Week 6.1: Testing and More Swarms

Two of my hives (Perwinkle and Purple) have been showing sign of trouble with their larvae. Some of them are dying and turning brown in their cells. The potential cause ranges from starvation to a viral or bacterial infection.

So Katherine, our local VDACS hive inspector came by to test them. Both tested negative for the suspected problems -- American Foulbrood, which is a death sentence, and European Foulbrood, which can be treated with antibiotics. 

While we were checking on the problem hives, I noticed a big cloud of bees flying through the yard about 30 feet away. I thought they might have been mine getting stirred up by what we were doing. Then the inspector said "Looks like you've got a swarm." 

Sure enough, a biggish swarm was hanging on a branch about 20 feet up in one of our fruit trees. I rushed to improvise some equipment to catch them, but the vamoosed before I could catch them. Bummer.

Then Jen decided to go looking for them thinking they might be in another tree. Instead we found another, smaller swarm setting up in a hazel bush. Thankfully, this one was within easy reach, so I caught it and set it in the apiary   so I can move it into a new hive. I am out of gear, so they'll live two-flat style above another hive separated by the new screen board I cobbled together out of scraps this evening. 

If you're keeping track, I have gone from 4 hives to 11 in a month. That's life during swarm time.

Week 6: Swarm season

File this under "Be Careful What You Wish For." I've been eager to catch a swarm since I started beekeeping two years ago. Last year, I strapped an old hive box to a tree along the edge of the property and baited it with lemongrass oil to lure in a swarm. Nobody bit.

Then this week, Jen said "I think you have bees in your box." And sure enough I found a small swarm had moved into the janky old box I had loaded with crumbling frames.

I collected them in a plastic nuc box and relocated them to the bee yard into a new White hive (White 2) that I bought on Saturday. They're calm, have a nice queen and a sugar water feeder. So, fingers crossed that they do well. They make hive Number 8.

The same day, I walked up on the hill to do my hive inspection and found an enormous mound of bees hanging from the bottom of the Yellow hive. Wow! Two swarms in one day.

I've rehoused one swarm so far and that was cast off from the Blue hive a month after I brought my first hives home in 2023. That time, they moved into a peach tree near the bee yard, so it was easy to catch them. These guys, by contrast, set up in a space where they were tough to access. 

I slid a nuc box under them and scraped the mass off the underside of Yellow hive with my hand. They plopped into the open box but left loads of bees under the hive. Usually with a swarm, the queen is in the center of the cluster. Get the queen and the rest of the bees will follow. 

I figured I had the queen, but then everybody started moving back up the hive stand to reconvene under the hive again. If there was a queen, she was still under the hive. I tried repeatedly to locate her and get them to settle into the new box but to no avail. Now I suspect they were actually members of the Yellow hive that has gotten so big they needed to move outside for a bit. Something tells me I'll be splitting that hive again to reduce the surplus population.

Week 5.3: Meet the New Queen

Khaki hive has a new queen and she is lovely.

When I created the Khaki hive (named for the sandy-colored paint that I found leftover in the garage), I pulled a frame from the parent hive that had queen cells already waiting to emerge. A few days later, there she was. It was a good way to jump-start a new hive rather than dumping bees into a box and waiting for them to make a new queen (aka a walk-away split).

This new queen appears to have gotten out, done her mating flight and come home to start laying eggs. I'll soon need to add a second box to keep up with her. I'll also mark her with a blue dot to signify that she was born this year. (Last year's queen have green dots on them.)

Week 5.2: And then there were Seven

I came out of winter with four strong hives that were filled with bees and raring to go. They very quickly multiplied in response to the spring blooms, sending foragers out to gather pollen and nectar from flowers showy (dogwood) and small (dead nettle).

The challenge for beekeepers this time of year is keeping their hives from swarming. Swarms are a natural process by which colonies spin off new colonies in response to overcrowding and an abundance of resources. You know you're at risk of a swarm when you start seeing peanut-looking queen cells hanging from the bottom edges of the frames in a hive.

My answer to the swarm problem this year has been to make splits -- to take bees, larvae, pollen and nectar out of one hive to found another smaller hive. In the case of the new purple hive, I also had a Queen Cell to work with from the Yellow hive to jump start the growth of the new hive. Otherwise, the bees would have eventually made a new queen from existing eggs laid by the queen of the Yellow hive.

The purple hive brings me to seven hives at the moment from the four I started with in March. These three new hives are too small to produce honey this year, but they'll be the foundation for a new bee yard I'm hoping to start at Black Bear Composting in Grottoes.

