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.
Where is the Queen?
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.
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!
Bees Plastered to the Back Wall
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.
Canted Top Box
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.
Bees Cooling on the Front Porch
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.
Queen Cage
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
My history with bees is not the greatest. I originally got started
Two New Bee Hives
through helping my neighbor, Harry, with his bees back when I lived near Harrisville, WV in the 1970’s. I mostly helped him with taking the honey at the end of the season and jarring it up. I made the best beeswax candles from the cappings. They smelled so good when you burned them and lasted a long time. We were able to just run into town, about 8 miles away, to the old Stout family hardware store and get everything we needed for bee keeping. Veils, long gloves, hive bodies, wax foundation and frames, feeders, everything. Some of their stock might be 30 years old but you knew it was in there some place if you had the time to look. Also, if it was a rainy, nasty day the younger brother would let you have stuff for next to nothing, or the price that was marked on it from the 1940’s. Rainy days depressed him. They tended to depress me too and I tried not to take advantage.
I got my own bees after awhile but then I lost one hive to bears- thanks to the DNR for reintroducing them to our area, and then one to foul brood, and I backed off from beekeeping until I moved to Freshwater Cove in Nelson County Va. My partner at the time brought me a present one day of a bee hive that was so mean, that when a bear got into them and turned the whole thing over, the bees actually won the fight. I think he was hoping they would get me too. They stung me every chance they got- even while wearing a protective veil. The last time I went near them I was pregnant with my youngest daughter and they somehow managed to get under the veil and sting me on my neck about 20 times. I think this might be why she was sensitive to insect stings for the first few years of her life. I am not sure what later killed those bees but I was glad to see their demise as they were the meanest bees I had ever encountered.
When I moved to Shepherdstown, I no longer had any bee equipment except a couple of old smokers and a hive tool- no veil or gloves or hive bodies hanging around. I discovered about ten years ago just how hard it is here, to get a hold of an empty beehive when you need one in a hurry. We had a hardware store and a Southern States then but neither one kept bee supplies in stock. So, why did I need a hive all of a sudden when I had no bees? Well, a friend had some construction going on at his house, so he brought his hive over to visit with us for a while as the bees were placed too close for comfort. You cannot move bees a short distance without confusing them as to where home is. The old adage is ‘Three feet or three miles’. They needed to go more than three feet so they came about ten miles to our place until they were done building. When they arrived, my apple trees were in full bloom, along with lots of nut trees and such, so they were quite happy. Anyway, maybe they made so much honey they ran out of room. No one brought them a super to expand with and so they swarmed. A whole bunch of the bees took off with the queen and landed about 20 feet away, on a young apple tree, right about eye level. They were only going to hang out there for so long, until the scout bees found them a new home in a hollow tree or something, and they had to be gathered up quick or lost. I knew that much but not much else.
I called the bees owner at home, hoping he would be around, but of course he was not and neither was his son. They had not shown much interest in the bees since they dropped them off weeks before. So I ran down to the hardware store to see if anyone there knew any beekeepers but the only one who knew anything was off somewhere. A woman shopping for paint gave me the number of a beekeeper nearby in Maryland who offered to come take away the swarm for himself. Fat chance, they are expensive to buy and I did not want to waste them. He would have sold me an empty hive, except his were an unusual size, and I would never be able to get parts for them. So I went over to the feed store to see if they knew of anyone who kept bees and might have an extra hive laying about and they put me on the phone to a local orchardist. The woman who answered said her husband was out in his bee yard trying to catch a swarm right then (obviously a good day for swarms) but she would have him call me back as soon as he came in.
