Day 55: My Last Inspection This Month

Today is a bittersweet day. We are off tomorrow to Montana for the summer. We have left a house sitter in charge of the house, a maintenance person in charge of the garden, and Zaga (backed by John Swann of Wicked Bees) in charge of the apiary. I began my morning by communing with the bees. Considering it was already in the mid 80's when I got outside, there was no way I was putting on a bee suit. I wore a veil, packed the smoker good, and hoped for the best. I also made up two gallons of sugar syrup (1:1).

Hives 1, 2 and 4 all have upper brood boxes boxes on them, and none of the hives' workers have begun building them out yet. They all, however, have built out a lot of new comb since last weekend (I am guessing thanks to being fed). All the feeders were also empty (I am feeding hives 1-4 and 6) and I put two liters of syrup in each of them. Interestingly, the TopBar hive (#5) was just as full of nectar as any of the others, and as it is foundationless, the bees need a lot more nectar to make wax. There were new frames being drawn out in every hive, and in every one I moved or turned them around to encourage the bees to work on other frames too. I wouldn't be surprised if the three hives with upper brood boxes have started building them out by next weekend.

It was my first inspection for Hive #6, Zaga's hive, and the bees were just as sweet as they were when I put them in. The TopBar hive was also good natured as was the formerly cranky hive (the Flow--#4). I did get stung while in Hive #4, but it was only the pad of my thumb when I put it down on a bee. I took the stinger right out and very quickly wasn't bothered by it or any other bees. The poor bee who stung me wasn't so lucky as she lost her life. I always feel bad when that happens.

Yesterday I rescued two bees from the pond just by reaching my hand in and lifting them out. It was fascinating watching them dry and groom themselves after their ordeal in the water. As I wasn't sure how long they'd been swimming and how exhausted they were, I got them each a little sugar syrup. After about five minutes they flew off. I put one of them on my shoulder after fishing her out so I could keep working. It was so cool!

Day 50: I Fail To Re-Queen

I had every intention of re-queening today. Oh I wasn't going to do the deed myself (regicide is such an ugly thing), but I was paying to have it done. I hired a beessassin. The shame.

Before he arrived I started my weekly hive inspection. Emboldened by Friday's lack of clothes and lack of stings, I wore no protective gear at all when I went into Hives #1 and #2 to check their sugar syrup supply and restock if necessary. Hive #1 was bone dry so I added two quarts of sugar syrup to their feeder. Hive #2 still had a bit so I didn't restock them--I'll look again in two days. Hive #3 needed some syrup... Oh who am I kidding! This all happened yesterday* and a million and two things that I have had to remember and deal with have happened since then. Two or three of the five hives being fed needed syrup, the rest still had an adequate amount. I ended up with one quart of syrup left, and I had made up six quarts. I put two quarts of syrup in each hive I refilled. Do the math.

Then Dan Weaver arrived with the new queen and my moment of truth. We suited up, lit the smokers and headed for Hive #4. First thing Dan did was look at the health of the hive. His impression was a strong healthy hive. He didn't see any of the signs of a hive under stress from varroa. What neither of us saw was an aggressive hive. I thought last week that they were a bit calmer, and this time I really felt that I was seeing the temperament of the queen that came with the nuc. Because all the brood and workers that came with the nuc originally were from another queen, I hoped that the aggressiveness also came from her and that the brood from the new queen would be sweet like my other bees. It now looks like that hope bore fruit.

I love my bees. I have waded into the pond in a dress to save a bee from drowning. Killing a queen who was only a few months old and might not even have been responsible for the crankiness of the workers really went against the grain. So I decided not to do it. I'll continue to monitor for varroa, and if the count worsens, I'll treat all the hives. This isn't the best time to treat as there is both a lot of capped brood and a lot of honey. Most of the treatments aren't appropriate under those conditions.

Day 48: Zaga's Hive

Nuc with bees, smoker, and hive with feeder already in place.

Before we are to the point where day 48 is too far from my memory to be able to accurately document it, I am getting my act together and posting! Day 48 I picked up Zaga's Nuc from Bee Weaver (actually from Dan and Laura Weaver's house just down the road--it's so cool that they live so close to us), brought it home, and installed it. I was tired of suiting up and I figured the bees would be too disoriented with the move to be aggressive so I just put on my veil. I didn't even wear gloves. Oh it was marvelous! I'll be honest: The past few weeks when I've had to cover up entirely and almost died from heatstroke, I questioned the wisdom of keeping bees. The blush was definitely wearing off the rose. But installing Zaga's bees in their new home made it all come back again! Beekeeping should be done naked, but I'll settle for clothes appropriate for the weather an a veil to protect my eyes.

