Day 39: First TopBar Hive

The new bees all clustered around the entrance to their new home.

The days run hot and heavy together and I find myself in the hives more than once a week. This trend will slow now that I have taken delivery of my last bees for the year. Today's bees came from Wicked Bee Apiary and the nuc was built in a TopBar box so the bees had to build everything themselves on foundationless frames. I waited a long time for these bees and my wait was well-rewarded.

The other nucs I got had four frames of bees. John has been holding this one for me longer than he planned because of the weather, and as a result it had seven frames of brood and stores in it. It had eight originally, but one of the combs fell off its bar into the bottom of the nuc. One of the combs was pretty small (I should have taken a picture of it), and when John went to add it to the hive he discovered that the bar was warped so it wouldn't go into the hive without creating a small gap in a couple of places. Apparently that won't do so he told me to take the comb to the house, cut out the finished honey (there was also a lot of nectar, but it wasn't ready so it wasn't capped).

As we finished up and I looked at the comb I saw 12 larvae in the cells and three capped brood. That's fifteen bees! John said to just get over it and process the comb, but I couldn't. I tried. I took it into the house and cut it off the bar, but then I thought, "Why not reattach it but to a straight bar? Maybe even a bar in the hybrid hive so the bees there will be encouraged to move into the TopBar portion of that hive instead of packing nectar into cells in the middle of the brood.

It took a bit of work with a candle and the gas stove, but I managed to attach the bit of comb to a bar from the hybrid, and I put it back into that hive. In the process I discovered a small colony of sugar ants had made their home in the TopBar side of the hive. I encouraged them to move out. I removed the queen excluder from between the two portions of the hive, and as I was finishing up I saw workers already swarming over the little comb. I look forward to checking on them Sunday.

Things I learned today: 1) When you find a new small comb on the end of the row in a TopBar hive, move it in one space between two already drawn out combs to help the bees stay straight and not go 3-dimensional in their comb-building. 2) When you need to move frames around in the hive, make sure to keep all the brood together--don't put a honey and pollen frame between two brood frames. 3) When you go to put the bars back in a TopBar hive, overlap them a little so there is no space between them and then set them down slowly, tight together. Don't try to slide them together.

And that's the bee report.

Day 37: Suiting Up For Inspections

Maybe it's hubris, but I think I am getting a feeling for what's good in my hives and what needs to be addressed. Today I suited up (with hive #4 I can't NOT fully suit up), lit the smoker (I'm getting really good at making it smoke too, by the way), and headed out with nothing more but a hive tool to check in with my hives. Hives #1-3 have boardman feeders on them, and the feeders have all been empty for 2-3 days. Hive #4 has not had a feeder since I took the division feeder out.

Hive #1: This is the established nuc--the furthest ahead of the four hives when I put them in. It still has three or so frames to build out, so no rush to add on a super. However when I look at the contents of the frames that are built out, the first thing I notice is that there is very little nectar or capped honey. There is a lot of brood in every stage that I can see--I still can't see the tiny eggs--through capped. There is some pollen (I'm still not sure how much pollen I should be seeing). But there are no frames built out holding only nectar and/or honey. This tells me that I need to feed this hive. I didn't see the queen, but I wasn't really looking for her. The bees stayed docile for my entire inspection even though I squished a couple (I HATE squishing bees!).

Hive #2: This is the package. These bees are doing GREAT! Still three or so empty frames so no super for it yet, but there are a couple of frames being built out of nectar/honey, and all the other frames have a lot of brood with a bit of capped honey around the edges. Out of all my hives, this one has the textbook colony structure. It does not need supplemental feeding at this time. I did see one queen cell (I'm pretty sure it wasn't a drone cell) and that is a concern, but there were enough larvae in all the stages besides egg (and there may have ben eggs, I just can't see them) that I think I am queen right. This hive had an assassin bug on the outside  of the hive with a dead bee in it's pincers, er claws, er hands, er WHATEVER is at the end of its front legs. There were also a couple of cockroaches in the hive. I removed the boardman feeder and put the entrance reducer back in on the larger size opening.

