April 16, 2019          "HUNTER HIVE"

Clear day. No wind.



The bees seem happy with their new hive. I peeked inside and there's a ton of activity!  :)

 The goal is to keep them happy and thriving. Since the nectar may not be flowing just yet, they girls may need sugar syrup to tide them over. I cooked a 1:1 mix of sugar and water. I just boiled it till the sugar dissolved and let it cool.

Among the frames, I have a feeder frame. I fill it with sugar syrup and the bees can access it as needed.

This should provided enough food for a while. I'll check on the sugar syrup the next time I check the bees. So far, everything looks fine. 

APRIL 15, 2019 

I got a pretty amazing surprise. I was completely crashed out asleep when the phone rang. My friends, the Hunters, were driving with a swarm they just caught...and they offered it to me!!! So of course I accepted this amazing gift! They drove right over.

They said the swarm had been in a tree, but wasn't too far up so it wasn't hard to catch. I've never caught a swarm, so I'm super impressed. 

photo credit: the Hunters

photo credit: the Hunters

The Hunters brought the bees in a plastic bin with some screen material taped to the top.  It was a pretty cool set up.

I put some new frames in among some honey frames I had in the empty Langstroth hive. We dumped the bees in and they went in the hive with no problem. There's a rock on the frames because there were bees on top, and some might get squished. The rock just held the cover (top) up a little bit. The rock will come out when they settle down.

I'm so excited. I'm back in bees!

Here's the hive all closed up with the rock still in there.  I think I'll call this hive HUNTER HIVE.  

You can see the empty top bar hive in the background and one of the empty Apimaye hives to the right. 

I have quite a few empty hives now. On the other side of the bee yard, there's another empty Apimaye hive. There's also a kiddie pool, which has water for the bees. There's rocks in there too, so the bees  have something to rest on and they don't drown.

I think the next order of business is to make some sugar syrup to feed the bees since there may not be that much nectar flowing yet. 

Isn't this the sweetest present ever?  

APRIL 10, 2019

HIVE #1 INSPECTION:

The bottom board was pulled out first. It looks like there were mites in this hive too. They're small, but if you look around you may find them.

Here's a close up of one of those nasty little critters:

We pulled out frames. Some looked fine and others, not so much.

This frame had a spotty laying pattern. A sign of a bad queen? Or maybe the queen is dead, there's disease or the worker bees are laying eggs?

Also, the cells have holes in them.

Some frames had the grayish look seen in the other hive--perhaps it is mold.

Some frames had honey, so the bees should have had plenty of food over the winter. 

More honey...

There were other frames of honey, as well. There was no problem with food supplies.

There were some frames I really didn't understand, like this one:

This one looked odd to me. Is that mold?  The color looks off, I think.

I guess all I can say is, this really didn't go as planned.  Beekeeping seemed so simple. It is not.

APRIL 10, 2019

Clear day. Moderate temperature.

For an overview of the hive body we used check out the Apimaye site. 

I was leaning toward traditional wood hives, but the Apimaye are well insulated, so we gave them a try.

INSPECTION  -  HIVE 2

My coworker and I inspected the hives and tried to figure out what had gone so wrong.


First we pulled out the bottom board. It looks there was a mite problem.  :(

Here's a close up of a couple mites from the above image:

We found some webbing, as well. It looks like the webbing I saw when I had wax moths in another hive.

We took off the Hive Top Cover and examined the dead bees.

Here's a close up of the dead bees:

The frames had a gray tinge--mold?  The hive had plenty of circulation, so I don't know how that could have happened.

Here's a closer look at one of the frames of gray honey comb:

Some of the cells had little holes in them.

Since we had some of the frames pulled out of the hive, we peeked in and saw some dead bees in the bottom. I would expect some dead bees from the winter season, but I'm not sure how many would be considered normal.

There are some large supercedure cells in the upper part of the frame.  Supercedure cells are one of the methods for paving the way for a new queen. Check out some reasons for a colony to make a new queen.

Could there have been mites, wax moths and mold? Well. that's a lot to go wrong in one hive, I think. Next I'll upload the pics from Hive #1.

LATE MARCH 

HIVE 1

Cool day. Clear skies. No wind.


About a week after the previous cursory inspection, the exterior of the hive was inactive. I had a very bad feeling.


I opened the hive and it was a ghost town.


Upon investigation, it was apparent there were no bees. Not one. They left.


Were they dead? Did they abscond? 