Meanwhile, I was frantically reading my old beekeeping book, trying to come up with alternative bee boxes. They have to be something fairly strong as this group of bees probably weighed 9-12 pounds and they would be hanging from the top of the box. Cardboard would collapse. I was rigging a 20 gallon plastic tree bucket with bamboo stakes stuck through it and trying to figure out how to get them to go into it, when the beekeeping orchardist called back. He was full of useful information and gave me confidence that I could get these bees caught without a problem. I was out talking to him on my cell phone, with the bees clustered around, when the original owner and his cousin finally drove up with a hive body, just in time. Thank goodness they also brought some veils and long gloves. Those are nice. Actually they are more like a necessity most of the time. The pair had very little experience, it turns out, and they were not looking at all enthusiastic, but I convinced them it would not be a problem and it wasn’t. Really it was a lot of fun. The bees behaved as if they were connected in a long rope, moving as one unit, about two and a half feet long and 8 inches wide, wrapped around a branch of the young tree. I placed their new hive, with frames of wax foundation hanging in it, on the ground below the swarm and we shook the branch. The bees all just dropped right in. They started to get a little stirred up and buzzed around us some, but they settled down pretty quick. It was neat to watch and hear them drop – kind of like hearing a few pounds of mini marshmallows fall on the kitchen floor. Not that I have ever heard that. We took a soft brush and made sure there weren’t any missed bees still up on the branch and then the guys went on their way. I stayed out there awhile until almost dark, put the top on after they all clustered back together, and moved them back over next to the other hive Then I took the lid back off, added another empty super box, and set up a feeding station with a jar of sugar water, so they would feel at home and have enough energy to draw out the new comb they needed. Unfortunately, the first hive swarmed again a couple of weeks later, and since we had no more hives for them, I gave them away to the orchardist neighbor, who had been so helpful. That winter, the snow drifted so deep I think my visiting bees suffocated and died. I felt terrible and asked the guys to take their boxes away.
Setting up the frames and feeders
I am not sure why I have decided to get bees again except that I feel a need to produce at least a portion of the food we eat. I have always kept chickens, grown a big garden and put a lot of food up each year. Luckily, on my third go round with bees, there is internet shopping with UPS delivery right to the porch. My new bee Guru, who has fifty hives and tends bees with his elderly father, told me where he gets his supplies online, so I did some research and ordered mine from the same place http://www.mannlakeltd.com/ . The two complete hives, each with two bodies and two supers, arrived in four large awkward size boxes right on time. I felt kind of sorry for the UPS man. Since I made the decision to get bees late in the season, it was hard to find a source of the actual bees for delivery this spring. When I did finally find some package bees that originated here on the East Coast (for better acclimatization, less shipping time) they were Russian and Italians from http://spillehoney.com/bees.html.
Three pounds of mailorder Bees in their cage
The night before I expected them to arrive, I made up a few gallons of sugar syrup to feed them with so it could have time to cool. The bees arrived in good shape in two shoe box sized screened in boxes at the post office at 6:30 am the next morning. The Post Mistress called my cell to come get them, and since I was already at work, I had to turn around and come back and install them in their new hives, which only took about an hour, plus another hour and a half of travel. I had heard that the Italians were the most gentle but it was one of that lot that stung me and they seemed more riled up than the Russians.
Checking for the Queens ReleaseThe Queens cage-empty
I wore my gnat veil, a pair of leather gloves and a nylon raincoat with a hood, Velcro sleeves and a draw cord hem. That one bee got me on my ankle. Four days later, when I removed the separate little Queen boxes I had hung in the center of the hive, and made sure she was released, I added duct tape to my outfit around my ankles. The worker bees have to work to get her out of her cage, which comes plugged with candy at one end. That gives the bees about four days to get acquainted with each other before she is free. If you release a new queen right away they might kill her. I have had the bees a week now and have refilled their feeders with another gallon each. So far, each hive has been busy building out comb but they have not made it out to the furthest frames yet. When they do, I will add another hive body and move the feeder up a level. When that gets full, I will add a super (a shallower box with frames and foundation) one at a time as they need it. I have an entrance reducer in place so they can defend against robber bees but as soon as this cold rain ends I think I will give them a larger front door so they can forage easier.
The Wild Cherries are in full bloom and I have planted buckwheat for later in the season. I may plant more of that. We don’t need all this lawn. The buttercups I don’t want out in the back pasture are also in full bloom. I might till them up as soon as they are done and plant some clover and orchard grass, which Mara, my horse will also like. The neighbor across the way has removed the cows from fifty acres and is about to plant it in corn. Round Up ready corn of course, which is what everybody plants these days. I was glad they killed the grass more than a week before I got my bees. If they had sprayed it when the clover was blooming and the bees were working it, it would have killed them. Luckily, they now have a beekeeper maintaining two hives on their farm on shares, who will be as worried as I am, and hopefully will help them prevent such things.
I am starting to remember how much work it takes to take proper care of bees and hope I can keep up properly. On Monday morning, before work, I will need to see if I can find the queens and make sure she is starting to lay eggs. If not I may have to order a new queen. I have never been good at locating the queen and probably should have had her marked. I will have to meet with the farmers on both sides of us and ask them to keep me informed and meet the couple doing the bees over there. There is a lot to learn. Rosie, my bee guru at work, is full of information and loves to talk bees so he will be a big help. There is also a local beekeeping group that meets once a month so I plan to hook up with them. All I need now is more hours in the day.
