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Month: June 2012

Another Swarm Cell

Another Swarm Cell

Here’s a quick two-clip video that shows some of what we had to deal with today.

The first brief clip shows a monster hive after we did a full inspection of it and thoroughly riled up the bees. It’s a swarmed hive with a newly mated queen (which we spotted). It’s full of uncapped honey and very little brood. We pulled some honey frames to give the queen more room to lay, but I’m not sure what we’re going to do next. We found swarm cells in two other hives. The second clip shows one of the swarm cells. The other hive with swarm cells had about half a dozen capped cells. Lovely. We have a swarm trap out and we took other swarm prevention measures. But we’ll see how it goes next week. We have three mated queens coming in. I hope requeening calms the bees down. The past 40 days have been exhausting. We’ve done everything we can to keep the bees in check, but they’re on fire.

Six-ish Hives (An Update)

Six-ish Hives (An Update)

I used a digital recorder to record notes during our last inspection. A very helpful way to take notes because I would have forgotten or confused most of it otherwise, and the notes wouldn’t have been as detailed.

For those who are curious, we have potentially 6 hives on the go now, each of them with their own specific history and a unique set of challenges for us. Here’s a brief summary:
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Video of a Hived Swarm

Video of a Hived Swarm

One of our honey bee colonies swarmed into a tree last week. We caught it and put it in a new hive with a small frame feeder and three frames of empty drawn comb so the queen could start laying right away. We checked on it yesterday and here’s a video that shows what we found (it’s doing well):

It’s not the greatest video, but it shows how things are working out for us since we moved the hives from our backyard to a place in the country. I won’t say exactly where we moved the hives, but anyone familiar with farms around St. John’s probably won’t have a hard time guessing correctly.

A couple notes about the video: 1) I got lazy with making my improvised ventilated inner covers. I came up with an equally effective but much easier to make version of the same thing at the 3:19 mark in the video. We haven’t tested it much yet, but I’ll write up a more detailed post for it later if it works. 2) The hived swarm probably doesn’t need two deeps just yet (and probably doesn’t need the extra ventilation), but swarms are known for building up fast. We gave them the extra hive box in case we can’t make it out next week. We’ll keep feeding the hive now just like we would with a nuc.

Continued on with Queen in a Hived Swarm.

A Destroyed Swarm Cell

A Destroyed Swarm Cell

We added a frame of brood with a swarm cell on it to a split hive last week that we thought was queenless. Turns out it wasn’t queenless, because by the looks of it, the queen inside the swarm cell was destroyed — stung to death by a queen that was already in the hive, then pulled dead from the swarm cell by worker bees. If a queen had emerged from the swarm cell, the cell would be open on the bottom, not the side (or so I’ve been told). The hive had several frames of freshly capped brood when we checked it yesterday. I don’t think a week old queen could mate and begin laying that fast. Thus ends my interpretation of the above photo. I could be wrong.

Jell-O Royale

Jell-O Royale

We inadvertently took a half decent photo of royal jelly during our hive inspections yesterday. Click the photo for a close up view that shows the larvae floating in the royal jelly.

Royal jelly is a white, gooey secretion that’s fed to all honey bee larvae for their first three days. Larvae intended to become queens are given a gigantic dose of royal jelly that more or less keeps them going for the duration of their development.
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Hiving a Swarm

Hiving a Swarm

Our hives in their new rural location, about 16km (or 10 miles) from our house in the city.
The first inspection of our hives in their new location was great. It was so much more relaxed knowing we could take our time and not worry about nosey neighbours. We’ll only be able to see the bees once every week or two, but the change of scene is worth the temporary inconvenience (until we get our own vehicle). It feels like a whole new world of beekeeping. All the hives seemed to be humming when we arrived around 1:00pm. I’ll write a summary of our inspections in the comments for this post. But in a nutshell, our hives aren’t in perfect shape, but we feel more comfortable dealing with whatever comes our way now that we don’t have suspicious neighbours close by making us feel hurried.

Here’s a slideshow that shows how we hived our swarm just before we left:
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Catching a Swarm

Catching a Swarm

Day 700: We checked on our hives at their new home in the country today and we love it. We even captured a swarm and had a great time.

I normally avoid posting photos of myself, but my face is obscured in this one and I sort of look like a biker with a handlebar moustache, a fat head and no neck. That doesn’t look anything like me. Anyway, that’s about half the swarm I’m holding. It was big. It was thick. And the bees were so calm, we were able to cut the branch off the tree, not exactly in a delicate manner, and they didn’t budge from their cluster. It was a text book swarm cluster.
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