Hive #3: This hive contains the bees from one of the two nucs that were made up for me the day I was down at Bee Weaver Apiary. It is also the hybrid hive (hives one and two are straight Langstroths). I started my inspection at the end farthest from the TopBar extension, and I just realized that I forgot to check the TopBar portion to see if there is anything happening in there. Based on the status of the rest of the hive, I don't think there is. So back at the beginning... Like the previous two hives, the bees in this one were docile and not perturbed by my presence. I could totally manage this hive in nothing but a veil. As also with the others, there was a lot of brood and a lot of nectar/honey. Problem is that even though there are empty--not even built out yet--frames, the bees are putting the nectar in amongst the brood so that there is capped brood next to nectar. Not good. Don't they know they're supposed to build out the cells in the new frames, put the nectar there, and use the brood cells that have recently hatched bees for new brood? I'm not sure what to do to make them start building out the new comb other than move an empty frame into a spot between two built out frames. Maybe they would get that strong hint. I'm tempted to go do it now, but I'll wait till tomorrow. Saw a hive beetle and a cockroach in this hive. I removed the boardman feeder and put the entrance reducer back in on the larger size opening.

Hive #4: This is the (formerly) cranky hive with the second of the new nucs housed in a Flow hive. It is the one I put a medium super on earlier in the week. I didn't really inspect this hive as I was just in there putting on the super. However I did look in the super box, and while there were some bees in there, they hadn't started building anything out yet. I'm giving this hive another week before I go in there again--and not just because it was a refreshing change not to be chased back to the house. No chance to see pests as I didn't really get into the hive body. I hope to see more movement up in the super next weekend.

I didn't see any of the queens, but given the states of all the hives, I wasn't really concerned/looking for them. I'll look for them specifically next time. I did mix up a pint of sugar syrup for Hive #1 and as I had already removed my bee vestments,  I put on a veil and filled up and installed the feeder just wearing it (well and pants and a shirt and shoes--oh yes, and socks too). And that's it for the Bee Report this Memorial Day. Now go hug a veteran.

Day 33: Feeding and Frame Technology

Today was not a regularly scheduled visit to the bee yard, but I needed to get the super (upper box) on the Flow (the cranky hive) so that maybe they'd get happier with the additional room. I got out the hive body pieces yesterday and put them together, then I stained them... and then I realized I had the wrong size box. Oh I had an 8-frame box alright, but I had a deep instead of medium and it is recommended that you use three mediums, or one deep and one medium for the bees (their brood, honey and pollen) in Central Texas. I already have a deep on the bottom so I didn't want another deep. It's already going to be next year before I put the Flow honey super on the top and start collecting honey for myself from that hive (every box after the first two is for honey collection for the beekeeper).

So this morning I got online and hunted for the closest place I could go to buy bee supplies. I found a lovely place in Florence Texas, about 50 minutes north of our house, called Busy Bee Beekeeping Supplies. At 9:30 am, Gallifrey, Jig and I hit the road. Turns out they are a dealer for Mann Lake--the online place I bought the last frames and hive bodies--so I loaded up on all kinds of fun things. I got a frame board for wiring up my own wax frames, wax foundation (for the frames), eyelets, an embedding tool for the wire, a wire spool rack, honey, books, more hive bodies (mediums this time), and a really cool division board feeder called a closed top ladder feeder.

This feeder is the coolest thing It holds a gallon of syrup and has the same body as the other division board feeders I have, but it also has a top with two holes for the bees to enter to access the syrup. It has O rings to keep the sides from bowing out into the hive from the weight of the syrup, and it has two plastic sock things that look like the wrappings you get on Asian pears at the supermarket. The bees climb down the socks to get to the syrup, and it's easy for them to climb back up so they don't drown! No matter how many sticks I floated in the syrup in two of the last feeders like this I had, I still had a lot of drowned bees. This handy dandy contraption looks like a really good way to save my bees.

While I was talking to the owner she told me that they don't use the boardman feeders because she thinks they encourage robbing and they need to be refilled to frequently. She did, however, show me how to use them with my entrance reducers. Now if I want to continue using them I need to put the reducers back in. And all the feeders were empty today so I should probably still be feeding, and I'll put the reducers back in tomorrow when I fill the syrup jars.

