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!