A Happy Beekeeping New Year

Well as you can tell, I have not been a consistent blogger in 2008, only one entry. Well I’ll use the excuse that I was too busy keeping my bees! Or should I say… building them.

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Left: A wild swarm of bees we removed from a picknic table at the local conservation area. As you can see, this swarm was very small.

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As you can see from previous entries, I started 2008 with only 3 surviving hives, out of 10 strong wintered over hives from the previous fall. With much effort I built those three hives into 8, while harvesting 60 lbs of honey, and rearing about 20 queens. Some of those queens failed, some are now reining in my hives, and some of the better queens were sold to fellow local beekeepers here on the cape. We had a great time with the bees this year.

Right: A swam of bees we removed from a storage shed at the Otis Air Force Base.

The bees are sure amazing architects!

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Some of our adventures included gathering two wild swarms. One was found in the middle of a local conservation area, attached to the corner of a metal picnic table. The site was right against one of the capes largest ponds in the middle of nowhere. The swarm was probably two miles from the nearest beehive. I think the swarm was from a wild hive.

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Left: A close up of the swarm, now acutaly an established colony. Where is the queen? We did find her (by luck) and put her into the new hive. Click on the photo for an enlarged view

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The other swarm was gathered from a storage shed at the Otis Air Force Station, right next to the airstrip. The swarm had established itself inside the storage shed, accessing their new home through rusted holes in the siding. Comb had been built attached to various packs and boxes which contained who knows what. We spent a good part of a day removing items to access the bees. They had built beautiful curved comb attached to the metal siding of the shed, and everything else. In a way, it was a shame to remove them. It took us a while to cut out the comb and attached bees and install them into a hive. What a challenge. Bees were flying and honey was dripping everywhere. We neglected to bring a bucket to put the extra honeycomb in, so we used an empty rifle locker. Bees were stuck to everything!

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Right: My first attempt a queen rearing this spring. See how small the cells are. I destroyed all these cells and started over. These cells were dry grafted. On my next attempt I primed the cups and got a 85% acceptance rate.
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The biggest challenge I had this year was keeping the bees in the mating nucs. I had about a 60 percent success rate with keeping the bees in a nuc. Some would abscond, or return to the parent colony, or migrate to a neighboring nuc. I had two nice queens, and established colonies abscond due to small hive beetle infestation. As we discussed at the bee association, this pest is increasingly becoming a problem. I believe my beetle problem came with the packages of bees I received from Georgia two years ago. They have increased unchecked for two years, and I saw many of them in my hives.

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Left: Removed queen pupa. These queens are all the same age. You can see how the cell size effects the development of the queen. Larger queen cells mean larger queens. Larger queens mean more overies and better laying.

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I was just thinking today that the 2009 beekeeping season has already started. The work we do in preparing the hives for winter will have a great effect on the condition of the bees this spring. This year some of the hives have been wrapped in black building paper. It is my understanding that the wrapped hives will be about 5 degrees warmer than the unwapped hives. We will see how this works out.

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Right: This is what it is all about.... The beekeepers reward.... Honey right from the extractor. We harvested 60 lbs this year.

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My new years resolution is to maintain this blog. If you read this, post a message. Let me know what you think.

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Right: My friend, and fellow beekeeper, Gene and I on extraction day!

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And have a happy new year!

The queens are coming the queens are coming

Well this is my first blog entry of 2008.

It has been a very difficult beekeeping season for me. We started the winter with nine very strong colonies with young queens. By May we were down to four. That’s over a 50% loss of hives. Of those four, one is very weak, two are average, and one is extremely strong.



Left: A dead hive. This hive was lead by one of the queens I raised last summer. Most of the time you can never figure out what happened. This hive stayed in the bottom box and never moved up to the upper box where there was plenty of honey and candy feed. They starved to death inches away from abundant supply
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That’s beekeeping. Everything was picture perfect in the fall, by spring the story changes.

Of the six queens I raised last year, only two have survived. One survivor was given to a local beekeeper last fall. The other is leading the week colony in our bee yard.


Left: A cell builder hive with two cell cup holding frames installed. These bees do not have a queen, and will quickly turn the grafted cells into queen cells.
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The honey flow is occurring here on Cape Cod, it started about two weeks ago. The bees are quickly storing nectar in the cells, ripening it into honey.

I have been watching my colonies closely for signs of swarming. So far all I have seen are queen cell cups, the cells that queens could be raised in. There have been no attempts by the bees to swarm this year. I have found that if you stay ahead of the bees, and provide them with young queens (introduced in the fall), and plenty of room ahead of schedule, they stay contented in their hives.

I have had no signs of disease or mites in any of the colonies this spring. That’s encouraging. You can see from past blog posts that last year we battled the worst infestation of verroa mites I have ever seen. It is interesting to note that the worst infested hives last year are the strongest this year, even though all the hives were treated.

Right: A frame of young eggs and larva from my strong hive. These young female larva are the offspring from my strongest queen. I want more queens like her.
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With swarm season on, we received our first call to collect a wild swarm of bees from the local conservation area. The swarm was hanging off of the corner of a picnic table. You can’t find an easier location than that!. We just put a hive under them, and they dropped right in. This will help make up our winter losses.

Right: Some of the 75 grafted queen cups I made today. They were installed into the cell builder shortly after this picture was taken.
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With swarm season on, it is time to try my hand at queen rearing again.
Last week I set up a “Cell Builder” hive. A cell builder is a queenless hive which contains emerging bees, nurse bees, brood, pollen, and nectar. In other words a strong young hive which does not have a queen. Since they do not have a queen, and no young larva to use to raise a queen, they will be primed for my grafts. Grafting is a method of queen rearing where you transfer four day old larva into special cells. These special cells are then built into queen cells by the bees.

Today I inspected all the hives, took young larva from my strong hive, and graft 75 cells cups. These cell cups were then installed into the cell building hive. I’m sure the bees were happy to see the young larva, and have the opportunity to raise some queens.



Left: A closeup of the grafts. You can see the small 4 day old larva floating on a layer of royal jelly.









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In 24 hours I can look to see how many of the larva they accepted, and decided to grow into queens.