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!