I took a quick look at the bottom board and expected to see a lot of dead bees. There were hardly any--nothing more than I would have expected if the colony was in prime condition.  

To review a few reasons bees may abscond, check the link:  Beekeeping for Dummies-Absconding

Beekeeping for Dummies-Absconding.

I didn't have the heart to take pictures or inspect further. I closed up the hive and decided to try to regroup. 

I was pretty sad and frustrated.


I felt like a massive apiary failure.


I.  Failed.  Bees.


I told my husband I wouldn't sink another penny into the bees. I told him that maybe I wasn't meant to be a beekeeper.


I reminded him that perhaps I was not qualified to care for anything. I reminded him of the Lucky Bamboo plant that was in my care--well it was not so lucky, and I managed to kill it in no short order.


He encouraged me and reminded me of the crazy fluctuating temperature we had in the area recently. It had been freezing, then very warm, then freezing again. And it all came rather quickly.


Was that the problem? Or was it something I could have prevented?


That was a puzzle for another day.  At this point, I just needed to step away.

March 18, 2019             HIVE 1

Clear day. No wind.

The entrance seems busy. The bees look happy and healthy.

I took a Snipit image from the video and looked for mites. I couldn't find any...

More bee footage...

They look active. No signs of distress. Everything looked great.  Right?


I couldn't be more wrong.  :(


More uploads tomorrow.

The first year of beekeeping was somewhat of a rollercoaster.


In the spring of 2018, Hive 1 thrived like crazy while Hive 2 lagged behind.  As summer rolled around, Hive 1 waned and Hive 2 was busy as a...well, busy as a bee.  Hive 2 produced a lot of honey that season and the hive was extremely active.

HIVE 1

My mistake here was a really didn't check for the queen like I should have. To be honest, I had a hard time finding her.  I hope to improve that skill. It was also difficult to check for eggs in the hive, which is another way to check for an active queen. Maybe she died. Maybe she left. Maybe she was just a bad queen.


As the season wore on, I did a routine hive check, and there was some strange spider-webby, tunneling material in the honey comb. I poked into the webbing and larvae came out. So that was nasty.  I had done some research, and discovered that a weak hive could not fight off wax moths. Eventually, the hive would just die. It was already late summer and not much time to rebuild a hive. I was resigned to letting the colony die off and starting fresh the next spring.


But I'm not a quitter. Dang it. I wasn't going to give up without a fight.


I got a Nuc with five frames of bees and a strong queen. I hesitated to just add the new bees fearing the old bees might try to defend their hive. I really didn't want a massacre of the bees happening in the hive--sort of a Halfields versus McCoys scenario. A well seasoned beekeeper informed me that the hive would likely be desperate for a strong queen and I could add the nuc frames with no preparation. Otherwise, I would have to use a technique involving newspaper between the two colonies to initially separate them until they acclimated to each other (How to combine two beehives).


The nuc arrived and the bees were immediately at home. There was no fighting. The hive grew stronger and stronger. My hive thrived again.


During the nuc addition procedure, the frames with the wax moths were removed and new frames put in their place.

2/6/19              HIVE 1  and  HIVE 2

Hive check.
Clear weather, ~ 35 degrees F, no wind
Exterior check only. Dormant exterior, no activity.

2/13/19             HIVE 1

Hive check.
~40 degrees F, clear day, no wind.
Hive 1 did fine over the winter. The girls looked good. They were mad, though. At this part of the season, bees are fiercely protective of resources. Even though I wore a full beekeeping suit, I still managed to get stung three times.

EARLY MARCH 2019     HIVE 1

Cursory hive check.
Clear weather. No wind. Mild temperature.
The hive continues to thrive.

EARLY MARCH 2019     HIVE 2

I checked my coworkers hive. I normally wouldn't have done that, because he loves playing with the bees and I thought he would be the one to delve into the hive first. However, I noticed that the entrance to Hive 1 was abuzz (haha), but Hive 2 had no activity.

Hive 2 was so strong going into winter, but I had a terrible feeling that the colony didn't make it through the season. I dreaded opening the hive, because I just knew it was a goner. Sure enough, I took off the lid and there were no live bees found. Just a few dead ones in the top super (box). I cracked open the bottom box just a little bit and there was no sign of life.

I was sad.  My coworker loves beekeeping so much. I had to deliver the bad news. He took it better than I thought.

We decided the next step was to open the hive up to investigate the cause of hive death.