Day 1116: Bees? Really?

Just because I haven't written about my bees in awhile doesn't mean I don't love them or look in on them from time to time. I do both love and look at them--though some would say I don't look in as often as I should. That's as may be. There have been disasters and heartache aplenty these past couple of years and only two of the original hives remain. There has also been a lot of learning, some honey, some wax, more than a few stings, and a feeling of bone-deep contentment from watching the bees dance in the sunlight and socialize on the lily pads in the pond. 

The past couple of weeks have been more than usually interesting in the bee yard so it’s worth taking up pen (keyboard) to preserve them for what they taught me. It’s a long story. 

A couple of weeks ago I went out with Jessie to do a little on-camera hive inspection and bee talk for a 10-minute presentation I had signed up to give. Fortunately we were both in full bee suits and boots as my top bar hive went completely non-linear when I opened it up. I am embedding the edited (there was much more footage and jiggly-wiggly camera action as Jessie gave me her camera and danced away from the hive but it got cut down for my presentation) video here:

 

I should mention that the bee suit gloves were too unwieldy for Jessie to wear and operate the camera so she was only wearing blue nitrile gloves. When the bees started swarming her camera and hands she had to get out of there quick. She did not get stung.

We went back to the house and waited several minutes for the bees who had followed us to thin out so we could go into the garage and from there to the house. When I got my suit off Jessie took a picture of the bee sting on my neck. If you look closely you can see the stinger still in it:

I immediately posted the following on the Austin Beekeepers Facebook page and got more than 50 responses from the wonderful local beekeepers:

Thanks to the lovely people in the group, I was able to get a marked Russian queen from someone who had an extra, and another beekeeper named Steve (a Bee Whisperer even!) offered to come out to help me find the old queen, send her to her eternal rest, and requeen the hive. The best laid plans... 

When we went into the hive there was no sign of a queen and no new larvae, but there were two mature queen cells that were just about ready to hatch. It was also a pretty big hive and could easily be split—which would also keep the bees busy so they didn’t have extra time on their claws (the real technical term) to go around stinging the neighbors. Problem was I didn’t have another top bar hive, and I’d also decided top bar hives weren’t for me. So what to do? 

Bit of background on hive types here: When I first got the top bar hive I naively thought I could easily move frames from it to another type of hive called a Langstroth (Lang) because I had had the top bar hive made with 19 inch-long bars like the Lang hives have. However I found out that the same bar length isn’t enough to make the frames compatible between the hives: The top bar box is deeper than even a deep Lang box so the comb was too tall, and the bars in a top bar hive fit together tightly so there is no room for the bees to go between them to move up and down the hive (top bars are the ranch homes of the bee world—one story only). Explaining why I couldn’t just leave a small gap between the bars so the bees could move around would require an explanation of bee space--and this post is long enough without--so just trust me when I say top-bar bars in a Lang hive is not an optimal configuration.

Back to my story. Though you can’t just move top-bar bars into a Lang box, you *can* cut a little bit off the bottom of the comb on the top-bar bars (there was neither brood, nor honey, nor pollen in the cells) and then move them over to a Lang hive if you intersperse a few empty Lang frames between them so the bees can get up and down. And thus it was that one top-bar hive became two Lang hives. One of them got the queen cells and a bit more brood, the other got the new queen and her attendants in her queen cage. It was a very exciting process and I wish I could have filmed it, but I don’t think Jessie would have been up to doing it again. When we were finished Steve instructed me to check on the hive with the new queen in a couple of days to make sure the bees chewed out the sugar plug in the bottom of the queen cage releasing her, and to check the one with the hatching queens in a couple of weeks for larvae. 

Fast forward two days. I go into the hive with the new queen and the queen cage is down on the bottom of the hive instead of suspended between the frames as we had left it. The queen and her attendants are still in it. I put it back up hanging with the sugar plug down between two frames and go on my merry way. 

Zipping ahead to today. It’s been a week and a day since I split the top-bar hive and fed all the bees. Two of my current hives are from new nucs (nuclear hives) so I wanted to make sure they were well-fed. I did a full inspection on the hives from nucs and they are doing fine. Brood, plenty of nectar cells, and pollen. Then I opened the hive with the new queen. The cage was suspended between the frames… and the queen and her attendants were still in it! Not only were they in it, but the bees had created new comb from under the sugar plug on the bottom of the cage. THAT was a weird one! I very much wanted to photograph it with the bees in it, but the stupid iPhone won't work with thick gloves (capacitance) and there was no way I was taking my gloves off with them! Here's a photo I took back in the house. The wax on the bottom looks a bit smooshed from being carried around, but you get the idea:

So I took the cage out, pried open the mesh on the side and went to gently shake the queen into the hive… and she flew away. WTH?!? At least she’s marked and this year’s color is white so she was really easy to see as she flew off. 

Not knowing what else to do, I put the top back on the hive and started carrying my tools back to the room in the well house where I keep them. Because I was using my new beekeeper stool (a gift from Steve the BW) and my tool/frame box, I had to make two trips. I’m glad I did because when I came back for the second trip I saw the queen fly gracefully into the hive (that white dot is BIG). 

I did go ahead and peek into the hive with the queen cells and both of them were gone so there is probably at least one new queen in that hive. The bees were still quite cranky, however, so I quickly shut them back up and called it a day. I didn’t get to the last hive, but I fed it and put a new box on it the last time I was in it, and I did see the queen and she was fat and healthy-looking (with a big green dot) so I’m not concerned about them right now. 

 And that what’s happening in the bee yard today!