2015-10-25: Winter Prep

We've finally hit a few nights of freezing temps so that means it is time to complete any winter prep that needs to be done on the hives.  I have empty feeder jars that need to be removed, boxes with no stores in them that need to be taken off (the bees don't need a bunch of extra space that serves no purpose) and mouse guards to be placed on.  I also need to decide what to do with my newly established nuc hives.

Old Nucs - Yellow/Green hives:

These are the splits I made some time ago that were moved into full sized boxes last month.  They've been feed 2 quarts of syrup each in the hopes that they would draw the empty frames with wax and start filling them up.  If I found 10 good frames then I was thinking to take two nuc bodies (5 frames each) and stack them.  It is suppose to be easier for the bees to move up in the winter and it would be easier for the bees to cover 5 frames at a time instead of 10.

Yellow Nuc:

I had suspicions during the last inspection that I had waited too long to transfer this nuc to a full sized hive and they decided to swarm (I saw some torn open queen cells).  The bees seemed "flighty" and the only brood I saw were drones.  The number of drones walking around the frames was high, especially since they should all be kicked out of the hive by now!  I did spot some eggs and developing larva but something was telling me that this was not right. 

Drones, lava and eggs but no queen

So, either I have the start of laying workers or I have a queen laying all drones.  On top of that, the bees had not touched a single new frame that I had placed into the hive.  Stay tuned for more on the Yellow Nuc during my inspection of the Green Nuc....

Green Nuc:

I was a bit annoyed after pulling the first few frames since the bees had not touched them at all.  Thankfully the original 5 frames that were moved into the hive looked pretty good.  Lots of capped honey and worker brood!  Two more frames in and I spotted the queen with her pretty green dot. 

Queen with a pretty green dot

I was even nicely surprised that after I moved past these 5 frames the bees were actually drawing out one of the new frames! 

Drawing out a frame with new wax

Have I mentioned how I love festooning bees before?  =) 

Festooning bees

 Based on my findings between both nucs, I decided the one was probably queenless and had the start of laying workers and the other was queen right.  I thought it would be a good idea to take two 5 frame nuc boxes and stack them with the best frames from each hive.  I unscrewed the bottom from one of the nuc boxes and stacked it on top of another nuc box.  Crap!  They are not made to stack.  There was a large gap between the two that would be open to the air.  Ugh.  I guess I need to deal with the full sized boxes instead.  I decided to do a newspaper combine and thankfully I had one sheet of newspaper left!  I placed it across the top of Green nuc, picked up the Yellow nuc off of its bottom board and placed it on top of the Green nuc.  The bees will eventually chew through the paper and this slow integration will hopefully prevent any fighting between the bees before they merge together into one happy family.  I'm just hoping that there wasn't some drone laying queen that I didn't spot in the Yellow nuc that ends up battling with Green nuc's queen.

Newspaper combine complete

Where did that orange pollen come from?

Yellow Hive:

This is my cutout hive that has made some really good progress over the summer.  I removed the empty feeder jar and took a look through the top box.  The bees were covering about 6 frames and had most of them drawn out. 

Yellow Hive bees

Quite a few were filled with capped honey.  Looking down into the box below I saw lots of bees and some rubber bands still on the frames from the cutout!!  They typically chew through them and dispose of them but I'm guessing they've propolised them right onto the frames now.  I'll have to remove them during the first inspection in the Spring.

Green Hive:

The top honey super on this hive was filled with drawn combs that were completely empty.  I thought for sure that when I added them that the bees would fill them quickly with the Goldenrod flow.  No such luck.  I pulled this box off after clearing a few stray bees off the frames.  I pulled a few frames from the next honey super and at least there was some capped honey there.  Looks like that box will stay on for the Winter.

White Hive:

Looking at the top honey super on this hive I could see that it was packed.  I knew this from my last inspection but I had also seen a large pile of dead bees in front of the hive.  I was concerned that this hive had been robbed out by other bees.  Well not a single frame of honey appeared to be touched so this hive should have some great stores going into Winter.  It also had a nice population of bees and when I looked closely at the pile of dead bees I saw numerous dead yellow jackets in the pile.  Maybe they tried to raid the hive and picked the wrong one to screw with!

Battle aftermath

To complete my tasks I needed to put the mite sampling boards back into the hives that had screened bottoms to prevent any wind drafts blowing up from the bottom of the hives.  With that done I also wanted to put my mouse guards on but with the entrance reducers on it didn't really look like they would fit properly.  Based on http://www.honeybeesuite.com/what-size-hardware-cloth-is-best-for-beehives/ it looks like #4 hardware cloth is the proper size for a mouse guard.  So I think I'll grab some and use that instead.

