Aug 11, 2012

Lost one of my hives today!

I guess when the hive got robbed several weeks ago, it put too big of a stain on the colony.

When I opened the hive today there were just a hand full of bees and most of the frames were filled with wax moths!

I disassembled the hive and got rid of all the wax foundations.

I still have one strong hive left. I've been feeding it syrup and the brood seems healthy.

Hopefully it will winter well.

July 27, 2012

July 25-27, 2012

Wed around noon.

Since I was going to go to the York County Bee Assoc meeting tomorrow, I thought I'd checkout my hives. If I see any problems, I could ask the experts at the meeting. Both hives had plenty of honey stored and both were a little light on brood. But, since it been really warm and nectar isn't as plentiful, I didn't really see any problems.

Here some shots of the honey stored in one of my hives:

Here's are some shots of the brood:

Wed around 4pm.

I noticed a lot of bees flying around my house. More then usually. I went down to checkout the hives again and found bees all over the one hive. I thought, oh no they were getting ready to swarm even though they had swarmed earlier in the season.

What the heck is going on?

Well, the next day I went to the bee meeting and took along my pictures and video along to see if anyone knew what was happening. I got my answer real quick. My hive had been robbed!! Robbing is when bees from outside your colony go into a hive, open up all the caps and steal the honey. In a matter of hours, all my honey was gone! It is amazing how fast the bees can work. My other hive sitting 5 feet away wasn't touched!

According to the guys at the meeting, if I had know what was happening, I could have stopped the robbing by blocking the entrance and thereby making it easier for my bees to defend their hive.

Oh well, now I know!

Here are those same frames as above minus the honey:

June 28, 2012

It's honey time!!!

After all the work we put into keeping bees, we finally got some payback.

We decided to make the honey extraction a group effort, so we got several of our local bee keepers together. This included my current neighbors Lee and Diann and my old neighbor Joe. Oh, we also had Diann's granddaughter Sara to make sure we did things correctly.

Since none of us had previous experience extracting honey, everything was a learning process. The first thing was....how to uncap the honey frames. We did have use of the clubs heated uncapping knife, but really didn't want to get into processing the wax cappings. Instead, we tried two different ways to do the uncapping. The first method was to use a heat gun to melt the caps. This worked pretty well with little mess. The other method we used was scratching the caps open with a uncapping fork. This worked faster then the heat gun, but put a lot more wax in the extracted honey.

Here are some shots of Lee and Joe using the heat gun method.

We found out very quickly that using a handcrank extractor is a lot of work!!

Our total processing for the day was two supers of Joe's and one super of mine.

I think we were all glad we didn't have more supers to process since we were only able to include two frames at a time in the extractor.

Here's a shot of Lee cranking and Joe holding down the extractor.

After cranking for several minutes, we would remove the frames and inspect them to make sure most of the honey was extracted. We then flipped the frames and extracted the other side.

Another shot of Lee and Joe using the heat gun.

When we finally got all the honey extracted, Joe had 3 to 4 gallons and I had around 2. We filtered the honey thru a screened mesh when it was drained out of the extractor and then ran it thru a meshed nylon bag that is normally used in wine making. I then used a ladel to fill my jars. Here's are some shots of my bottled honey.

This is a short video showing the amount of work required to run the handcrank extractor.



One final note. After extracting the honey out of the frames, you never really get all the honey. This could make storing the supers for next year very messy. To do the final cleanup, we let the bees do the all the work. I placed my extracted honey super outside near the bees and in one day they had all the remaining honey cleaned out of the frames. They also cleaned up the excess wax around all the cells. They are amazing working bees!

June 25, 2012

Haven' updated my blog lately, so here goes.....


May 27, 2012

I knew my hive was getting full, so I decided to add some supers to make more room for the bees. On my way to the hive I noticed a lot of bees flying around. I was actually watching them swarm. They landed in a tree near the hive but unfortunately they were 60 feet up!! No way was I going to be able to catch the swarm. They stayed there for several hours then decide to fly to a new location. That was also 60 feet up a tree. I setup an empty box under the tree in hopes they would decide to setup residence there. We went away for the weekend, but nothing was in the box when we got home and the bees were long gone. Oh well!! Here's a video showing the swarm:

I contacted Mike and he explained that the bees make provisions for a new queen prior to swarming. He said that a new queen should hatch out shortly and she should be laying eggs in a week or two.


June 24, 2012

Checked my hives this morning to see how they were coming along.

