Late swarm

The other morning, Jen woke me with the magic words: "There's a swarm in the apple tree."

There *was* an swarm in the apple tree. It was a small swarm and, since the apple tree is also small, I was about to reach the swarm easily and collect it. 

This was the fourth or fifth swarm I have caught on my property this year. Only one turned up in my swarm traps and stuck around before this one. Unfortunately, that one has gone queenless and been merged with the old White hive that collapsed due to mites and hive beetles.

For this hive, I scooped them into a bucket, then collected the stragglers with my bee vacuum.

After that, they went into a five-frame nuc box that I had on hand from after bringing my friend Jodi's bees to my house a few weeks earlier. (Jodi's newly developed allergy precludes her from keep her bees at the moment.)

They're small, which means I'll have to feed them lots of sugar water to try to boost their population ahead of winter. They'll need as much nectar/sugar as possible to make it through to March or April. Fingers crossed.

Update 12/18: I eventually merged the swarm with the remains of one of the Crimora colonies that went queenless. They are thriving.

New Bee Yard is Open

I kicked off my new bee yard at Black Bear Composting in Crimora last week. The yard is positioned in a large field ringed by black cherry, black locust, and fall bloomers like wingstem. The field is also loaded with asters, clover, and other small flowers in addition to grass that gets mowed a couple times a year for hay. I'm very curious to see what the spring bloom is like out here.

The hives are two of five that I am fostering for Jodi Kitchens, a friend who developed an allergy and had to stop tending her bees several month ago. Next year, I'll use the yard to handle the overflow from my home apiary, which has room for 10 hives. I should have space in the new apiary for 6 to 8 hives.

Because they had been untouched for so long, they were a bit spicy when opened for inspections. The bigger of the two has is very strong, which means it is also packed with honey -- not always a good thing. I pulled some honey to give to Jodi and left the bees some empty frames to build out and fill when the fall bloom begins in earnest.

I also found the queen of the smaller hive! It's always exciting to find a queen. She was too quick for me to catch and mark, but I'll try again on Sunday when I revisit the yard to test for mites and make some other fixes (like giving the small hive (J5)) an inner cover. The small hive was expanded from three five-frame nuc's, so they're enjoying the opportunity to spread out a bit. I did shrink them down to two boxes just to keep them from having more space than they can defend from invaders.

I also witnessed something I've never seen before -- a nurse bee feeding a new bee as they struggled to emerge from her cell following pupation. I love to see new bees emerge and have seen many do so, but this was a first. Pretty cool.

Colony Collapse!

'Tis the season for hive disasters.

Two years ago, Yellow hive lost its queen in the middle of summer. It took them a month to produce a new queen, but by then it was too late to build the colony up enough to survive the winter.

This year, it's White hive's turn to go down the tubes. It startes with a sky-high varroa mite count in mid-July.  Within a week or so, the population crashed to a quarter of what it had been. 

The the small hive beetles moved in.

Small hive beetles are, as the name suggests, small black beetles that live inside the hive. The adults are pests that the bees can keep in check normally.

The real problem with hive beetles is their offspring, which hatch in the honecombs and then tear through the hive's food supply -- pollen and honey. In the process, they cover everything in "slime -- basically, honey and their leavings. And I mean everything.

The only solution was to dismantle White hive, freeze the frames to kill the mite larvae, then clean the frames. In between, I feed the larvae to our chickens and let the bees reclaim the undamaged honey. I'm planning to scrap off the comb and melt it with the rest of my beeswax from this year. 

In thr meantime, I have hit "reset" on White hive in hope of recovering them enough to make it through winter. Fingers crossed.