A Successful Start up North

With last year's hive up North in Akron failing due to mites and beekeeper ignorance, we're giving it another try. The package was installed in one 8-frame medium with drawn comb last Monday, April 15. Today Cora, under my supervision, opened up the hive for her first time so we could remove the queen cage and verify she is laying.

These bees are grouchy! I don't know if it's because there were two of us, or that Cora was puffing the smoker a bit vigorously or what, but I had bees bonking the veil and buzzing around the neck area. Now fun!

The good news is, we saw a few eggs and some very young larvae. We also saw the queen! It looks like she only started laying a couple of days ago at the most, as most of the larvae we saw were very small and swimming in royal jelly.

Package Install - Let's try this again!

Both of my package hives died last year. Part of this might have been beginner beekeeper error - okay probably most of it. This year I am trying a package again. This time hopefully I can do a better job keeping Varroa under control (I did nothing for this last year) and recognizing queenlessness (which would have helped with the North hive).

Anyway, here are the bees - shaken into a box in North Georgia on Friday:

This looks like a lot more bees than were in my package last year. 

I did the usual bee shake procedure with some variation since the queen cage wouldn't fit between two drawn frames. Here's the best picture I could get of Her Majesty - not great since her attendants were crowding her a bit. She is bright orange.

After pulling out the cork on the candy end of the cage I pressed the side of the cage into a drawn frame put another frame against it and pressed again. This embedded the cage between the two frames of wax with the nylon strap sticking up between them. Getting the cork out of the cage was sort of a panicked procedure because I forgot to bring a screw or nail back with me and the hive tool didn't do a good job prying it out. Fortunately my 4-year-old was playing in the sandbox nearby and could be employed to get a nail. 

Dumping the bees in the hive it was apparent that this was a lot more bees than I put in last year. I stuck the frames with the queen between them in the hive, stuck the top on with some sugar water and let them be. An hour later the last of the bees from the box had found their way inside the hive. Here's a pic of the frames after putting them in, before closing the box up:

Let's hope this one does great! I'll check for a released queen in a few days.

Ohio Queen hive moved to full sized box

The Ohio Queen Initiative queen hive was previously in a 3-story, 6-frame medium nuc setup. I wanted to get it into a more standard setup with room for growth. I cleaned out one of the deadout colonies and that will now be the home for this beautiful queen!

Tearing down the hive gave me an opportunity to see how this colony is doing overall. There aren't a ton of bees in there - probably four frames worth - but the queen is laying and it looks like a decent pattern:

All of the capped honey cells that have been emptied out are now filled with brood or eggs at some stage. The laying pattern is very solid. Here's a closer look:

I left some honey frames in the hive but still put the jar of sugar water with Fumigillin-B on top of the hive. Hopefully they build up quickly and grow into a good production colony!

Hive status and update

Today it was sunny and 55 degrees when I got home from work. As soon as I got out of the car, I saw bees all over the crocuses in the front yard. Back at the bees, my one remaining hive, the one started with the Ohio Queen Initiative queen last Summer, was very active. Bees were bringing in bright orange crocus pollen. I opened the top and put in a Mega-Bee feed patty. I lifted up the top box quickly to steal a glimpse of the cluster. The top of the cluster looks to be covering three frames. If they are covering the rest of three frames, I'll be thrilled! Next week has some even warmer weather coming, so maybe then I'll give them a better look.

Rough winter for bees!

Today the high was 56 in Northeast Ohio, so it was time to check on the bees. When I went out in the afternoon, I saw bees flying happily in and out of the nuc I made in July from the Ohio Queen Program queen.

All of my other hives are dead now. I stopped up at the North hive yesterday to confirm the tiny cluster that was in there in November died off. It did. I took the remaining honey off the hive - about 40 pounds of mostly crystallized aster/goldenrod from fall. I put six of those frames on top of the nuc today to help it make it through.

I asked my Dad to take a look at the hive at his house (East) today also to see if they were flying. That hive looked really good in January when I had it open on a warm day. Unfortunately, they are also dead! How sad.

Being down to one hive out of five, I am wondering what approach I'll take in the Spring with bees. If the nuc makes it through the next month or two and can build up, I may be able to split it. Since both packages I bought last year are dead, I'm a little discouraged about packages from down South. I called a local pollination guy who sells bees to talk to him. He said he's seeing about 80% losses himself, and that's consistent with what other guys in the business are seeing up here this Winter. The weather just didn't cooperate last year. The dearth was too long, fall was too short, and bees couldn't brood up for Winter. He assured me that the problems last year were mostly due to weather, and that I should give packages a try again. I guess I have to think about that - at the very least, any package I buy at this point will get to build up on lots of already drawn foundation.

January Update

Judging from little yellow bits of wax cappings that have fallen on the snow under the hives through the screened bottoms, it looks like all four of the hives that were alive in December are still alive today. On the swarm hive at my dad's, the bottom of the cluster is all the way in the bottom of the hive. If you look up under there you can see them moving around. In the hives at my house, they are higher up in the boxes. I did not open up the lid on the Ohio queen nuc where I put sugar but I could see through a hole that there's still sugar piled up in there.

I read somewhere this week that the queen starts laying eggs for spring again shortly after the Winter Solstice. To the bees, spring is coming! The tough part now will be to be sure they have enough food to make it until spring. The long term forecast shows a warmup to almost 50 next week, so I may construct a candy board this weekend and put it on top of the hive at my dad's place on a warmer day, since they only have about one Medium box of honey stored up.

Dad has decided he will put the spare hive from the failed swarm in his cousin's yard where we caught the successful swarm last year. I will offer up a couple frames of brood comb from my failed hive to use as bait. Dad has really grown an attachment to the bees; I suspect we will add several more colonies at his house in 2013, through splits and swarm captures.

December update

We are having a nice warm early December in northeast Ohio. Today I checked on the bees and found that the Ohio queen hive and the swarm hive at my house and the swarm hive at my dad's house are still alive. The package hive at my house is dead and the one at Cora's house is small but alive.

I noticed that the Ohio queen hive is already in the top of the box, which is not good. Since the weather is going to be warm tomorrow again I put a quart of 2:1 syrup on there for them to take down.