I'm also considering getting or building some candy boards that come with a top entrance.  This would allow the bees to leave the hive for a cleansing flight during the Winter if the bottom entrance happened to be plugged up with dead bees.

With four hives going into Winter and some diversified genetics (one Italian, one cutout wild open mated and two "northern" queens), I'm hoping to have some better luck overwintering this year.  Wish for a mild Winter and wish the girls luck!

Until next time, thanks for reading!

Hive Autopsy : 2015-04-12

When the weather finally started turning to above freezing temps back in mid-March, I started to get really excited thinking my bees had made it through the winter.  Sadly, about the same time I stopped noticing any audible response from the hive when I would knock on it.  The day the temp hit 60 degrees I couldn't wait any longer and I popped open the lid to take a look.  A few dead stray bees were in the top box but none of the honey had been touched.  This was not too surprising since the hive was four deep boxes tall.  The next box was also full of honey and no bees.  In the next box down I found the dead cluster on about 5 frames.  Dang.  This past weekend I finally had a chance to bring the hive into the pole barn and take it apart to do an autopsy.

This was a very depressing task but if I am making mistakes I want to learn from them!  Usually a hive dies because either they starved to death, they froze to death (these two are often connected), or they had some sort of disease or queenless problem.  Here is what I found:

First off, I noticed that the dead bees on the bottom board were mostly on the left hand side.

Dead bees on the bottom board

Usually they cluster in the middle of the box but for whatever reason they favored the left hand side.  The top of the picture shown here is facing the North, so bees started on the West (left) side of the box (frame 1).  I'm not really sure if that evidence is of any note.  The lack of dead bees on the bottom of this picture is because that is where the hive entrance was located and I had been cleaning the dead bees out of the entrance every week.

After looking over a few of the frames I could see they were mostly devoid of honey.

There was a tiny bit of honey on the top of the first frame, but the rest were empty.

The size of the cluster looked pretty large to me so I think they had plenty of bees to generate enough heat to stay alive.

On the fourth frame I noticed a small patch of brood.

You can see about eight capped brood cells amongst the dead and moldy bees with their heads down in the cells.

The other side of of this frame had even more capped brood cells.

Not a drop of honey on these frames until frame 8, 9 and 10.

These frames were solid honey.

With no honey left on the frames that the cluster was on and also that there were brood on those frames, I would say that the cluster was unable to move to the honey next to them.  Essentially they starved/froze to death.  In a sad twist, I'm wondering if there weren't TOO MANY bees in the hive! 

<sigh>

Well, on a more positive note, I had ordered two more packages of bees that are scheduled to arrive on April 26.  Also, the Siberian Squill that I planted in the Fall for the bees is up!

I have also been working on my solar powered Arduino hive monitor and I have it working.  I need to build a stand of some sort for the solar panel and set it up out in the bee yard. 

Another one of my goals this year is to introduce some Michigan survivor stock genetics into my apiary.  I've been in contact with Northern Bee Network and I plan to order some queens once my new bees are established.

Thank goodness for the renewal of Spring!!  As always, thanks for reading.

She's Dead Jim - Autopsy of White Hive: 2014-03-31

Well, I pretty much knew White Hive had died but the weather here was finally nice enough for me to verify the sad news.  At almost 60 degrees, I trudged out to the hive with my wagon to see what exactly led to the demise of the hive.  The bees were flying between Christmas and New Year's and it was right after that when the first "Polar Vortex" hit Michigan with many consecutive days of below zero temps.  A week or so after that a second one hit and even after that the temps barely hovered above the zero mark.  Generally speaking, cold doesn't kill the bees but I think this must have been a bit too extreme for them. 

I began by taking the top box off and it was heavy!  Looking though the box frame by frame revealed solid frames of honey front and back.  A few small clusters of dead bees here and there but nothing out of the ordinary.  After looking at six frames, I finally found part of the main cluster on frame 7.  I couldn't believe that the bees never even really made it to the top box!!  The bees generally start at the bottom of the hive at the beginning of winter and gradually move up to the top of the hive eating the honey as they go.  With only part of the main cluster being in the top box, it seems that the bees never even made it far into winter.  That would confirm my thought that they had died in early January.