The hive that I added a new queen earlier this spring seems to be doing good. It has both capped honey and lots of brood. Hopefully the population will build up before cold weather sets in this fall.

I next check the hive that had swarmed on May 27th. I was expecting to see brood, eggs and larvae, but had none of these. If there's a queen in the hive, she isn't producing. I contacted Mike to see about getting a new queen. Mike called me right back and I was able to pickup a new queen Sunday evening. He told me to put the queen cage in the hive and check it later to see if the bees are 'attacking' the cage. This means there's probably a queen already in the hive and they're trying to kill the new queen. If that is the case, I'll have to try finding the old queen and pinch her.

June 25, 2012

Didn't have time last night to put the queen cage in the hive, so I put it in this morning. Later in the day I checked to see if the bees were attacking the new queen, but it turns out she was already released. Guess they really wanted her bad!! So now the question is, is she alive or dead. The only thing to do now is wait a week or two and see if there are any eggs.

May 9, 2012

5/9/2012
Checked hive and queen is now out of her box. Put the frame I removed the other day back into the hive. Closed hive up. Still using 1 brood box in this hive. Will check for eggs/brood in about a week.

5/4/2012
New queen arrived in mail. Pulled the cork and placed the queen box in the middle of the frames. Temporarily removed one of the frames.

5/2/2012
Took hive 100 yards from its normal location and dumped all bees onto the ground. Scraped out all done cells on frames. I moved a frame of brood along with worker bees from the good hive to the bad. This should produce worker bees until the new queen starts laying eggs.

4/26/2012
Mail ordered a new Russian queen from Kelly Bees. Ordered one that is marked so it will be easy to find in the hive.

4/25/2012
Took my bad hive 100 yards from its normal location and dumped all bees onto the ground. Returned the hive to original location and removed the top brood box. This actions is supposed to result in getting rid of the laying worker bees. This are workers that have started laying infertile eggs since the queen is missing from the hive. The infertile eggs will only produce drones, not workers. Eventually your hive will die due to lack of workers. The theory with dumping the bees is: since laying worker bees never were out of the hive, you dumping them on the ground at least a 100 yards from the hive location and they won't be able to find their way back. We'll see if this works!!
Time to order a new queen.

4/?/2012
Added queen excluder and honey super to the good hive.

4/?/2012
Removed feeders from both hives.

April 12, 2012

Checked the top feeders on both hives. On my 'bad' hive, the bees haven't touched the syrup. On the 'good' hive, the feeder was empty. Added a gallon of syrup to the 'good' hive.

Aprl 9, 2012

Checked both hives again today. I'm back to having one good and one bad hive! Seem to being having the same problem as before. Little brood and a lot of done cells. Moved another frame from my good hive over to the bad hive. The wind was blowing fairly hard, so I didn't spend a lot of time in either hive. Closed everything back up and put syrup in the top feeders of both hives.

April 1, 2012

We have a new queen!

Not sure if bring over a frame of brood helped or the bees just took care of themself, but the bad hive now has a new queen.

Seeing brood, eggs, etc.

 ...and here she is.

Still seeing lots of done cells, but I don't think that's a problem.

Guess maybe the queen came out of one of these queen cells.

Lots of bees in the hive. A good sign.

....and the other hive is also doing fine.

Notice the multi color pollen stored in the cells.

Lots of bees on this frame. Notice the capped honey on the left.

Yummy!!

Since the weather is supposed to be cold nights for the next several days, I thought I'd give feed each hive. Put the top feeders on both hives and added a gallon of syrup in each. Also put in 1/2 tablespoon of  Fumagilin-B prevention of Nosema apis.

March 23, 2012

Talked to Mike about my situation. He suggested bring over a frame from the good hive that had brood and eggs on it. The hope is a new queen will be raised. If that didn't work, I'll have to order a new queen. I exchanged on of the frames. Time will tell....

March 18, 2012

Time to look inside the hives for the first time this spring.

Good news and bad!

Here's some shots from the hive I installed late last year. It's the one we replaced the queen. Lots of stored honey, pollen, brood, larvae and eggs. Looks like this one will be a real producer.

That's the good news!



 The bad news...

Doesn't look like the queen is laying in the second hive. This was the hive that was doing so good going into winter. No good looking brood, but lots and lots of drone cells. There also was a queen cell in this hive which I managed to destroy!

Time to get help....

March 13, 2012

Checked the bee to see how they wintered. Things are looking pretty good.

Here's some shots of the sugar I put in each hive for the winter.