This afternoon I stained the new medium super, let it dry, and filled it with the black and yellow plastic foundation frames I previously bought from Mann Lake. Then I suited up, lit the smoker, and headed to Hive #4. I smoked them good--entrance and under the cover--before I took the top and the inner cover off. I carefully brushed bees away from the top edges of the brood box and set the new box on it. A bit of smoke convinced the bees hanging on the inner cover and lid to go elsewhere while I put them back on, and I headed back to the bee supply shed (the RO system side of the well house right next to the bee yard). Not a single bee angrily buzzed me! No kamikazes, no killer bees. Huzzah!

The video below is done by the wonderful people at the Flow and shows how to put together your own frames. What I am going to do with the wax foundation is shown starting at minute 7:29.

Tomorrow, decorative painting of the hives!

Day 29: Weekly Inspection and Mean Bees

Wax frame with new capped brood (bottom center),
pollen (in the ring around it), and capped honey (the
white cells in the upper right

It's getting difficult knowing what day it is in beekeeping. I guess I'm going to have to keep a spreadsheet so I can just look up the date and the corresponding bee day. Okay, spreadsheet made, yesterday was Day 29.

I suited up fully for my hive inspection as I knew I'd need to remove the entrance reducers and put in the boardman entrance feeders, and all that futzing around was likely to make even the calm hives a bit more agitated. Wow am I glad I did! Yesterday was an overcast day about 70 degrees at 5:00 pm when I went into the hives. Zaga wasn't able to be there so it was my first day doing a full hive inspection by myself. Armed with a loaded smoker, I filled the new boardman feeders with the leftover sugar water from last week, arranged my tools, and went out into the gloaming drizzle. In order to more accurately track what I did and what I found, I took my phone and used voice memo. The problem with the voice memo is that I was out there for an hour and 15 minutes to capture everything I did, I need to listen to the whole memo... Thus the bees take up two hours and twenty minutes of my day. There must be some way to speed this up.

Another picture of the same frame as above, but from
further back.

Ah well. I listened to my loooong memo and transcribed the details about hives, frames, beetles, queens, etc., into a spreadsheet. In my own obsessive compulsive kind of way, I think I want to have a blank form to use for each hive examination with check boxes indicating finding the queen, hive beetles, treatments, frame status--honey, pollen, brood, nectar, etc. That way I can capture the details without either having to talk to my phone or have Zaga take notes. On the plus side, I can condense the status of each hive into a couple of sentences!

Hive #1: This hive is chugging right along. I'm continuing to feed it as the larvae looked a bit dry and the feeder was dry. Saw a hive beetle, no beetle B Gone strips (like dryer sheets with no fabric softener on them, the beetles feet get tangled up in them). I need to add one next time. I did find the queen, and she was quite busy. Long Live the Queen!

A foundationless frame--the bees made all the comb from
scratch, though it looks like they reused wax from the
frames that came with the nuc as some of the cells are the dirty
brown of used brood comb. New brood in the yellow capped
cells, honey along the top in the white.

Hive #2: This one was the package so it started with no frames of brood or nectar or pollen, and it still has about as much brood and food stores now as the first hive which had the greatest headstart of all of them. I think I'll go with all packages next year if I buy more bees. There was some syrup left in the divider feeder when I replaced it with the frame and put in the boardman feeder. I didn't find the queen and I was a bit concerned because there seemed to be fewer larvae in this one. Will need to check carefully next time for larvae and queen.

Hive #3: Four full frames of brood, nectar, honey, larvae and pollen in the middle, a couple more drawn out frames, three not drawn out yet and added a new one. I found the queen. Long Live the Queen!

Another foundationless frame, this one is less drawn out than
the one above, but it shows how the bees build rings of
hexagonal cells and then connect them.

Hive #4: I am beginning to hate this hive. I have been stung twice now--both times by bees from this hive. This time I got stung all the way up by the house, through my hat and hair at the very end of the hive inspection. These bees are just angry. They might be angry because they are over-crowded. This hive is full, full, FULL! It was impossible to do a good inspection as there were so many bees surging around the frames and the hive body that I couldn't move anything without risking squishing them. the hive is definitely more than 90% full so tomorrow I am going to have to put another box on the top. But do I do another brood box which would hold a mix of honey, brood, and pollen, or do I put on the Flow super?

