

My first mated and laying queen. She is the only daughter from my best queen who went missing a few weeks ago. This daughter will be introduced into her mothers hive.

Of the 30 grafted queen cups placed in the cell builder hive, only two queen cells were produced. That is less than a 10% acceptance rate. This is not as good as I expected, even for a first try at grafting. Since the queen cells were capped I placed them in cell protectors and introduced them into mating nucs consisting of two deep frames of bees each. These grafted queen cells are scheduled to emerge on July 4th or 5th.

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A frame of eggs and larva. Newly hatched larva was taken from this frame and grafted into queen cell cups.

One happy discovery was to find a mated queen in the third mating nuc. This queen was raised by the bees from an egg from the mother queen which has since gone missing. Since she is the only daughter produced by my favorite queen, I am introducing her into her mothers hive (which is still queenless, and now broodless). With in a few days she should be accepted by the hive and be laying. To introduce her I placed the frames of bees from the nuc into a deep hive body. The hive body was then placed over two sheets of news paper above the queenless colony. The bees will chew a hole in the newspaper within a day or so. By that time the new queens scent will be distributed in the hive and with any luck the bees will accept her as their new queen.

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90 grafted queen cups

Since the cell builder hive is now without any queen cells, I added two frames of brood an bees, as well as two grafted frames holding 90 grafted cell cups. If I only have a 10% acceptance rate I should end up with at least 9 queen cells if not more.

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A closeup of the grafted cells. You can see the very young larva floating on a drop of royal jelly

48 hours will tell.

The Mother Of All Queens Is MIA

2007-06-23T16:08:00.001-04:00

Todays activities included grafting queen cells for the first time. I had intended to use eggs form the Mother Queen of my best hive. Upon opening the hive I could not find any eggs or larva. This is the hive I tipped over on June 8th when removing the miller frame from the hive. I thought that she was ok, Perhaps she was injured and died. There were no queen cells found in the hive. Perhaps I destroyed them during an inspection, not knowing that the queen was gone. On June 21 I examined the miller frame to find one large queen cell still intact. I moved this frame along with a frame of bees and brood to a queen mating nuc. The queen should emerge from the cell in a day or two. It will then take up to two weeks for the virgin queen to mate and start laying eggs.
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Grafted plastic cell cups which have been pressed into the cell bar prior to grafting. Each bar holds 15 plastic cups.
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I took a frame of eggs and larva from my next best hive. The hive has proven to be strong, but the bees are average in temperament and not as gentle as the mother queen I had hoped to use.
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Cell bars with attached grafted plastic cell cups place in the cell bar frame. The frame is upside down, and will hang opposite in the cell builder hive.
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See the frame of larva in the background?
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Grafting is an interesting process.

The best queens are raised from larva that is newly hatched so I wanted to graft the smallest larva on the frame. The frame I selected from had everything from capped brood to eggs. With my reading glasses on it was easy to compare the sizes of the larva to make sure the youngest larva was selected. I used warm moist towels to keep the grafts warm and to keep them from drying out prior to transferring them into the cell building hive. After about 10 failures I was able to transfer the larva into the plastic cell cups. Since I created the cell building hive on June 1st it now contains, a few emerging brood, no eggs, no larva, and of course no queen. The only larva in the hive will be the young larva I grafted. If the bees accept the grafts they will begin to build queen cells from them. In 36 hours I should be able to see the results of the grafts.
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The cell bar frame inserted into the queen cell builder hive. This hive has no queen, larva, or eggs other than what has been added with the cell cups.
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I am hoping I will have more control of the process with the grafted cells verses the miller frame method used in prior weeks. There will be no question about the age of the larva and the expected emergence date of the queens. With the miller frame. eggs and larva of various ages could have been used by the bees to rear queens. Since the bees select which lava to turn into queens, there is less control. With the grafting method, since I was the one to select the larva, there should only be, at the most, 24 hours difference in the age of the queen cells.
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From left to right. 10 frame cell builder hive, 4 section mating nuc, 4 section mating nuc. You can see the sugar syrup feeders. Only one of the mating nuc sections is in use. It contains a queen cell from the miller frame use peviously
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36 hours will tell.

Where have all the queen cells gone ?

