beekeeping: learning the hard way

Over the past month-plus, I've watched my hives with a wary eye.  They aren't doing well.  The langstroth hive that I split off from my top bar isn't nearly as active as it should be (read: a cloud of bees orienting themselves to the hive location at least once a week), and while there are eggs and both capped and uncapped brood, it's just not quite as active as it should be.  I will keep feeding them and watching.

My top bar hive, however, is in collapse.  When I last wrote about my hives, I knew that they'd swarmed and hoped to see evidence of a new queen.  I did not.  I saw flies hanging around, and when I opened the top to inspect two weeks ago, there was a small ant colony making itself at home.  A strong hive will keep out robbing bees from other colonies (there were lots of bees in this hive and around it that didn't look like mine), ants, and small hive beetles, the bane of southern bee keeping.  Even worse, I didn't see any new brood.  The hive was queenless.  I hoped that I'd caught it in time, and moved a frame with a queen cell and lots of brood from my langstroth hive over to this top bar hive.  I watched the bees tend to the queen larvae, checked the window every day to watch its progress.  It was capped, and one day, it was open.  The queen had emerged.  Unfortunately, I also noticed larvae for something else crawling around, and the honeycombs seemed to change color.

On Sunday, I got up early, suited up, and got ready for inspection.  As always, I began my inspection from the back.  This was the first frame of honey that I pulled:

 

Isn't it beautiful?  Golden capped honey, super straight comb.  I set it aside and pulled out four more just like it.  One comb fell off of the starter strip (it was a hot day, and the wax begins to melt), so I put it into my harvesting bowl to take in.  I harvested nearly 5 cups of honey from the comb that fell.  Forager bees were actively putting away honey and pollen, and younger bees were building new comb.  As I worked my way to the front, however, it was very clear that the hive was in distress.  The combs were very dark and liquidy looking.  The entire front of the hive was in collapse.

The larvae that I'd seen late last week were everywhere.  Bees were robbing the fermenting honey, and even though the queen cell had been opened, the comb was getting slimy and there was no evidence of new activity.  I took out the worst of the infected combs and put them in my chicken yard for the girls to eat:

You can see how dark the comb is- the comb closest to the wood is still capped, but those white spots on the dark comb are small hive beetle larvae.  I was devastated, even  though I knew a friend and neighbor beekeeper had lost her hives the same way, and there's little to do to combat these beetles besides having a really strong hive.

Grief aside, I have an action plan.  I'm going to take the combs that are still good and move them into my deep-bodied langstroth hive for those bees to eat and use.  There are two top bar combs in that hive already, and if I add four more, the bees there should be able to build up their colony.  It's my hope that next year the queen will lay eggs on the top bar combs and I can move them and their nurse bees over to repopulate my top bar hive. 

But what about the bees currently in the top bar?  A bee that is "born" in the spring and summer only lives for 6-7 weeks.  They emerge, clean their cells, tend the queen, tend new bees ("nurse" bees), build new comb, the finally go out to forage.  With my colony, all that's left are a few worker bees and the foragers.  They will continue to try to do their work until they die.  I'm less worried about them, and hoping that some of the bees will remain with the combs I move into the langstroth hive and live a while longer.
  

early summer beekeeping

A few weeks ago, when it was still properly spring (temps are in the 90s every day now, with humidity to match- I call that summer), a neighbor asked for my help in installing a nuc  (which is a miniature bee colony with 4-5 frames filled with worker bees, a laying queen, and capped brood) into his new hive.  Installing a nuc (pronounce it "nuke") is easy business- transferring the frame from one box into another, whereas installing a package of bees involved dumping thousands of bees from a screened box into your hive, hoping both that they accept their queen, who is pretty new to them, and that they stay put.  I was glad to help.  Here's Jim, putting his frames into place, late in the evening.

We waited several weeks and did a hive inspection this weekend.  Lots of honey being put up, lots of new comb drawing going on, and lots of crazy comb building, too.

We scraped off the burr comb and extra comb they were building, top-bar style, off of the queen excluder and put it on his wall for the bees to clean up (the pieces you see here were full of uncapped honey, and the bees are  clustered around a spot where we'd dripped quite a bit of honey).  He has a pretty little hive and his bees seem happy!  In the photo below, you see the bees at their entrance and his mason-jar feeder.  They're slurping the syrup down!

This weekend I did some hive maintenance and landscaping work of my own.  My spring has been so busy that my garden is really overgrown.  The area around the hive had been mulched with pine straw when the top bar hive was in this spot, but weeds and baby coneflower volunteers (from the echinacea in the right foreground) were taking over.  I pulled the weeds (and about 100 bearded iris), dug up the baby echinaceas, laid down a thick layer of newspaper, and mulched the whole area with pea gravel so that it would be easier for me to work with.  I left a few of the baby plants around the hive, and moved a lavender to the far left borer of the pea gravel, hoping it would both be happy in this spot and feed the bees.

 Later this week I'll do another inspection of this hive and my top bar hive, but my goal this weekend was to get the area back into workable/presentable condition.  My top bar hive has a window, which is a very handy way to check on the bees without opening up the hive.  I'd noticed fewer bees lately, and this morning's check confirmed my suspicions. 