So Zaga's hive is a cute little green and yellow Langstroth from Bee Weaver that sits on a stand that is only about eight inches off the ground. First thing I did was put a closed-top divider feeder in the box and remove the extra frames to make way for the frames in the Nuc. Then I opened the Nuc box and pulled out the first frame. What beautiful, glorious comb it had! It was all fresh and white with fully built out frames full of brood, nectar and capped honey. I put it in the middle of the hive and went on to the rest of the frames. They were all beautiful, and I was easily able to find their industrious queen (shown at left). If you click on the photo of the bees you can see the queen. She's the one with the big yellow dot on her.

Side note: Some queen breeders mark their new queens with a spot of paint on the thorax. They use a different color every year so you can tell the age of your queen by the color of her dot. The system is an international one with white or grey used for years ending in 1 and 6, yellow for 2 and 7, red for 3 and 8, green for 4 and 9, and blue for 5 and 0.

When I had all the frames placed in the hive, I reluctantly closed it up and left the nuc box in front of it so the few bees still hanging around in it could find their way into their new home. The other activity in my bee-day was less pleasant: I had to decide what to do about the elevated varroa count in one of my hives.

The first obvious step was to consult an expert with a different management strategy to see what he does. When I picked up Zaga's hive, I talked to Dan Weaver about his varroa management strategy. Bee Weaver does not specifically test or treat for mites and they haven't for over 10 years. They breed their queens for resistance and hygiene, and they use their lifetime of experience with the bees to recognize problems early enough to manage them by tweaking rather than major intervention. Dan can scan a hive and see mites on baby bees, larvae that is more yellow than it should be, and other early signs of varroa-related problems. I can barely find the queen yet so I can't rely on my ability to see the subtle signs of a hive being out of tune. Most beekeepers lack the experience the Weavers have (five generations of beekeeping will do that for you), so it's not a wonder we have to do more intensive inspections (like the sugar shake).

Going beyond how to determine if you have a problem is what to do about it if you do. Because Bee Weaver breeds their queens for resistance and hygiene, if a colony is showing early signs of varroa, one of their strategies might be to re-queen the hive. Re-queening has two potential impacts on the varroa population. First, it breaks the brood cycle of the bees. The old queen is removed and is therefore not laying, and the new queen is in a queen cage for 3-4 days before she gets out and starts to lay. Varroa reproduction is tied to bee reproduction as the mites lay their eggs in the brood cells with the larvae. Second, the new queen is probably going to have better genetic traits for fighting off varroa as that's what they are breeding for.

Re-queening can also fix an aggression problem. And there, in a nutshell, is my situation with Hive #4. So my initial plan, after consulting with Dan, is to re-queen with a new Bee Weaver queen. As I can be challenged finding the queen, Dan is going to come over and do the re-queening for me on Sunday.

Day 47: Adding New Brood Boxes and Checking For Varroa Mites

Hives 1-4, left to right

Today was the first varroa check for hives and it had to be a really quick one as it was also my birthday and I had pampering to do. I approached the activity as if I were storming the beaches of Normandy and every second counted. Not to imply that getting a massage and a facial is comparable in effort, but you wouldn't know it for the planning!

Today's agenda was simple: collect a sugar sample from three of the fives hives (the ones with either screened bottoms, removable bottom boards, pull-out plastic trays in the bottom of the hives, or some combination of the above), store the samples in individual plastic 1-lb frit jars labeled for the hive the sample came from, put the new medium brood boxes on top of two hives, and add closed-top division ladder feeders to all the hives but the Topbar. Get in, get out, analyze the data later after pampering.

I started with Hive #1 which doesn't have a screened bottom board so I planned to pick up the entire hive body (it was only one deep brood box) and put it on a piece of paper on which I could catch the sugar. The paper was on an aluminum tray across the top of my green garden wagon (I should've taken a picture--it was a great set-up). This initial foray almost got derailed when I picked up the hive to put it on a paper-covered tray because the bottom board came with the hive because it was stuck on with the bees' propolis. Bees don't like gaps in the structure of their hives as they can allow increased vibration and decreased structural stability hives and are a security risk. So the bees collect resin from trees and some plants, mix it with beeswax and spit, and make a glue out of it. They had very efficiently glued the bottom board to the hive so I needed a little help to get it back onto the hive stand after I got it off.