2007-06-22T12:48:00.000-04:00

Where have all the queen cells gone ?
Long time passing
Where have all the queen cells gone ?
Long time ago
Where have all the queen cells gone ?
Gone to graveyards,
every one.
When will I ever learn ?
When will I ever learn ?

Of course that’s not really how the song goes, but it is the song I have been singing this week.

Yes it is true. For some still unknown reason, the beautiful queen cells which the bees had been raising, have been destroyed.

I conducted a hive inspection on June 18th with the intent of starting my mating nucs and transferring the queen cells into the mating nucs. I found that all the queen cells had been either destroyed, or the larva was dead in the uncapped cells. What happened? An inspection this week should tell. I expect it could have been one of four things.
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The Miller frame, full of queen cells (13) on June 16th. On June 18th the cells were dead.
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First: The cold nights combined with the screened bottom board could have chilled the queen cells and caused the queen larva to die.

There were two unseasonably cold nights a week and a half ago. Temperatures dropped into the low 40’s which could have chilled the larva. Since this is a miller frame and it was not fully drawn out there were not as many bees on the frame as on the others. However, the miller frame was in the middle of a very strong hive. The bees should have been able to keep them warm.

Second: My math could have been wrong.

Perhaps one or more queens were raised from larva that was older than I thought, allowing a virgin queen to emerge and destroy the other cells before the expected emergence date. Lets see. The miller frame with eggs was taken from the mother hive and installed in the cell building hive on June 8th. If the eggs (assumed 3 days old ) were installed in the cell builder on the 8th then the queens would be emerging 13 days later (16 – 3) on June 21st. No the math is ok. An inspection on the 18th should have shown capped queen cells. There was at least a 2 day buffer before the queens should have emerged.

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This photo from June 16th appears to show a dammaged queen cell. Are the workers building or tearing down?
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Third: I could have missed one of the queen cells raised by the bees from an older larva.

As soon as a virgin queen emerges she hunts down competing queen cells and destroys them. If the bees started raising a queen from larva when the cell builder hive was started on June 8th the bees could have started a queen from larva that was 6 days old (unlikely). That would put queen emergence on the 18th, the same day as my inspection.

Fourth: A queen cell was transferred into the Cell builder when it was created on June 8th.

This seams to be the most likely explanation. A started queen cell (which would have been very small) was inadvertently installed into the cell builder hive when it was assembled. Although the hive was inspected for erroneous queen cells which were destroyed, if one was missed it would have emerged before the 18th, giving the virgin queen time to destroy the cells.

If a queen is found in the cell builder this weekend it will resolve the mystery.

The lesson I’ve learned through this is that it is very important to know how old the larva is when starting a queen cell. The miller method allows queens to be started which could be 3 or 4 days in age apart. When the miller frame is installed in the hive it probably has eggs and larva. The bees can select any age larva to start queen cells from. This means that the queens raised from this larva will emerge at various times, and the queen cells will be in various stages of development throughout the queen rearing procedure. It seams that grafting larva the same age into queen cups would insure that the queens being raised are all within one day of each other in age. If the weather permits I will attempt to graft cells this weekend and continue this experiment.
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Left: My first virgin queen. This queen was raised by moving a frame of eggs and larva along with two frames of bees into a nuc. The bees raised their own queen. She emerged from her sell just prior to the inspection on June 16th.
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On a positive note. There was one cell which seamed to be intact. It was installed in a queenless mating nuc. We will see if the queen emerges this weekend as well.

The queen cell started on the 1st of the month and installed in a nuc had emerged. The virgin queen was seen walking around on the comb. If she has mated she will be laying eggs this coming week.

The Mother of All Queens (2)

2007-06-15T23:57:00.000-04:00

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A bee with yellow June Pollen
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The cold raw June Cape Cod weather finally broke today. It was partly sunny with temperatures in the low 70’s or high 60’s. It has been damp with rain on and off with the night temperatures the past four days falling into the 50’s, Not good weather for honey production. This has been a very difficult season for the bees already.

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On June 10th there was a break in the weather before the temperature dropped. I took the opportunity to look at the Miller frame of eggs I had installed in the Cell Building Hive (see previous post). 48 hours had past. As you can see in the photo the bees had started drawing out 4 queen cells. I looked through the rest of the hive and removed queen cells from all other frames, about 4 cells.

The queen cells on the miller frame are being started from newly hatched eggs. Since the frame only had eggs on it, and not hatched young larva, the queen cells will be moved into queen mating nuc hives on June 19th or 20th.