The one thing that was super cool about Hive #4 is that it is the only one in which I used foundationless frames--frames with no existing wax or plastic for the bees to build their cells on (also known as drawing out the comb). They create everything from scratch as they hang from the top of the frame. They did one complete foundationless and a third to a half of another. There might even have been one more foundationless in there, but I didn't record anything about it in my memo. By the time I got to it, the bees were super pissed off and I just needed to be done.

A couple of notes about this inspection. Because of the temps, the weather, and the time of day, there weren't many bees out foraging which made the inspection--especially of Hive #4 more difficult. I need to remember to inspect on sunny still mornings so most of the bees will be out hunting for nectar or pollen.

Today I went to Home Depot and bought some little test jars of paint in a range of colors with which to decorate the white painted hives, and I also got some white paint to paint the new TopBar and the unpainted shallow boxes I will need to add soon. In spite of being stung twice so far and the difficulties I am having with Hive #4 (leading to me no longer beekini beekeeping), I LOVE MY BEES! This is a really great experience.

Day 23: Getting Comfortable Inspecting the Hives

Man is it hard to use the laptop when you also have a lapcat! Harder still when he wants you to use your fingers to pet him instead of typing on the keyboard.

It's hard to believe I left the bees alone for an entire week, but apparently I did as the last post was a week ago. Today I made a gallon of 1:1 sugar syrup and then Zaga and I suited up and headed out to wrangle bees. What a difference this week! Thanks to John Swann and his consultation from Wicked Bee Apiary last week, I felt much more confident about what I was looking at (and for) in the hives today. We found all four queens--even though the yellow dot was completely chewed off of one of them. I am sure the dot-less queen is one of our original girls and not a new queen who superseded ours as she has a clipped wing, and all my queens were marked and clipped. I still didn't manage to spot eggs in the cells (I really need to take a pair of reading glasses), but saw lots and lots of larvae and a ton of new capped brood. The capped brood we got with the nucs had a much darker brown wax. The caps on the new brood cells are almost as light as the caps on the new honey.

So examining your hives... It doesn't matter how many seminars and club meetings you attend, how many slideshows you watch, or how many books you read. Opening your first hive is like having your first kid: Everything you thought you knew completely flees your mind when faced with the immediate visceral reality of YOURS. I knew of the visual difference between capped brood and capped honey. I had seen pictures. It took John patiently pointing everything out to me in my own hives for me to really get it. Today Zaga and I didn't even take out all the frames from the hives. Once we found the queens we did a quick look down the sides of the remaining frames to see how drawn out they were, and then we closed up the hives. I don't know if I squished fewer bees today than in previous visits, but I felt much better about reinserting the frames. Putting the inner cover back on was a snap using John's method of setting it down perpendicular to how it was supposed to go and then turning it in place till it was squared up.

All the hives are looking really good, and the Flow--which only has eight frames as opposed to the ten frame capacity of the rest--is almost at 90%. When John was here we took the feeder out of that hive (which houses the nuc that was established already when I brought it home) so there are eight frames in it and only a couple haven't been built out yet. When it gets to 90% I have to decide whether to put another brood box on it or go ahead and move to the Flow super. I need to find some of the other Flow folk around here to see what they do. It's a good resource to be able to see what the Aussies are doing with their Flows, but as they are the first to say, there's no substitute for getting advice from your local beekeepers.

Finally, I ordered external feeders, an 8-frame brood box for the Flow (just in case I want to use it rather than the Flow super), and a bunch of shallow frames, and they arrived last week. Tomorrow I'll open the box and set them up. Thank heaven I didn't order wax frames as the box has been on the porch in 90 degree heat for a few days now. John was supposed to deliver my TopBar hive over the weekend so I could paint it. Better drop him a note as he is also supposed to delivering my TopBar nuc this week and I need to have the hive painted (outside only) before I put the bees in it. Zaga's nuc (or nucs--she might end up with two too) will come this week or next. We are really rocking the apiary--more bees!!!