Devon (one of the contractors working nearby on the pond) was conscripted to assist me. Between his nervousness at being naked around the bees (well, naked as in not wearing a bee suit, he did have a t-shirt and jeans on), and my terse focus on getting the job done we fumbled around a bit while I held the hive in the air and he moved the bottom board here and there until he put it on the stand and I was able to put the hive on the paper. Whew! Everything else went easy-peasy. I took the lid and the inner cover off the hive, scooped a cup of powdered sugar out of by baggie and sprinkled it on top of the frames concentrating on the central brood frames, and brushed all the sugar down between the frames. Then I closed the hive back up and moved on to Hive #2. That one has a screened bottom and a plastic tray in it so all I had to do was take off the lid and the inner cover, sprinkle the sugar in as before, and close it up.

The third hive I did was Hive #4, aka the Cranky Hive. Hive #3, the hybrid, has neither a screened bottom, nor a removable plastic insert, nor a removable bottom board so to do a varroa check on them I would have to use the scoop-a-1/2-of-a-cup-of-bees-into-a-glass-jar (that's about 300 bees) method. I wasn't too confident about my ability to do the scooping so I gave this hive a pass for now. Hive #4, the Flow, has both a screened bottom board and a removable plastic insert. However it already had a medium brood box on it so I had to take the new box off and put it on the ground before doing the sugar test. It wouldn't have made any sense to sprinkle sugar through both boxes as there were no bees to test in the top (they haven't started building it out yet) and the sugar would just have got caught up on the frames.

As usual, when I opened the brood box up the bees got all pissy and immediately started dive bombing my head. I ignored them and calmly sprinkled in the sugar, brushed the excess between the frames, and put the lid back on. I left the medium super out for now.

Interesting side note here: I just watched a video on Facebook produced by the wonderful Flow people and they are now making a hybrid honey super which has the patented Flow honey frames, and it also has regular frames for the bees to build their own comb and store honey. The honey super is still protected against brood being laid in it as there is a queen excluder (a plastic screen with holes big enough for the workers to get through, but too small for the queen) but the honey frames in it can either be cut up into comb for harvesting, moved down into the brood box as winter stores for the bees, or extracted like any other Lang hive frame. They happened to have some of the hybrid supers in the size matching the 10-frame Lang hive body in a warehouse sale for 10% off and they are currently offering 15% off everything through the end of June so I got one for 25% off! I'm going to put it on one of my Langstroth hives next summer.

Anyway, back to the varroa checks. I waited 10 minutes from the time of my first powdered sugar sprinkle and then lifted Hive #1 back onto its stand. Then I removed the lid and the inner cover and placed the new medium brood box with the 1-gal closed top, division ladder feeder already in it onto the brood box. The inner cover went onto it followed by the lid. Then I carefully poured the powdered sugar on the paper into a plastic jar and labeled it. Before collecting the sugar from the next hive I turned the paper over exposing a clean side. I know it was overkill as I'm not testing for anything too small to see with even my tired, old, naked eyes, but it made me feel more scientific.

Then I pulled the plastic tray from the bottom of Hive #2 and repeated the addition of a medium brood super. The sugar from the plastic insert got dumped onto the paper and then funneled into the jar which was then labeled. Hive #4 was the same as Hive #2, but instead of adding a new medium brood box, I put the feeder into the existing second box and then replaced it and the cover and lid on the hive. So far so good, time to go inside and do counts in the coolness of the kitchen.

Just a few mites

For the first count I dumped the contents of jar#1 onto a white plate and, wearing my reading glasses, used a corn cow prong to push the sugar around checking for mites. As I've said before, the mites wiggle their legs when you poke them. I counted five mites in this batch which is just below the recommended threshold for treating. Then I thought, hmm, I bet I could be even more sure of my results if I sifted the sugar with a strainer it would pass through but the mites wouldn't. I neglected to tell Dave that I used his fine kitchen strainer for the sifting, but I did wash it really well in really hot, soapy water. After I was left with just a little sugar, mites, ants, and some debris in the strainer I dumped the strainer contents out onto another plate and still counted five mites. Hive #2, the package, netted no mites at all (Huzzah!). But Cranky Hive #4 had so many mites that I stopped counting at 16. There were probably 18 in there--three times the number of the mites you need to see to warrant treating.