The Miller frame on June 1st prior to it's insertion into the "Mother Queen" hive

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Today (June 15) I had the opportunity to inspect the queen building hive again. I found about 12 good size queen cells on the miller frame.

After inspecting the rest of the hive, I removed 4 to 5 queen cells (capped and in the last stages ready to emerge) built on other frames. If I had waited another day or two all my efforts could have been defeated by these cells. It was obvious that there is plenty of royal jelly being produced in the hive. Royal jelly is essential for queen rearing since it is the only food the queens feed on.

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The Miller Frame on June 10th. 48 hours after it was removed from the "Mother Queen" hive and inserted into the "Cell Builder" hive. The bees have started to build four queen cells.
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The best queens will be raised on lots of royal jelly. These rival cells need to be destroyed in order to insure that they will not emerge and destroy the miller frame queen cells.

This miller frame is my controlled frame. I know the age of the eggs and I know which queen (hive properties and genetics) these eggs are from. Since I know the age of the miller frame, I can accurately calculate the date the queen will emerge from theses cells.

A queen takes 16 days to develop from egg to larva. Since these eggs were laid on June 7th or 8th, virgin queens will emerge from the queen cells on June 23rd (16th day from egg laying). Since 12 queen cells have been produced I will need 12 mating nucs to place the cells in (one cell per mating nuc) on day 14 (June 21st ).

I spent a few hours painting the mating nuc covers and bottom boards I built a few months ago. They will have to be stocked with bees (2 frames each) on day 13 (June 20th). Once the queens emerge from their cells they will take up to a week to mate and start laying eggs. There is only a 75% success rate in the mating of queens. I have lots of drones (male bees) in my other hives, and I know the beekeeper who has bees less than a mile away from me. There should be plenty of drones in the area for the queens to mate with.

It will be interesting to see what happens over the next few weeks. At this point I am happy with the success of my first effort. Once the daytime temperature reaches 75 to 80 degrees, I am planning to try my hand at grafting queen cells. We will talk about that when the time comes.
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The Miller Frame 7 days after being inserted into the "Cell Builder" hive. There are 7 queen cells on this side of the frame, and 5 queen cells on the other side.

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Now an update on honey production. My three strong hives, including the mother queen hive, are starting to store nectar in the honey supers. Two of the hives are now producing round comb honey, one hive is producing liquid honey. Of the other hives, one has been struggling all spring. They are still only on 5 frames in the bottom box of the hive, compared to my best hive which has 24 frames of bees, produced the miller frame of eggs, and donated 6 frames of bees to the queen rearing project.

Not to mention the fact that it was knocked over by me during and inspection!.

A queen cell produce under uncontrolled conditions.

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I will be inspecting the hives for swarming preparation this weekend.

I will post more results next week.

The Mother Of All Queens

2007-06-08T15:45:00.001-04:00

This week was an exciting beekeeping week for me.
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A swarm of bees high in a scrub pine tree
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Last Friday I went to visit a fellow beekeeper (John), at his home. He his hive had swarmed a day earlier, and we were going to inspect his hive to see what condition they had been left in. I have never worked with a more gentle bee. We probably did not have to use any smoke or where a veil or gloves.
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A closer look at the swarm
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Inside the hive we found four queen cells. The hive was started last year, and according to John over-wintered well. Our inspection showed that only 13-14 of the frames in the double brood chamber (of 20 deep frames) had been drawn out. Of course the bees were working on storing honey in the honey super though. The brood chamber was crowded with honey. This is probably the reason the hive swarmed. It was honey bound. Any extra room the bees were making by building comb was being filled with honey. There was no place for the queen to lay, so the bees must have felt crowded even though there were 6 or 7 empty frames in the brood chamber and plenty of space in the honey super. As happens more times than not on Cape Cod, the swarm ended up landing at the top of a large scrub pine tree. It is hard enough getting a swarm out of a scrub pine, never mind them being 80 feet up in the air.
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John with his bees
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John had contacted another beekeeper who brought over an empty nuc box and had placed it up in the tree (about 12 feet up) in hopes that the swarm would find it and make it their new home. John would have then had two hives of bees.

