Swarmy Weather

The swarm of bees that landed in our Walnut tree back in June seems happy in their new hive box, with larvae and eggs developing nicely. That is the only way I know if there is a queen laying. I have not managed to actually find a queen visually yet.

The other five hives have been slurping down a gallon each of sugar syrup  every two to three days. It seems I am constantly heating up big pots of syrup on the stove. It takes one pot with  a gallon and a half of water (12 pounds) and three bags of sugar, and another pot with two gallons of water and four bags of sugar, each feeding. First I heat it up to melt the sugar, then I have to wait while it cools down. I hate feeding them white sugar and would like to try Maple tree sap, or something else, instead. I have to do some research on that to see what would be healthy for them. The beekeepers I mentioned it to, did not think it a good idea. I don’t see how white sugar can be good for them. The only reason I am  feeding them this far into the season is that they are still building wax comb on the brand new foundation  and that requires a lot of carbohydrates to produce. Next year they will get an earlier start and have the foundation already built when the nectar flow comes in. They also get protein and probiotics in the form of pollen patties, to help them feed the brood.

The bees are continuing to build out their double deep hive bodies (two ten inch deep boxes with ten frames each) and until they get them all filled up I cannot add a super (shallower box for honey storage) to any of them.  A screen goes on under the honey super to prevent the queen from moving up there and laying eggs. Otherwise the frames would be all mixed up like they are in the rest of the hive- a little brood, pollen and honey on each frame.

I will have to treat the bees for mites in September, so any honey I get will have to be collected in August, when there is maybe not that much nectar available, although this link may help so I can plant more for them.  I would love to get some honey for myself this year but I may not. It kind of depends on what is available out in the surrounding fields and woods when I finally add the supers .

I have to check the hives at least once a week to be sure they still have a laying queen as evidenced by brood and larvae in the cells. Last week I found the number two hive with no larvae and very little brood left. This made me think that the swarm I caught might have come from this hive. They absconded with the queen without leaving me one behind.  I called Eversweet Apiary, which is only about seven miles from my house, to see if they had a new Carniolian Queen available, so I install a new one.  Heading out the drive the next morning, I glanced over at the bee yard and saw that the number two hive was now covered with bees on two outside walls. This was different than the bees  “just cooling off on the front porch”, as Ed Forney of Geezer Ridge likes to say, when they congregate on the walls above the entrance to cool off. These were covering the back and side of the hive. They were dripping off the bottom and not flying through the air, but huddled as if in a flat-ish swarm, or maybe about to take off. Not again!

I hurried out to Eversweet to get the new queen, hoping the bees would stick around long enough for me to introduce her to them. When I asked the guy there what he would do, he said, “All you can do is try. Put her in there and see if her pheronomes will lure them back in. ”

As soon as I got back, I suited up and wedged the queen cage in between two frames. Then I removed the entrance reducer and canted the top feeder box off to the side to give the bees an easier way to get back inside and check her out.

I looked out there every hour or so all day  and they seemed to be moving back in. By nightfall, they were all inside and I straightened up the box again.

The queen comes in a tiny cage that has a sugar plug in one end that the bees have to eat through to release her.

It takes the bees a couple of days to eat through and allows just enough time for them to get used to her smell. There is always the chance that they will not accept her but when I checked two days later they seemed to be feeding her through the wire mesh, not trying to sting her, which was a good sign. There was a bee in the tube and almost though the sugar plug so she she should be released by now. I am going out to check…and there is a bee meeting tonight l that I will need to  attend. There is so much to learn.

-Wendy lee, writing at Edgewisewoods, Gardens and Critters