Week 5: Bursting at the seams

After three days on a school trip to New York followed by a solid week of cold, drizzly weather, I checked out the hives today to find them pretty close to bursting at the seams!

Blue hive, in particular, worried me when I saw this big of a crowd outside the entrance this morning. That kind of behavior when the weather isn't hot can indicate the hive is spoiling for a swarm -- something they do when they feel like they're running out of space in the main hive. I've been worried about the exact scenario for the past week.

Sure enough, when I got into Blue hive, the girls had built something like a dozen peanut-shaped queen cells. They were hanging down from the bottom of the frames in the third box -- a sure sign of swarm prep. I destroyed most of them and move one frame with three queen cells to a new hive along with about 5 frames of bees, brood, and food. With luck, that will reduce the population stress in the Blue hive, give them some empty frames to build out and they'll start focusing on honey production.

Blue hive has loads of space lower down in the hive for the queen to lay, so it's odd that they were feeling the need to swarm. One possible solution would be to reverse the hive boxes -- put the empty bottom box on top and the upper box on the bottom. It's a controversial method of management, but it might trick them into thinking they have space.

The other option for any of these hives as they get full of bees is the Demaree split -- essentially to divide the hive in two, isolating the queen with plenty of empty cells to lay in while the rest of the bees continue to harvest nectar and honey like normal. I haven't tried it yet and I've used all my built-buyt-empty frames for the moment, so it's likely I won't be able to try that method as I had planned.

Orange was the new pollen color this week -- most likely from the dandelions that are popping up everywhere after last week's rain. As much as lawn lovers hate dandelions, bees love them. They're a major source of nectar and protein in the spring.

The queens are all laying amazingly well. They're young and full of life (literally) and it's not unusual these days to see frames that have brood from one side to the other. The one exception is Periwinkle hive, which seems to be having a flare-up of chalkbrood again. The disease is caused by a fungus that destroys the nascent bees before they can mature. I found several frames with shriveled larvae that had turned black. I pulled those frames to avoid spreading the disease more than necessary.

After making a split out of the White hive two weeks ago, I started another new hive -- the Khaki hive until I come up with a better name -- by pulling queen cells, brood and food from the Blue hive. With luck, the new queen will emerge there in a few days and start building that hive. If she's anything like her mother, she'll be prolific!

Week 4: Dandelion Time

The weather this week has been fit for neither man nor bees. With temps in the 50s and drizzly rain, it's been a tough time to be a bee. 

I have held off on this week's hive checks for fear of exposing the brood to chilly temps, which would kill thousands of bees-to-be and set back honey production.

The farthest I have gone is to peek under the lid to see how things are going. My primary concern is my new hive (Green) that I split off from White a little over a week ago. They are making a queen, which is a good sign. Hopefully, she will mature over the next few days (queens mature im 16 days), fly off to mate and return safely to start building a new colony.

When I lifted the lid, I could feel the heat coming off the colony. Bees keep their hives around 93 degrees F to grow brood and dehydrate nectar into honey. The 50-degree temperature difference was obvious!

On the plus side, the rain is bringing out flowers. The blooming is booming. And while daffodils are lovely and fruit trees are nice, the real stars of this week's bloomfest have been the weedy stuff that pass unnoticed underfoot -- dead nettle, henbit and, of course, dandelions. 

While gardeners hate the, dandelions are ambrosia for bees, providing loads of nectar for honey production. Now that I know that, I wish my yard had more of them!

Week 3: Mite Check

The biggest pest of honeybees is the varroa destructor mite, a tiny arachnid native to Asia that has spread around the world. Like ticks, mites spread disease, so managing them is crucial to keeping hives healthy. This is the part of beekeeping that really feels like farming.

Testing for mites is pretty direct: dump a frame or two of bees into a bucket; scoop a measuring cup filled with bees (about 300); drop them in a special device with alcohol. Put on the top, swirl the cup. The alcohol kills the bees and the mites, which fall through the inner basket and collect in the bottom of the cup.

It seems cruel, but 300 bees out of a hive with 30,000 or more is a small sacrifice that will be replaced in a few days -- aa long as you don't accidentally include your queen in the sample.

This first test of the year came up clean: No mites in three of four hives. The Blue hive had a single mite in its sample. Ideally, you want 9 mites or fewer in a sample. That's 3%. Above that, it's time to treat the hives. 

Commercial keepers smoke their hives with oxalic acid, which require them to wear a respirator. I prefer formic acid, which comes as patties you put in the hive for two weeks. With no mites to speak of so far, I'll hold my treatments until later in the summer.