It was warm enough today (1°C / 34°F) to take a peek inside our four hives and add some pollen patties. I didn’t have to top up the dry sugar that was added 46 days ago. The bees in the foundationless hive are low on honey, as I suspected, and have eaten through the most sugar, but they have enough to keep them going for a while. The bees in the conventional hives have eaten some of their sugar, but I still think they would have been fine without it. I could see several frames full of honey in each of the hives. The bees in the conventional hives were clustering above the top bars by the end of December, but a lack of honey doesn’t seem to be the reason. Okay, then, here’s how it played out in video form. First, a short version in HD that cuts to the chase.
File this one under “Another Slow News Day.”
What do rotting honey bee corpses look like in the middle of February after being buried in snow for a couple months? This:
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We had a heavy rain storm over the weekend that melted and washed away most of the snow and revealed the bottom entrances of the hives that have been buried for much of the new year. I knew I’d see more dead bees. The old-timers seem to fly outside the hive and die. Several hundred of them are scattered around the yard, little black dots everywhere on the crusty snow. Sometimes the dead are removed from the hive, but I get the impression corpse-removal becomes a lower priority in the dead of winter when it’s hard enough just to stay alive. The bottom board of our one foundationless hive is nearly blocked with dead bees. Dead bees are accumulating in the other three hives, too, though not as bad.
Read on . . . »
I’m not sure if it has something to do with today’s date (the winter solstice), a recent snowfall or just business as usual, but a pile of dead bees suddenly appeared at the bottom entrance of our foundationless hive today. I wouldn’t have noticed them if we were using a solid mouse-proof entrance reducer instead of the open mouse-proofing mesh. The dead bees would have stayed piled up inside the hive all winter.
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I could still see the cluster poking up through the middle of the top bars in the upper brood chamber. All three of the conventional hives look the same as they did last week, clustering high in the top brood chamber and hardly any dead bees on the bottom board.
I wonder what it all means. Probably nothing.
UPDATE (Dec. 23/11): I just took a closer look at the dead bees. About 90% of them are drones. The foundationless hive always had a large number of drones and not all of them were booted outside in the fall. This must be the last of them.
Continued in Dead Bees and High & Low Clusters.
Here’s a short uneventful video I took of the hives today where I mistakenly refer to Hive #2 as Hive #1. (I need to paint numbers on the damn things.)
And now here’s a quick review of the 4 hives in our backyard as they stand today:
Read on . . . »
Hive #1, our pride and joy, seems well on its way to filling a second honey super. Here’s a quiet little video recorded through a screened inner cover that shows the bees crowded on the frames in the honey super filling them up with nectar on the way to becoming honey.
SELECT 720p FOR HIGH DEFINITION AND OPTIMAL FULL SCREEN VIDEO PLAYBACK.
Read on . . . »
I mentioned in a previous post that this year’s nucs are way ahead of the nucs we had last year. (I call them nucs even though they’re living in full sized hives. They’re young colonies that aren’t yet strong enough to make it through the winter. Until they get over that hump, for me, they’re still nucs.) Each of them had a frame feeder installed in the top box until a few days ago. We had to remove the feeders because there is so much honey in the top boxes of each hive that we’re concerned the queens could become honey bound. We even had to remove a frame of honey from one of them.
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We filled in the remaining space with a couple of empty frames with plastic foundation. Hive #4 now has a full 20 frames. Hive #3 has 18 frames — nine frames along with two dummy boards in each box. Hopefully the empty frames we added will provide the queens with more laying room once the bees have drawn comb on them. We’re still giving the hives pollen patties, but we may not need to feed them syrup again while the weather is still warm. At the rate they’re expanding, we might even be able to add honey supers to them. Last year’s nucs didn’t even have all their frames drawn out by October, and if we hadn’t fed them candy cakes over the winter, they would have died from starvation. Why are this year’s nucs doing so well?
Read on . . . »
THE FOLLOWING HAS BEEN UPDATED SINCE ORIGINALLY POSTED.
Well, it looks like we’re going to get some honey this year after all, at least from one of our hives. I was led to believe that foundationless hives in the cold wet climate of St. John’s, Newfoundland — with its short, sometimes non-existent summers — wouldn’t produce extra honey for humans during the first year because much of the bees’ resources are funnelled into raising drones and then back-filling the drone comb before they have a chance to make extra honey in a honey super. So far that’s turned out to be true. We migrated all the foundationless frames into a single hive, Hive #2, and that hive hasn’t done much with its honey super. However, Hive #1, the hive that we transferred all the conventional frames in to, has filled its first honey super. Check out the video and I’ll tell you more about it later:
SELECT 720p FOR HIGH DEFINITION AND OPTIMAL FULL SCREEN VIDEO PLAYBACK.
Read on . . . »
A general update video from our beeyard/backyard.
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There’s not much to see. It’s mostly me pointing at the hives and narrating.
We moved Hive #1 to its final location today. Here’s a photo of all our hives in a row shortly after the move.
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We did a full inspection of the hive too. Most of the top box was full of honey with a few frames of brood in the middle. We pulled one frame of honey and replaced it with a frame of foundation. The bees will draw out the comb on the foundation and use it either for brood or honey, whichever they need most, I suppose. The bottom box was full of brood frames at various stages, and it’s all looking good. We pulled the last foundationless frame (with drone comb on it, of course) up into the top box so we can conveniently migrate it to the designated foundationless hive, Hive #1, as soon as we have a chance. We’ll probably extract the honey from the pulled frame, because, well, it’s likely to be the only honey we get this year, so we’re going for it, honey super be damned. I’ll post a video soon that shows exactly what’s involved in moving a hive. It’s a wacky bunch of fun. You’ll love it.
Someone emailed me a couple questions like I’m some kind of beekeeper who knows stuff. I got lucky, though, because the questions were easy. Question #1: What does drone comb look like? Answer #1: It looks like this:
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