On Saturday I worked my bees. Three of the hives were examined for swarm cells. My strong hive had started building cells, but there were no eggs in them. Since there were so many bees I took three frames, Two capped brood and one with eggs and young larva, and placed them in a nuc box with a division board feeder filled with sugar syrup. I assumed that the bees would realize they had no queen and build queen cells from the larva. Empty drawn comb was placed in the old hive where the frames had been taken. Since this strong hive contains the queen I want to breed, I prepared a special frame of foundation and placed it in the center of the brood chamber. I plan to raise new queens (by the miller method) from this frame once the old queen lays eggs in it. I had planned to come back in 4 days to remove the frame, but mother nature delayed me with cold wet weather this week. Temperatures dropped to the low 40’s and it was wet.
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A special frame (miller method) prepared for raising queens
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There was a short break in the weather today. Clouds and rain are expected to move in tonight for the weekend. In beekeeping you need to take your opportunities when they come.

My first step was to create a queenless cell builder hive. I spent the winter researching queen rearing, and dreaming about my plans to raise queens for myself and my beekeeping friends. A queenless cell builder hive is a deep box of bees with specific types of frames of bees. The order I used was as follows (from left to right) Open nectar, Capped Brood, Capped Brood, Pollen, Empty space, Eggs & Larva, Empty space, Pollen, Capped Brood, Open nectar.

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My Cell Bulder Hive notes from this winter.
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The eggs from the “mother queen” are placed in the empty spaces. I ended up taking frames from my two strongest hives, since I have been concerned they might swarm within the next few weeks. The cell builder needs to be continuously fed, so a hive top bucket feeder was installed on top of the inner cover of the cell builder.

The next step was to examine the “miller” frame I had installed on the 1st, to see if the bees had drawn out the comb, and if the queen had laid eggs in it. Sure enough I pulled out the frame to find the queen walking across it. The bees had drawn out almost the entire frame. There were eggs mixed with nectar in the frame. I gently moved the “mother queen” off the frame into the hive, and placed frame with the eggs into the cell builder.
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The assembled cell builder with space for eggs. The fifth frame is the miller frame taken from the "mother hive".
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The order of frames I used is as follows (from left to right) Open nectar, Capped Brood, Capped Brood, Pollen, Empty space (miller frame), Eggs & Larva, Empty space, Pollen, Capped Brood, Open nectar.
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Now the timing begins. It takes 16 days to raise a queen from egg to adult. I will assume that the frame of eggs is 1 to 2 days old. That means that any queen cells raised from this frame of eggs would be ready to hatch on June 22nd. Each queen cell will need to be placed in a separate mating hive prior to the emergence of the virgin queen. More on that next time.
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The finished cell builder with a hive top feeder and cover.
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Of course with all these manipulations something was bound to happen. As I was examining the “mother hive” I knocked over four boxes of bees. While my back was turned they tipped over and came crashing down to the ground. Boy were their a lot of bees flying around. It took about half an hour to put the hive back together again with the frames back in their respective places. I did find the “mother queen” and she looked unharmed.
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The next hive inspection in a few days will reveal if she is still laying eggs as well as she has been.
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Below. My first "intended" queen cell. This one cell was built by the bees in the Nuc box I created on June 1st. The queen quality cannot be determined because the age of the larva used to create this cell was uncontroled. The cell is capped and should emerge within 5 days.

A load of hay

2007-05-31T15:48:00.000-04:00

"A swarm of bees in May is worth a load of Hay.
A swarm of bees in June is worth a silver spoon.
A swarm of bees in July ain’t worth a fly."

This is an old beekeepers saying. Apparently in the 1700’s a load of hay was worth more than a silver spoon!

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Michael near a swarm of bees we had in 2002
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The saying means that if you capture a swarm of bees in May, chances are that they will produce enough honey to survive the winter, and maybe some extra for you.

If you were to capture a swarm of bees in June, they would probably produce enough to survive the winter.

If you captured a swarm of bees in July, chances were that they would not have enough time to produce enough numbers, comb, and honey stores to survive the winter.

The main honey flow is on here on Cape Cod. Our honey flow starts the end of May and continues to the start of August. That gives the bees two months to produce enough honey to keep them and me happy through the winter months.

There is a small honey flow in the fall of most years, but I allow them to keep that honey for themselves.