Part of the cluster

Looking at the bottom box, frame 1 and 2 had some honey on them but after that the frames were looking mostly empty.  This is probably the area that the bees clustered on at the start of winter and they had eaten all the honey there.  When I got to frame 6, I started to see most of the frame covered by dead bees and a large area of bee bread just outside their cluster.  Frame 7, 8 and 9 were completely covered by bees on both sides of the frame.  On top of that, almost every cell was occupied by a bee.  I was very surprised to find that many bees.  It seems to me like almost four solid frames of bees would have been plenty to generate enough heat to survive.  I brushed my hand through the lifeless bees and tried to find the queen but I didn't find her.  As I did this, I was also looking to see if there was any evidence of mite damage or disease.  I didn't see any deformed wings or k-wings.  I also didn't see any actual mites.  I did see a few brown streaks on one of the frames which could be evidence of Nosema.  My hive that survived last year had A LOT more streaks like that and they survived.  Ugh.

Finally I removed the bottom box and looked at the screened bottom board.  There was a 2 inch thick layer of dead bees there!  On top of that layer of bees were a few crumb lines.  These would be from the bees above them chewing through the wax cappings and the crumbs falling to the bottom of the hive.  This tells me that quite a few bees had died but the cluster remained alive for some time after that.

Dead bees on screened bottom board

It is always frustrating to loose your bees but even more so when there doesn't seem to be any apparent reason for their demise.  My only conclusion is that the cluster was fixed in place by very cold weather and they were unable to move to the honey surrounding them.  Since a small part of the cluster was in the top box, they may have simply been caught in the transition between the two boxes when the cold weather held them in place making them unable to reach more honey.

Well, I guess I have to look at the bright side.  Spring is right around the corner and I have two packages of bees on order due to arrive in May.  All the honey remaining in this hive will be put to good use in establishing two new hives!  Better luck for the upcoming winter too!

wax crumb line on dead bees

As always, thanks for reading!

Poo Storm: 2013-12-28

I've heard of a "poo storm" as a figure of speech before, but yesterday I experienced one!!  The temperature here in Michigan reached a whopping 40 degrees and it was sunny as well.  I decided to take the opportunity to remove some of the ice that was actually blocking the front entrance of the hive.  It had already begun melting and the ice slid off in a big chunk quite easily.  I could now see that the bees had moved many of there dead as close to the entrance as possible but they couldn't get them outside so they were clogging the holes in the mouse guard.  I pulled the dead ones out and brushed off some remaining melt water off the landing board and a few of the more cold hard girls were eager to come outside!

It is cold out here girls!

I took a quick count and there were 10 dead bees that I had pulled out and were now in the snow.  By the time I was done counting, about four more bees came out to investigate what the bright orange ball of light was that was hanging in the sky.  They flew around for a bit, never straying too far.  Two of them seem to be doing orientation flights (hovering in front of the hive facing toward to hive to remember what it looks like).  I looked up and one bee was near the vent hole on the candy board so maybe she crawled up and exited there.  It wasn't long until two of the bees had landed in the snow to take a break.  That is usually a death knell for a bee because if they stay too long the cold will move into them and make them "sleepy".  Of course they can't be that cold for very long without their sisters keeping them warm so they would soon die.  I picked them up out of the snow and placed them back on the landing board.  I ended up doing this a few times and decided I couldn't stay there all day rescuing bees, so I headed into the house.

After having lunch and running around for a few hours, I decided to head back out to take a peek again late in the afternoon.  That when I saw the evidence of the poo storm!  As I neared the hive and hit the boundary of the bee garden, I saw dead bees all over the place.  In addition to that, little brownish yellow splashes in the snow all over the place!

This snow used to be pure white

Hope you feel better now girls

If you didn't know, bees are very cleanly and only defecate in the hive if they have a bad form of bee dysentery.  So, they generally "hold it" for weeks and weeks at a time until there is a warm spell.  They sure took advantage of this one!  I'm just glad I wasn't around when a few thousand other bees decided to come out and drop a load.  Dang!

Having "done their business", it looks like they also took an opportunity to drag out a number of their dead sisters.

Bring out yer dead!

You'd might think with this many dead bees that it was a catastrophe, but this is not the case.  In the winter, the dead generally accumulate on the bottom of the hive until a warm day when the bees can leave their cluster and remove them.  With thousands of bees in the hive, a hundred dead is a pretty normal amount to have accumulated over the course of about a month.  So all seems well in White hive so far this winter!