A New Beeginning

The season for catching swarms is long gone come the first week of July.  This means a complete rethinking of how to get a new hive started this summer.  Again, it is honeybee biology and social structure to the rescue!

The traditional way to turn one beehive into two beehives is to split the hive.  This involves taking a robust hive and removing frames of bees.  Frames are the structures inside the traditional boxy Langstroth hives most people associate with beekeeping.  Fortunately for me, there is a healthy observation colony at Irvine that regularly needs frames removed from it to give the queen room to lay eggs and prevent the hive from becoming overcrowded.

To get the worker bees to raise a new queen, two frames with bees are removed from this hive (there are only four frames in it total) and are replaced with empty frames.  The frames removed will ideally have capped brood (pupa ready to emerge as adults), larva at various stages, eggs, and some capped honey for sustaining the larva.  They are placed in a small, half hive called a nuc, short for nucleus.  A frame of honey from another hive and two empty frames are placed in the nuc box.  The bees will use several of the eggs available to them to rear a new queen in this box.  All the frames with the new queen and all the bees are later transferred to a new hive body.  The whole process takes close to a month.

There are a few problems, though.  The nuc box is made for 19-inch frames.  I have top bars that are 17 3/4-inches long.  The frames in the nuc normally have cells on them already so the bees don't need to waste energy and resources building wax.  Top bars require the bees to build fresh comb.

The solution to the second problem was simple.  Since my first hive failed, I had new comb already drawn on three top bars. 

To solve the first problem, I simply jury-rigged an extension onto the back wall of the nuc box allowing two of my comb covered top bars to hang from it.

I originally screwed this board to three of the top bars.  I would later not worry about the screws because the bees would seal the bars in place with propolis.  I also kept it to two bars because the comb broke off of one when I dropped it.

How it will look in the nuc box.

The next time the observation hive needed frames removed, we put them into the nuc with my top bars.  Within two weeks, a new queen was walking around in the hive!  less than two weeks later, I opened the box to see her inspecting my comb for egg laying purposes.  I quickly moved the two bars into my hive body and shook the bees off one of the frames and into my hive.  I watched for a bit as the confused bees flew through the air.  Fortunately, they were picking up the strong scent from the bees and queen in my hive and many of the bees flew in to join them.  Some strayed back to the nuc, however.

The next day, I fed the new colony some 2:1 sugar:water syrup and it was time to wait and hope they would stay in there for the long haul!

To Catch a Swarm

One of the great things about keeping bees, especially for the first time, is you already know there is a decent chance they could up and leave.  This helps curb the disappointment of losing a colony.  The most important thing is to learn from the experience and make corrections to how you kept your colony before the swarm.

The other good part about bees swarming is that your bees are not the only ones that may do it.  Throughout the early spring, It seemed swarms were being spotted all over the place by friends and family.  As much as beekeepers seem to hate their hives swarming, they LOVE finding a swarm.

A swarm is focused on one thing:  finding a new place to build comb and a colony.  Scout bees have already found suitable places, it's just a matter of moving together to that new place.  What a beekeeper wants to do is capture that swarm with the queen and choose their new home for them (i.e. a beehive).  Of course each swarm I learned about was far too far away to go capture (I even saw one up in Seattle!) . . . until a little over a week after my bees left.

A homeowner left a message with the nature center reporting a swarm.  I called them back and left a message explaining I was interested in trying to capture the swarm if they could give me their address.  Soon after work, I heard back from them and spent my afternoon making this wonderful bee swarm capturing box:

The idea is to gently scrape or forcefully shake the bees into the box, hopefully getting the queen inside.  Then I would put the lid on.  Next step would be to wait while the bees flying in the air sniff around for their queen.  They would enter the box through the funnel, but the funnel would prevent them from being able to fly back out.  Tada!  Swarm captured.

Unfortunately, upon arriving at their home, I learned they had an actual hive of bees living in the wall of their house.  Lacking the knowledge and equipment to get them out, I left disappointed.  A few weeks later, Wally received a similar call which turned out to be a hive of yellow jackets, so at least I made out better than him.  Turns out, not everyone knows a bee swarm from bunch of bees (or wasps).

So, now on to plan B which I'll outline in my next post.

And away we go!

I was headed out to lunch on June 21st when I saw a beard of bees clustered outside of my hive.  I went up to check to see if the cluster was my bees.  Indeed it was my bees . . . all of them.

No bees were left inside the hive, which meant the queen was somewhere under that cluster.  Now, it was a very hot day, so Wally suggested there may not have been enough bees to keep the hive cool, so a bunch moved outside.  But, with the queen in the group, it most likely meant the bees were preparing to swarm and abandon ship.

The queen is in the highlighted circle (still a virgin).

So why would such a small bunch of bees swarm like this?  Usually, it is due to several negative factors.  I have two immediate thoughts on what caused the bees to prepare to swarm.

First, from day one, carpenter ants were raiding the sugar water I placed in the hive.  A strong colony would be able to fend these ants off, but my colony never really reached a size (due to the loss of the first queen) that was able to overtake them.  I even witnessed some of the carpenter ants team up and kill a bee or two as the bees wandered near the sugar water.  I suspect the ants began raiding the honeycomb as the population of bees dropped and as we were trying to boost them back up.

Second, the hive certainly could have gotten too hot.  There was more sun than I expected where I placed my hive.  In a few years, it may be a good spot for an apiary, but apparently, not yet.

Unfortunately, once the bees begin swarming actions, there is little you can do to stop them.  They have already picked a new place to live.  With a colony as small as mine, it would not be worth putting the stress on them to try to recapture the group.