Can you see the queen cup?  The long open tube in the center honeycomb?  Well, there are about five of those closer to the hive entrance.  I believe that my hive has swarmed.  Again.  Gary saw a thundercloud of bees barreling down the driveway, over the gate, and up into the top of a neighbor's giant oak tree the beginning of May.  I knew that the split we'd done in April wasn't enough, but I'd hoped that the swarm he watched would be the end of it.  Seems not.  At this point, I'll go into the hive, check for eggs and brood, and remove a few bars to give the bees more room (and harvest some spring honey) and hope that they won't keep swarming.  In a langstroth hive you just put more supers on top of the hive to prevent swarming, but part of the charm (?) of a top bar hive is that it is good for increasing the bee population.  As I myself have witnessed.  But my mentor tells me that only a healthy hive with a growing population will swarm, so we must be doing well!

spring business

Good morning! I am so tickled to be here with you and share a little about what's going on in my garden.  Memphis has a really warm climate (we've recently been moved to zone 8a) and spring usually comes early for us- the end of February and first of March brings daffodils, hyacinths, and sees hellebores taking their exit.  Even after our fierce winter (we usually see lows in the 20s and were stunned by some of our single-digit lows this year), spring has been lovely.  The tulips and daffs are almost over, azaleas in full swing, and the dogwoods have another week or so before they say goodbye.  Roses are budding up and my asparagus is sending out the first tender spears.

I have been doing a lot of prep work for the other major part of my garden this spring- I got a new beehive!  I have had a top bar hive for two years.  This is the top bar hive, to the right, in mid-summer.

Originally, I bought a nuc (a starter hive with a queen, workers, and eggs) and was sad to see it die of starvation in March of 2013.  Mere weeks after I cleared the hive, some friends alerted me to a swarm of bees clinging to a weeping willow tree in their neighborhood.  One morning my husband and I donned veils, grabbed some sugar water spray, a bee brush, and a modified banker's box and captured our first swarm.  The bees were happy and gentle and increased exponentially in numbers- so much so that I wondered how I'd work with them.  One morning in May, I stepped outside the back door and saw another swarm in the very top of my fig tree! I called my bee mentor and we retrieved it (with a lot of work) and it went to his bee farm. 

A swarm is the bee colony's way of dividing- only very healthy colonies with a good laying queen will swarm- essentially, they outgrow their space.  The queen lays eggs and when the worker bees realize that they're close to running out of room, they build a specially shaped cup, called a queen  cup, in preparation for a swarm.  There are usually several, queen cups.  When the queen lays the egg into the cup, the workers feed the developing bee royal jelly to facilitate her growth from a regular worker bee into a queen.  Once the cell is capped, the queen will leave with up to 60% of her colony, looking for a new home.  A swarm is generally a gentle thing- all of the bees are clustered around the queen, keeping her warm (90 degrees is their optimal temperature), but sometime they land in inconvenient places, like the top of the fig tree!

After capturing two swarms in 2013, I wanted to avoid that this spring.  I bought a langstroth hive from my bee mentor and we began the process of checking for queen cells, pulling frames of brood and eggs, and moving them into the new hive body.  We moved the old hive to a new location, hoping to confuse the foraging bees so that they'd go to the new hive, and made sure to leave plenty of capped brood in the old hive so that the colony would continue to thrive.  In this photo, we've pulled the frames from the top bar hive and are checking for brood (the baby bees and eggs).  You can see that the comb is built off of wooden bars (and plastic supports, because sometimes in hot weather the comb has softened and fallen off of the bar- it is a big mess when that happens).

This is my new langstroth hive.  The bottom two boxes hold the same sort of triangular-shaped pieces of comb from the top bar hive.  The upper box holds smaller square frames that are full of foundation and drawn out comb.  When I checked them last week, they were beginning to store honey in the upper box.  The natural colored wood holds a large feeder.  As the colony grows, I'll add more boxes for honey storage.  I still need to paint them, too.

I felt very pleased with how the transition went and both hives seemed to be active.  Just as I was congratulating myself on having avoided a swarm, I looked up into the antique rose bush outside my back door and saw this:

A swarm!  Early on Monday morning I was ready to start my day in the studio when I noticed bees flying into the rose bush.  It is not yet blooming, and the camellia that grows with it has finished up for the year, so I was perplexed until it dawned on me what had happened.  I was going to have to capture a swarm anyway!  Happily, these bees are not my bees but a swarm from either a neighboring hive or a feral colony.  They are a different type- more yellow with more highly defined stripes than my two colonies.  Again, I called my mentor, and he came to get them.  This removal was easy, especially in comparison to the swarm in the top of my fig tree.  Several days later, I looked up again and there's another swarm.  Very same spot.  Pheromones?  Who knows.

At this point, I am preparing myself for another swarm and getting a bee box ready so that I can get them to someone else who can rehome them.  Tis the season for bees.

If you should be so lucky to see a swarm of bees, don't panic!  Look up your local beekeepers association and see if they have a list of beekeepers who will come to rescue the swarm (and you!).

Thanks for reading about my spring bee adventures.  I'll see you here again next Tuesday with more news from my Memphis garden!

late october in the garden

snow is in the forecast for tomorrow. we keep having false alarms in the frost department, but we felt it was time to harvest our tomatillos. did you know that we didn't think we planted tomatillos this year? we were sent tomatillo seeds instead of the husk cherry seeds that we ordered. i'm not complaining. more salsa verde in our very near future. we also pulled out our matt's wild cherry tomato plants (finally!) and have an entire colander full of various shades of cherry tomatoes sitting by the sink.



it's time to plant garlic. many of you wrote to tell me that you are a bit intimidated by garlic. don't be! it's super easy to grow and doesn't have many pests. just simply break the bulb into cloves. don't peel them.



and plant them with the tip pointing up. i've read different opinions about spacing. 4-6 inches sounds good to me. at the farm, we plant them 8 inches apart because we have the room to do so. push the entire clove into the soil and cover. pat the soil down when you finish planting.

if you have a chance, enhance your soil with some aged manure or compost. at the farm, we add cheep cheep, which is supposed to be good for any plants in the allium family.



our hives are wrapped and ready for winter weather should it truly arrive tomorrow. mouse guards are in place, too. we're all set whether it snows or not.