Day 16: Getting Help

The Expert Cometh! This morning I called John Swann of Wicked Bee Apiary and he came out and examined the hives. Hah! I was right! I have mean bees! It's not that my bees don't like me, it's that they don't like anyone. John confirmed that one of my hives has very testy bees. These bees are not from my queen--they are the adult bees that came with the nuc. The next bees I will be seeing are the brood bees that came with the nuc--and they are likely to be just as feisty as they came from the same original hive as the adult bees and likely from the same queen. However in six weeks I should start seeing bees from my queen, the current queen, and then it will be time to evaluate temperament. If they are still very defensive, borderline aggressive, then I will probably requeen the hive and start over. Requeening means that there will still be some brood left from the old queen to raise up, but then all the new bees laid after the requeening will have a different genetic makeup and (hopefully) a better disposition. The bees in the other three hives have much better temperaments.

The best news of the day is that the hives all have their original marked queens. Zaga and I had difficulty finding them because the other bees have begun to chew the yellow paint off the backs of the queens, making them a bit harder to spot. But John found them all, and he also showed me lots of new brood in various stages of development from eggs, to larvae, to capped (pupating) brood. We also saw a baby bee chewing its way out of a cell. I'm glad human babies don't chew their way out... Just a thought.

On the feeding front, I am over-feeding. As much as I give them, they, greedy little pigs that they are, will consume. They will take all that sugar water and fill cells and cells in the hive with it--leaving the queen nowhere to lay eggs for more bee babies. So I need to knock off the feeding a bit. A quart at a time, a couple of times a week is enough according to John. And I probably want to go to entrance feeders (feeders that are outside the hive but whose entrance is inside the main hive entrance (so bees from other hives and other bugs don't eat the syrup). The big advantages to entrance feeders are that you don't have to disturb the hive to refill them, you can see when they need filling from the outside, and they don't take up frame space in the hive.

Right now none of my hives are ready to have additional boxes added. They are all healthy and they are all being drawn out (the workers are making new wax cells for brood, pollen and nectar), but they're not 90% full yet. When the two outermost frames are drawn out on the sides closest to the middle (leaving two non-drawn-out sides), then it will be time to pop another box on top. The top box will be a medium--as opposed to the deep that is currently the base for each hive--but it will also be used for brood, pollen and honey. I can't remember what John said about adding more boxes this year--my brain was full by that point, and it's damn hard to take notes while wearing big gloves and juggling bee hive components and equipment.

So, mostly happy bees. Living queens are busily laying eggs--which is better than either of the alternatives (lazy live queens or productive zombie queens). One last note about bee eggs: They are damned hard to impossible to see--luckily the larvae are a bit bigger and it looked today like the same ages of brood were clustered together in the frames so I could find an egg cell or two in the cluster of 20-30 cells with eggs grouped together next to each other. Likewise I was able to find the wriggling little larvae all tucked up in adjoining cells in a frame.

I did suit up completely for this examination (as did John) and it was a good thing or I surely would have been stung. The bees did NOT like being disturbed two days in a row!

Day 15: Mean Bees

There was a really good title for today's post... Oh yes, Zaga just reminded me, "Off with her head!" We came up with that title after a really big Negroni each, and now I can't remember why it was so funny--and so apropos. Today was a regular bee maintenance day, and Zaga had no end of amusement at my expense because I felt the bees did not like me. Hives three and four seemed--to me--to be more aggressive today than they were two weeks ago. There was even a bee that chased me all the way back to my front door. I was sure she was going to sting me she was so mad at me. Zaga says they are insects and just want to kill us anyway so I shouldn't take it so personally, but I want my bees to like me! The first day we were all so zen. Now at least a couple of the hives--maybe three of the four--seem really cranky to me. I may or may not have been stung today--I'm leaning towards not, though Zaga is still laughing at the way I screamed when I thought it happened. In my defense, I thought a bee was in my sandal and had stung me, and when I yelled "Holy Shit!" it was more in anticipation of further pain to come rather than actual hurt.

So "Off with her head!" felt to me to be the sentiment the bees were showing me today. I, of course was in a dress, veil and gloves with bare arms, back, and legs below the shins. Zaga was completely covered in a beesuit, veil, gloves and closed shoes. She could afford to be sanguine about the bees' irritation as there was no way she was going to get stung through all that clothing.

