Catching the Queen

A New Spring Nuc

Monday we picked up a nuc, supposedly from upstate NY. It was supposed to be full of brood, from eggs to larvae and full of bees and honey and pollen. It was full of bees but no brood that I could see. And no honey and pollen. It looked like the beekeeper pored a package of bees on 5 frames of comb and added a queen, let them stay for a week or two and called it a nuc. Whatever. We put the 5 frames in our dead hive with PLENTY of honey and a pollen paddy. We cleaned out the brood box by scraping and cleaning out all the propolis and wax. There was no sign of disease so the bees should be happy in this brood box and then we added 5 more frames of honey and pollen as well as a 3/4 full of honey medium on top of that brood box. I threw a lilac flower in front of the entrance and opened the hive the day after we placed them in there. The same day they were bringing in pollen from the neighborhood. Just in case, I think I’ll re-queen both hives next week with Italian Hybrid Resistant queens like the ones I got last year. They lived through the winter anyway. :)

April looks like June

As you can see from my previous photos, Springstarted early this year. We had crocuses by the 2nd week in February and bees were flying all through February. Now it is the 3rd week of April and all the May flowers have bloomed and are just about spent. My live hive has brood and a few queen cells. I reversed the brood boxes in hopes that they don’t swarm. I didn’t see the queen when we opened the hive to check it last Sunday but the population is large and they look very healthy. The frames were filled with a lot of nectar. I had to remove some burr brood comb that was crammed in between some boxes and frames. I didn’t see any young larvae, only week old or more.  Maybe we will have to requeen. We pick up a nucleus hive on Monday to replace the hive that died in January. Here’s hoping there will be nectar for them in June and July. If this weather keeps up who knows.

Science: Study Finds that Bees Can Have Tiny Little Personalities(via @Jezebel)

Oh brother! We lost our big hive.

We lost one of our hives in mid January, a huge well populated and aggressive hive but one that we never re-queened. One day they were flying all around in 60 degree weather and eating their honey and pollen paddies and then over the next week they died off over a period of 7 or 8 days., many leaving the hive and falling to the ground outside but most just falling to the bottom. There must have been about 20,000 bees or more dead in a pile with the queen right in the middle and a bunch of drones in there as well. Sheesh.  I can’t figure out what happened. There was a fair amount of capped brood for the time of year and a full medium of honey. There were no signs of disease that were visually apparent. There were not a lot of mites either. Maybe they couldn’t deal with the extreme fluctuations in temperature that week. It was 60 degrees one day and 14 degrees the next night. But I would have thought with the large population they would have been able to deal with the weather. But they were from Georgia and we never were able to re-queen that hive. It’s odd that they started leaving the hive and piling up outside the entrance.

The dead hive is on the left with the bees piled outside the entrance.

A view from underneath the hive. I took a flash photo up through the screened bottom board. As you can see, it’s carpeted with dead bees.

Our bees were really hungry

Both our hives stored a full medium of honey in a super above the brood boxes but almost no honey in the brood boxes themselves.

WHY?

We don’t know. But we’re feeding them sugar syrup so they can catch up. We gave them each a gallon of syrup on Sunday at 5:30 PM and by Monday at 10:15AM the gallon was empty. So we’ll be feeding them like crazy until they stop taking it.

Like I said since April: We are determined to keep our bees alive through the winter.

We added a little Honey Be Healthy to the syrup but think we’ll switch to lemon grass oil or some essential oil that they like.

Full:

Empty 17 hours later:

I am waiting patiently

The formic acid worked very well on my hives. Yay! We took the old remnants out two weeks ago. The weather has been so warm that the bees haven’t even chased the drones out of the hives yet. The Petwo hive is still booming. The Kongo hive is weaker. The nuc is doing great. So I think I will merge the nuc with the Kongo hive before it gets too late. But I am waiting patiently for it to stop raining, which it’s been doing for the past week. :/

So Irene came and went

…and nothing happened. :/ But I guess that’s good. :)

Irene is coming!

Hurricane Irene is on her way up the east coast headed straight for our beehives! Luckily our part of Brooklyn is not in a flood zone. But just to make sure a disaster doesn’t happen we strapped the supers together and snuggled the Nuc between them. They should be OK here against the house and under the pine tree.

The rest of us are all just hanging out at home waiting for Irene to arrive sometime late tonight. We can’t go anywhere since the city shutdown the subway system at noon today.

Hang in there bees.

I am sorry world, I want to keep my bees alive.

We can’t be totally natural in an unnatural world. We have decided to treat our hives with Mite-Away. The powdered sugar method of control is not working and as we said at the beginning of this season, WE ARE DETERMINED TO KEEP OUR BEES ALIVE OVER THIS COMING WINTER.

From all I’ve read and heard now from many sources, powdered sugar sprinkled on the bees to force them to groom themselves and thus remove the mites in the process does not work unless you do it every week.

It would be impossible for my hives to thrive if I opened them every week, pulled out every frame, applied the sugar and then closed them back up. IMPOSSIBLE. I know I would be doing more harm than good.

So I think Mite-Away may be the next best thing to a non-pesticide solution. It’s new and not a pesticide. It’s an acid. One that supposedly does not taint the honey or harm the bees. It also, I believe, can be used to treat tracheal mites and small hive beetle.

We’re going to try it. We’ve added an eke onto each hive (photo below) in order to be able to lay the Mite-Away patties on top of the top most brood box with out squishing them between the supers. We’ll remove them after 7 days.

Good luck bees, good bye mites.