A load of hay

"A swarm of bees in May is worth a load of Hay.
A swarm of bees in June is worth a silver spoon.
A swarm of bees in July ain’t worth a fly."

This is an old beekeepers saying. Apparently in the 1700’s a load of hay was worth more than a silver spoon!

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Michael near a swarm of bees we had in 2002
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The saying means that if you capture a swarm of bees in May, chances are that they will produce enough honey to survive the winter, and maybe some extra for you.

If you were to capture a swarm of bees in June, they would probably produce enough to survive the winter.

If you captured a swarm of bees in July, chances were that they would not have enough time to produce enough numbers, comb, and honey stores to survive the winter.

The main honey flow is on here on Cape Cod. Our honey flow starts the end of May and continues to the start of August. That gives the bees two months to produce enough honey to keep them and me happy through the winter months.

There is a small honey flow in the fall of most years, but I allow them to keep that honey for themselves.

All of the hives were inspected over the long holiday weekend. There were no swarm cells (queen cells) found in the hives. Honey supers (boxes) were added to the strong colonies that will need more space to expand into.
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With any luck next week’s inspections will show signs of nectar storage in these boxes.
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A closer look at the 2002 swarm
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I place a ross round honey comb super on each of my strong hives. These are always a favorite at our local fair and sell out quickly.
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The weather has been beautiful here on the cape this week. Low 80’s with no humidity! Of course you know the saying on Cape Cod.

“If you don’t like the weather…. Just wait a minute”

Yesterday I received a call from an fellow beekeeper in a neighboring town. Apparently his one hive swarmed. He had started the hive last year, and added his honey supers early thinking this would be enough to keep them. Unfortunately for the next month second and third year hives need to be intensely managed in order to insure that swarming preparations are not begun by the bees. It is their natural tendency to reproduce, and swarming is the process through which a hive of bees reproduces.


The bees will decide to produce one or more queens. Once the queen cells are capped, half the hive along with the old queen leave the colony and find a new home.

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A ross round honey comb super ready to be placed on the hive
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It is quite the amazing thing to see. Tens of thousands of bees run out of the hive and take flight in a cyclone of activity. It is like being in a dirt devil of bees. Unfortunately for the beekeeper, he has just lost his honey producing work force, and the existing hive is left with an unpredictable future. If all goes well a new virgin queen will emerge within a weeks time.
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Then within another 7 days she will take several mating flights, and if she is successful or does not get eaten by a bird, or does not get lost, in another few days she will start laying eggs again.
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The end result is a loss of ten thousand worker bees, the old queen, a months worth of egg production, and this years honey crop. It will take the bees the rest of the summer to replace what it has lost.
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With that said… Watch your bees carefully this time of year, you can rest in the winter

Rain Rain Go Away

The weather continues to be unseasonably cold here on the Cape. We just got through four days of cold rainy weather. Not good for bee flight.

A hive top feeder with hardened sugar syrup
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A quick inspection before the poor weather showed that one of my hives started in 2006 is extremely weak. It is probably down to two frames of bees. They came through the winter nicely, but have dwindled the past three weeks. I ordered a new queen from Pennsylvania. The bee breeders comment to me was “It has been a very strange spring” I don’t know what that means from their end, but I will agree it has been strange here as well.



I found a small hive beetle. They like to feed from the sugar syrup.


One of my desires is to produce comb honey this year. I’m planning to use the new queen I ordered to create an “artificial swarm” with one of my strong hives. This hive I will use to produce the Ross Round Comb Honey. I will expand on comb honey production in next weeks post. The old queen and some of the bees from the hive will be used to strengthen the week colony. The weak colony queen will “go missing” to put it nicely. She is only a year old, but showed a poor pattern of laying. Perhaps she did not mate well, or perhaps she has been injured some how. This particular hive was slow to increase last year and did not produce any honey.
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A honey bee collecting water from my bird bath
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I have been disappointed with the queens I have been receiving from Georgia the past few years. They seem to be lasting only a year or so. One of my strongest hives has a northern queen I received in 2005. She has produced for two whole seasons, and again this year is one of my strongest and most gentle hives. All the rest of my queens are one year or younger.

This is one of the reasons I hope to raise my own queens this year. With any luck I will be able to reproduce the gentle queen from Pennsylvania.

I opened one hive to find a dead hive beetle on the outside of the hive-top feeder. Not something I wanted to see. I’ve been seeing more of them than I have in previous years. I will have to do some research on how to deal with them if they become a problem. I’ve never had to deal with them in the past.


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Bees collecting water .
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With the end of the rain there is an abundance of activity around the hives. There has been a lot of water collection. The bees will use water to liquefy crystallized honey, or any hardened sugar candy left in the hives. It is good to provide water for the bees. They are going to find it someplace.


Better for them to collect water in my yard than at my neighbors pool!

There’s No Place Like Home

Paul and Clare picked up 106 packages of bees for our club last week. Thanks Paul and Clare.

Our packages of bees finally arrived this week. Their delivery had been delayed due to all the poor weather down south this spring. I even heard a story about a bee breeder who lost 100 hives to a tornado….

A queen cage placed in a homemade hanger

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The installation of a package of bees can be intimidating if you have never done it before. The installation (or housing) of a package of bees consists of removing the thin wood cover, from the package, to exposed the queen cage and the can of sugar water.

Prior to removing the queen cage the package of 4,000 bees is slammed on the ground to dislodge the bees from the top of the package so the queen cage and the can of feed can be removed.

As it’s name implies the queen cage contains the queen bee. At this point

she can be inspected to make sure she is alive and healthy.

There is candy in one end of the cage which separates the queen from the opening in the cage. The queen cage is suspended between the frames of comb with the opening facing upward.

The plan is that once the bees eat through the candy the queen is released in the hive. This is a kind of time-delay so to speak.

It will take about three to four days for the queen to be freed from the cage. By this time the bees have accepted this new place as their home, and stay.

Shaking a package of bees into the hive

Once the queen is suspended in the hive the bees are shaken out of the package onto the queen and into the hive. Of course most of the bees fall into the box, but many fly around. At times the air can bee filled with buzzing bees. Although intimidating, this is the time where the bees are most docile. The bees have no home to protect, so they are not aggressive. Once the top feeder and the cover are installed, some bees will find the entrance to the hive, expose their sent glands and start fanning. This is the signal which allows all the flying bees to find their new home.

But watch out. In about a half an hour the bees start to become protective of their new home. My friend Gene gets stung every year at this point in the installation.

He gets stung. But I don’t.

It was interesting to note that last week none of the five hives were working the fruit trees. But within hours of the installation, the new bees were working them. This is why crop pollination is so important.

There is no guarantee that the established hives will work any specific crop, but the hive just brought to a location will work the nearest crop it can find.

My friend Gene taking his bees to their new home. He got stung earlier that afternoon.

It's become a yearly tradition.