Stats for the day:

Hive #1--The hive with the cracked feeder that spilled syrup all over the hive on Wednesday : This is the Lang with the older nuc (the one with the established queen) in it. The feeder was not empty of sugar syrup, but it was also filled with bee corpses. We were so rattled by all the dead bees in the syrup that we forgot to take a count of the filled frames. There were a lot of them, however. We did not find the queen.

Hive #2: This is the Lang with the package in it and I was really pleased to see how they're doing. Of the nine frames, 5-1/2 of them were drawn out and in the process of being filled. Filled with what, we are not sure, but filled nonetheless. We did not find the queen, but otherwise the hive looked really good. The feeder was completely empty.

Hive #3: I'm beginning to think these bees don't like me. This was one of the new nucs (nucs that had a queen in a cage vs. already established in the hive) and it is the hybrid hive. The feeder was completely empty. The bees were drawing out comb on the bottom of the frames they were so out of space, but they were ignoring the extra plastic frames which had come with the Mann Lake hive and which I had put in this hive to fill it out. The feeder was completely empty, and I moved it from the third slot from the right, all the way to the left to encourage the bees to spread out more--maybe even to start filling in the adjacent TopBar honey super. We did find the queen in this one (yay!). There were four empty frames in this hive.

Hive #4: These bees really don't like me. This is the Flow and it is populated with one of the two new nucs. We did not find the queen today for the second week in a row. I think this hive has been taken over by Satan Queen and the workers are all Satan Spawn. There were six very full frames in this hive--out of seven--and one of them was completely drawn from a foundationless frame. Very cool. The feeder was also completely empty.

What I most learned from today is that I can't tell brood comb from any other comb (with the exception of capped honey) with any certainty. Clearly this week we need to get an experienced beekeeper in to work with us on our hive inspection, and we need to take some really good notes--and maybe pictures.

I didn't want to go back into the hives a second time today, but I really wasn't expecting the feeders to be dry since Wednesday--especially since I put a gallon of sugar in each of the feeders. But they were dry so I went back in and split a gallon of syrup between the four of them (all I hd made up). Hive #1 we took the feeder out, dumped out the sugar syrup and dead bees that were in it, refilled it, dropped a sheet of Beetle Bee Gone in the bottom of the box, and replaced the feeder. Hives #2 and #3 also got Beetle Bee Gone and more sugar syrup, hive #4 only got the additional sugar syrup (I didn't want to mess around with the cranky bees again).

I still love my bees, but each time I go into the hive just serves to highlight how little I know about them, therefore how much I have to learn, and how much it feels like I'm just winging it. I need to get someone to do the hive examinations with Zaga and me who is experienced and can tell what the heck (s)he is looking at in all the seething cells and if there is anything we should be doing. I also want to know if we should still be feeding because the bees went through about 18 lbs of sugar in water since Wednesday...

Day 11: Feeding the New Bees

Bee undertakers, what a sad job. This morning when I was out gazing at my hives I saw a couple of bees dragging little bee corpses from the hives and flying off with them. I wondered what they did with them so I watched one. I really thought she was going to bury her charge as she just kept flying it around and then dragging it along the ground as if she were looking for the best grave site. Anthropomorphizing aside, I think the dead bee was somehow stuck to the live bee and the live bee eventually managed to shake the dead one off and then flew away. What a short life individual worker bees have.