All of the hives were inspected over the long holiday weekend. There were no swarm cells (queen cells) found in the hives. Honey supers (boxes) were added to the strong colonies that will need more space to expand into.
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With any luck next week’s inspections will show signs of nectar storage in these boxes.
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A closer look at the 2002 swarm
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I place a ross round honey comb super on each of my strong hives. These are always a favorite at our local fair and sell out quickly.
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The weather has been beautiful here on the cape this week. Low 80’s with no humidity! Of course you know the saying on Cape Cod.

“If you don’t like the weather…. Just wait a minute”

Yesterday I received a call from an fellow beekeeper in a neighboring town. Apparently his one hive swarmed. He had started the hive last year, and added his honey supers early thinking this would be enough to keep them. Unfortunately for the next month second and third year hives need to be intensely managed in order to insure that swarming preparations are not begun by the bees. It is their natural tendency to reproduce, and swarming is the process through which a hive of bees reproduces.

The bees will decide to produce one or more queens. Once the queen cells are capped, half the hive along with the old queen leave the colony and find a new home.

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A ross round honey comb super ready to be placed on the hive
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It is quite the amazing thing to see. Tens of thousands of bees run out of the hive and take flight in a cyclone of activity. It is like being in a dirt devil of bees. Unfortunately for the beekeeper, he has just lost his honey producing work force, and the existing hive is left with an unpredictable future. If all goes well a new virgin queen will emerge within a weeks time.
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Then within another 7 days she will take several mating flights, and if she is successful or does not get eaten by a bird, or does not get lost, in another few days she will start laying eggs again.
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The end result is a loss of ten thousand worker bees, the old queen, a months worth of egg production, and this years honey crop. It will take the bees the rest of the summer to replace what it has lost.
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With that said… Watch your bees carefully this time of year, you can rest in the winter

Rain Rain Go Away

2007-05-22T16:52:00.001-04:00

The weather continues to be unseasonably cold here on the Cape. We just got through four days of cold rainy weather. Not good for bee flight.

A hive top feeder with hardened sugar syrup
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A quick inspection before the poor weather showed that one of my hives started in 2006 is extremely weak. It is probably down to two frames of bees. They came through the winter nicely, but have dwindled the past three weeks. I ordered a new queen from Pennsylvania. The bee breeders comment to me was “It has been a very strange spring” I don’t know what that means from their end, but I will agree it has been strange here as well.

I found a small hive beetle. They like to feed from the sugar syrup.

One of my desires is to produce comb honey this year. I’m planning to use the new queen I ordered to create an “artificial swarm” with one of my strong hives. This hive I will use to produce the Ross Round Comb Honey. I will expand on comb honey production in next weeks post. The old queen and some of the bees from the hive will be used to strengthen the week colony. The weak colony queen will “go missing” to put it nicely. She is only a year old, but showed a poor pattern of laying. Perhaps she did not mate well, or perhaps she has been injured some how. This particular hive was slow to increase last year and did not produce any honey.
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A honey bee collecting water from my bird bath
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I have been disappointed with the queens I have been receiving from Georgia the past few years. They seem to be lasting only a year or so. One of my strongest hives has a northern queen I received in 2005. She has produced for two whole seasons, and again this year is one of my strongest and most gentle hives. All the rest of my queens are one year or younger.

This is one of the reasons I hope to raise my own queens this year. With any luck I will be able to reproduce the gentle queen from Pennsylvania.

I opened one hive to find a dead hive beetle on the outside of the hive-top feeder. Not something I wanted to see. I’ve been seeing more of them than I have in previous years. I will have to do some research on how to deal with them if they become a problem. I’ve never had to deal with them in the past.

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Bees collecting water .
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With the end of the rain there is an abundance of activity around the hives. There has been a lot of water collection. The bees will use water to liquefy crystallized honey, or any hardened sugar candy left in the hives. It is good to provide water for the bees. They are going to find it someplace.

Better for them to collect water in my yard than at my neighbors pool!

There’s No Place Like Home

2007-05-08T18:51:00.000-04:00

Paul and Clare picked up 106 packages of bees for our club last week. Thanks Paul and Clare.

Our packages of bees finally arrived this week. Their delivery had been delayed due to all the poor weather down south this spring. I even heard a story about a bee breeder who lost 100 hives to a tornado….

A queen cage placed in a homemade hanger

The installation of a package of bees can be intimidating if you have never done it before. The installation (or housing) of a package of bees consists of removing the thin wood cover, from the package, to exposed the queen cage and the can of sugar water.