Lots of mites

I spent the next two hours researching what treatment I should use and how many hives I should treat. Opinions amongst beekeepers on this subject are strong and polarizing. I followed up with three very knowledgable, very qualified, very strong local beekeepers, and all three of them have vastly different management strategies for and philosophies about varroa mites. At the end of it all, I decided that my best course of action at this time is to re-queen Hive #4. The bees are overly aggressive, and they are not either varroa resistant or hygienic about the mites. To get those characteristics, I need to change the genetics of my hive--which is what they do at Bee Weaver (where I got most of my bees). So Danny Weaver is coming over on Sunday with a new queen, and we're going to find and replace the current queen. It wasn't an easy choice, but there is no way to eliminate varroa from your hives: if your bees don't have now, in a few weeks they will--at least around here. So I'm going to go with bees bred for hygiene and resistance as a first step. I am sorry that I'll have to commit regicide to do it, but it is for The Greater Good.

Day 44: Asking the Experts

Today I did my weekly hive check, and I found what I expected to find after attending yesterday's Ask a Beekeeper get together put on by the Austin Beekeepers Club. I asked a lot of questions--more than anyone else--and as so often happens when you get information from multiple sources, the answers I got yesterday contradicted what I had already been told by other reputable beekeepers. However I think they info I got yesterday was correct, so tomorrow I have more work to do in the hives. But before I go too far down the he said-he said rabbit hole, here's a quick hive status.

First off, the fourth hive is still very cranky. Okay, I might have squished a couple of bees trying to get the frames out--even with the new medium brood box (yesterday I was told "supers" are for honey, and all boxes for brood, no mater where thy are, are called brood boxes) as the bees were mostly hanging out in the bottom box and it was impossible to get my fingers in or the frames back in without squishing bees. This is the only hive where I had that problem.

I didn't even open hive #5 as it was just installed in the middle of last week.

I only found the queen in hive #3, but I found larvae in all the hives. I also found a very well-built queen cell in hive #3 and I'm not sure what that's about.

Now to what I didn't find: 1) lots of nectar, and 2) a lot of built-out comb. According to the information I got yesterday, these two are related--and they are also related to my stopping feeding. Both of the beekeepers yesterday--and one of them was Lance Wilson, who is Mr. Bee. Seriously. That man has all the cred in the world starting with his Master Beekeeper status. Anyhoo, Lance and the other experienced beekeeper at the get together both said you might have to feed your bees for the entire first year. Lance's rule of thumb is that a hive needs 15 lbs of honey in reserve at all times, and if it is a new hive that is building a lot of wax, it should definitely be fed. I had stopped feeding because I thought the bees had adequate stores--they didn't if they need 15 lbs of honey as that is three deep or five medium frames full and none of my hives has that.

So tomorrow I need to put feeder boxes back in (I have decided I don't like the boardman feeders as they leak into the hive, they mess with the entrance reducers, and they don't hold enough). However I'm also going to be putting a second brood box (medium) on two of the hives tomorrow (the TopBar and the hybrid have plenty of room to expand out and they don't take boxes on top anyway, and I already put a new box on one of them) so I need two medium division feeders. I don't want to put the feeders in the bottom boxes as I would need to lift the top boxes off every time I needed to refill the feeders. Unfortunately I only have one medium feeder so I'm off to Busy Bee in Florence tomorrow for another one or two.

My last conundrum with my hives is that it's time, according to Lance, to do a varroa mite check. I like the way he does his (shake powdered sugar into the hive, collect it on a piece of paper under the screened bottom board and look through it for mites). But only two of my hives have screened bottom boards so I either need to get screened bottom boards tomorrow for the others or don't check them that way. The other way I know of includes putting bees into a jar with powdered sugar, shaking them, dumping them on paper, and then counting mites that fall off the bees. I am not thrilled with figuring out how to get the bees into the jar in the first place, and that test isn't as accurate.

Once you've dusted the bees with powdered sugar, it causes the mite to fall off of them. The mites look like black specs in the powdered sugar, but if you poke them they wriggle their legs--unlike real specs. If you have more than six mites in your sugar when you do this test you need to treat for mites as you probably have more than a 2% mite load because of all the capped brood. Bee Weaver advertises that they haven't had to treat for varroa in many years (and as they are the source of my bees, I shouldn't have to treat either, bee genetics being what they are). Lance says he treats 2-3 times per year (based on need--the results of his tests) and commercial beekeepers treat four times.

So my current bee philosophy is continue feeding and check for mites. Tomorrow is the day to finish implementing it. My even more current philosophy is that I'm tired and it's time for bed!