It's only Wednesday, I was in the hives for a thorough inspection on Sunday and I'm not supposed to be back in there till this coming Sunday, but I had to go in today to fill the feeders. I was concerned on Sunday because all four feeders were bone dry and I don't want to be starving my bees. So today I went out--no hat, no gloves, no smoker!--and just peeked into Hive #2 (the Lang with the package) at the feeder end (I didn't even take the inner cover off the body, I just slid it back enough to expose the feeder). It was bone dry. Not wanting to mess around, I went to HEB and bought 24 lbs of sugar thinking I'd have some left. I don't. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I keep telling myself it's a learning curve. You can't remember everything. The first mistake I got halfway through making was that I got out a big enamel pot to cook up the sugar syrup in. We've been having trouble getting that much sugar to dissolve in a gallon of water so I thought I make a good, old-fashioned sugar suspension by heating it up. It got pretty hot and I got to thinking. There was a niggling little worm in my head that said you're not supposed to cook the sugar syrup as it can be bad for the bees. So I hopped on the handy-dandy Interweb and validated my fear. As with many things, there is no straight up answer. What is definitely bad for bees is hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF). Really. It is a "naturally-occurring organic acid with the formula C6H6O3. It is often formed during the dehydration of sugars, especially fructose, and is known to be toxic to honey bees." The original paper referenced by that article is here. So will cooking your syrup kill all your bees due to increasing the amount of this naturally occurring organic acid? Nope. But there is a question about increased bee mortality due to increased levels of HMF caused by applying heat to the sugar, and since I have new bees they are stressed enough without my slipping them some additional toxins with their supper.

After I turned off the stove (the syrup hadn't even boiled yet--much less caramelized which is an absolute no-no) I mixed the hot syrup in with some cold water to bring down the temperature, and then I took the first pitcher full out out to the hives. Because Hive #2 has the package bees--the ones who didn't have any brood, any pollen or nectar stores, just a queen and a bunch of bees--I am the most concerned about their health. I took the divider feeder out of the hive (it was bone dry) and it was full of bees. I shook them out (twice) so I could add the syrup, and after it was filled I replaced the sticks in it so the bees would have something to climb out onto when they fell into the syrup.

Hive #1 with the sugar syrup running
out and down the left front leg.

Before I could do Hive #3, the hybrid hive, I had to refill my syrup pitcher in the house. So I removed my bee garb, traipsed back to the house, and refilled the pitcher--and this time I was careful to put in exactly one gallon so I would know how much syrup the bees were going through in a specific time period. I trudged back to the hive (of course I was trudging: It was 92 degrees out), re-donned my garb, relit the smoker, and opened up Hive #3. This time I decided to leave the feeder in to minimize the intrusion for the bees, and I carefully and slowly poured the syrup in. This feeder was also full of bees, but I poured really slowly so they had time time to crawl up the sides (they're grooved) or onto the stick rafts in the bottom. Yes, several bees got drenched with sugar syrup, but by the time I finished they all had a big grooming party going on so I am choosing to think of it as a spa day for bees.

Wash, rinse and repeat for clothing off and on, traipsing, trudging, and smokering. Then it was time for Hive #1. Did I say this is a learning experience? I didn't mention the process of opening the hive last time, but I did it the same this time: a little puff of cool smoke to the front entrance followed by lifting the top and puffing a bit in there and putting the top back down for a minute. Then I removed the top and slid the inner cover back to expose just the feeder. As I did on Hive #3, I gently filled the feeder with one gallon of syrup till it was almost to the top, and then I relaxed and enjoyed the spa party. The girls were happily grooming and sipping syrup--it was a great party. And then I heard a sound suspiciously like water running... I had forgotten that this feeder that came with the nuc was cracked. Now I really like Bee Weaver, but why would you put a cracked feeder in with a nuc that someone purchased? Give the customer a new feeder for heaven's sake! Nucs aren't cheap.

I looked at the front of the hive and sugar syrup was flowing out the front of the hive and down one leg. Let's get this party started! Bees poured from the hive and flew in from who knows where else for this sugar bonanza. Normally I would be afraid of robbing (where bees from one hive come to steal the honey from another hive by force, as opposed to by stealth) but this is my strongest hive, it was queenright on Sunday, and it's a standard Lang hive with foundation frames (less work for the bees than foundationless where they have to build the comb from scratch). So I put the top back on, carefully nudging the grooming party bees out of the way, and I watched the activity at the front of the hive for awhile. The bees seemed to be trying to grab as much of the syrup as they could. As I stood there, I saw a little whiptail lizard cruising toward the base of the hive where there were a lot of sugar-drunk bees lounging about. Whiptails eat bugs so I wondered if she (they are almost all female) was there to grave rob (from this morning's bee activity) or feast on sugary bees on the ground. I left without finding out.

Thus end the bee adventures for today.