Prior to removing the queen cage the package of 4,000 bees is slammed on the ground to dislodge the bees from the top of the package so the queen cage and the can of feed can be removed.

As it’s name implies the queen cage contains the queen bee. At this point

she can be inspected to make sure she is alive and healthy.

There is candy in one end of the cage which separates the queen from the opening in the cage. The queen cage is suspended between the frames of comb with the opening facing upward.

The plan is that once the bees eat through the candy the queen is released in the hive. This is a kind of time-delay so to speak.

It will take about three to four days for the queen to be freed from the cage. By this time the bees have accepted this new place as their home, and stay.

Shaking a package of bees into the hive

Once the queen is suspended in the hive the bees are shaken out of the package onto the queen and into the hive. Of course most of the bees fall into the box, but many fly around. At times the air can bee filled with buzzing bees. Although intimidating, this is the time where the bees are most docile. The bees have no home to protect, so they are not aggressive. Once the top feeder and the cover are installed, some bees will find the entrance to the hive, expose their sent glands and start fanning. This is the signal which allows all the flying bees to find their new home.

But watch out. In about a half an hour the bees start to become protective of their new home. My friend Gene gets stung every year at this point in the installation.

He gets stung. But I don’t.

It was interesting to note that last week none of the five hives were working the fruit trees. But within hours of the installation, the new bees were working them. This is why crop pollination is so important.

There is no guarantee that the established hives will work any specific crop, but the hive just brought to a location will work the nearest crop it can find.

My friend Gene taking his bees to their new home. He got stung earlier that afternoon.

It's become a yearly tradition.

May Be Spring? Maybe

2007-04-30T16:33:00.000-04:00

It has been a cool wet week here in the Northeast. The bees have been flying when possible. The coolness is expected to give way to warm weather this week.

A Queen mating box under construction. You can see the three removable divider making four seporate compartments. Click on the picture for a larger image.

The damp weekend gave me time to work on my queen mating boxes. These are standard deep hive bodies (boxes) which have been divided into four, Two frame sections. This mating box will sit on a special bottom board giving each section its own separate entrance.

(left) Looking down inside a compartment to the screened bottom below.

(Below) The special screened bottom board. See how each section will have it's own entrance?

The plan is, that once queen cells have been raise to the point where the queen is ready to

emerge, each one of these sections will receive a queen cell, with two full frames

of bees and capped brood. Once the queen emerges from her cell she will take two to three mating flights where she will mate with multiple males, 12 to 15. Upon completing her mating process she will return to her compartment and start to lay fertilized eggs. She can then be evaluated, marked, and introduce into a colony who’s queen is failing.

The forsythia has begun to bloom, as well as the peach trees, and early dandelions.

Forsythia Blossom

The forsythia is an important pollen producer for the honey bee in spring. The bees will collect the abundant pollen to use as food for the young.

The peach tree in our yard is always the first fruit tree to bloom. It’s pink flowers are pretty contrast against the yellow flowering forsythia.

Peach Blossom

The blooming of the dandelions are a traditional signal to the northern beekeeper to switch the two deep hive bodies. During the winter months the cluster of bees will work its way around the stores of honey in the hive. They group themselves together into a tight ball, and by moving there wing muscles without moving their wings, they generate enough heat to keep the center of the cluster at 90 degrees. This “ball” of bees will move as a group around the hive and slowly consume the 50 pounds or so of honey that has been stored in the combs. By spring they are almost always in the upper of the two boxes. This is convenient for the beekeeper, because if extra food is required, a sugar candy mixture can be added on top of the frames of bees to sustain them until they can collect food in the spring. Once the dandelions show up, it is warm enough to place the top box with most of the bees, and the queen, on the bottom, and place the mostly empty box of comb on top of the box with the queen.

An overwinterd collony being fed sugar candy. See how all the bees are clustered in one area?

Since the queen likes to move upward in a hive, she will be able to lay eggs below, and when the lower box is depleted of space, she can move upward to the empty combs, which are now being filled with pollen and nectar from the spring flowers. This allows a more rapid buildup of bees in preparation to the main honey flow (nectar flow) which starts here on Cape Cod around the last week of May. Now is buildup time. The more bees we have, the more honey will be produce, but also the greater chance of swarming.

But more about that next time……