At 5:00, I walked back up to my hive to see what was going on.  Suddenly, the bees began to take off, swirling up into the air.  I sat on the ground as I watched every last one buzz off into the air, filling the sky around me.  Then, they were gone, hopefully to a new home that they would be able to flourish in.

Flying off into the sunset.

Hatchling

Even with a new queen on the way, my bees were in a bit of an emergency situation.  So, one day Wally and I decided to try to help them out.  Wally maintains Irvine's bee colonies and observation hive and I try to help him out when I can.  Out in the meadow, there is a top bar hive that had the potential to tremendously help my bees.

We went out to the top bar, opened it all up and started looking for some good brood comb.  It didn't take long to find a good piece that we were able to cut off an rubberband to one of my top bars (the top bars on Wally's hive are longer than mine and wouldn't fit in my hive).  With this new bit of ready-to-hatch brood and some nurse bees, the hope was they would boost my colony's population.

About a week later, I was finally able to look in to see if the new queen and brood had hatched.  They had!  It did not take long at all to see a virgin queen walking around on the comb.

Hatched queen cells (and brood) are on the white comb.  The brown comb is from the other hive.

There was, however, more bad news . . . the new bees had already exhausted the supply of honey the workers had been storing for the past couple weeks.  Following normal procedure, I made more sugar syrup to feed to the bees and placed it in the hive.  In order to try to guard against carpenter ants, I placed used coffee grounds, chili powder, and pepper around the base of the legs of the hive.

Even though there is a new queen, she is still a virgin.  In a day or so, she will take off on a mating flight.  This is where the spectacular courtship of the honeybee takes place, culminating in male genital explosion (literally).  The queen will fly up between 20 and 50 feet in the air where a "river" of drones are flying back and forth through the sky.  This is known as a drone congregation area (DCA) and could be as far as 1.5 miles away from the hive.  Drones are the male bees of a colony.

Now, the guy who discovered the elevation at which bees do the deed used an interesting trick.  He knew the whereabouts of a DCA and walked through it with a queen bee in a cage tied to a helium filled balloon.  He held the string at various lengths.  10' - no bees.  15' - no bees.  20' - THE BIRDS AND THE BEES!

Once a drone catches up with the queen, he will mate with her.  On occasion, the queen will mate with more than one drone, perhaps on several flights.  The goal of the drone is to pass on a massive amount of his genes and he has a trick to help ensure he gets more of his in the queen than any other drone.  During copulation, the drone will arch back sharply, snapping his genitalia and forcing his semen to explode into the queens body. 

The violence of the motion causes his genitals to snap off and remain in the queen.  As he falls down, down, down to the ground (or a burning ring of fire?) to his certain death having lost a large portion of his body, another drone will remove the old drones remains from the queen and mate with her himself.  Cool pictures of the process can be found here.

The Queen is Dead . . . Long Live the Queen!

Drama in the colony - the queen is dead . . .

I peeked into the hive late in the week and noticed a queen cup on one of the combs.  Bees normally build queen cups throughout the colony just in case they will need to raise a new queen.  The fact that they built this one so early in the life of the colony , however, had me worried.

A few days later, I did a more thorough inspection and my suspicions were unfortunately realized.  The queen and new eggs were nowhere to be seen.  This could mean one of two things:  she flew the coop with a swarm or she died.  A few signs point to the latter.

First, the bees built a queen cup to place an egg in.  This queen cup was a capped queen cell by the time I saw it the second time.  Second, there were about the same number of bees in the hive before and after the queen went missing.  Third, in addition to the queen cell, I saw several "emergency queen cells" made from what would have been horizontal cells where normal workers would be reared.  This suggests the queen suddenly went missing and the bees had to augment normal brood cells to accommodate a developing queen (this must be done within 4 hours of the queen dying).

The most common reason a queen dies, especially so quickly, is a clumsy beekeeper smooshing her when moving frames around.  I am fairly confident I did not do this since I am using a frameless hive, knew where she was, and have been supremely careful with my bees.  I suppose I could have done something else to harm her, but I prefer to think that something more dramatic occurred like an epic battle with a carpenter bee or that she valiantly fought off the carpenter ants as they tried to steal the young larva.

In any case, the queen cells mean I will hopefully have a new queen to replace the old one.  There is also a good amount of capped brood in the hive which means there will be some new bees to replace any that die in the next couple weeks.  While I was pretty bummed the day I found out I no longer had a queen, I am feeling a bit more optimistic now. 

A Visit from Catie

I wanted Catie to see my bees at work so we decided to go after church on Sunday.  The bees were still pretty busy building comb and fetching nectar and were not very aggressive.

Bees in a Box

So I dumped 3lbs of bees in a box to free their queen and . . . now what?

Now, it's time to wait.  It was really difficult not to look inside the hive, but very important that I gave them time to settle into their new home.  After a few days passed, however, it was time to take a peek!

On Friday, I fired up my smoker for the first time, zipped on my jacket and veil, and was ready to see how my little gals were doing.  I very lightly smoked the entrance and took off the lid.  The first thing to do was pull up the queen box and see if she was released.  A quick look showed that she was out and about.  A good sign!  One by one, I removed top bars to check for comb being built.  It did not take long to find some!

The yellow on the new comb is pollen the bees collected.

I quickly realized I did not need to worry about smoking the bees.  Smoke has long been known to "calm" bees.  Basically, a little smoke does two things:  some of the bees will prepare to abandon the hive by drinking honey, as though there is a forest fire;  the smoke will make it difficult to smell any alarm pheromones being sent out by guard bees.  Since my colony is so new, they are pretty much focused on building up their resources and not defending the hive.

The queen is somewhere under the other bees in this photo.

I quickly checked two of the combs.  It did not take long to find the queen laying eggs.  There was even honey and pollen in some of the cells.  All signs show the colony is off to a good start.