No Eggs, and Clumsy Hiving

6/10/07



I checked my hive again yesterday. I wasn't extremely thorough as the weather was looking a little spotty (didn't want to get caught with an open hive in the rain again), but I at least got the chance to check several frames for eggs and larvae. I saw capped brood, but no eggs or larvae. So I'm really starting to think that my hive is queenless.

I think I'll leave it alone for a couple of weeks....hopefully by then a new queen will have hatched, mated and be laying eggs. I think I'll feel better once I see eggs and larvae again.

Also, I've been having some trouble with my hive frames, specifically I'm trying to improve my hive handling technique.

Currently my biggest problem is that the frames have these spacers on them that I'm having trouble with. By spacers I mean these lengths of wood about the size of a pencil. There are two on either end of the frame running from the top of the frame to the bottom. They are just there to make sure you can't take two frames and press them flush against each other (which would of course squish the bees).

The problem I run into is that when I am closing up the hive I have to of course put all of the frames back in. I can only fit all 10 frames in there if the frames are snugly in there (where the spacer for one frame is resting right up against the spacer on the next frame, which is of course the point of a spacer), and I've noticed that sometimes I'll be pushing two frames together and I'll hear this unpleasant ---Crunch-- sound as a bee gets caught between the spacers.

I try to move the frames together slowly, but it seems like the bees don't get the hint and move. Instead they just sit there until they are trapped between the two spacers. According to the advice on bee source if you smoke the bees or blow on them as you slowly press the frames together the bees will scamper out of the way. I'm going to try very hard the next time I open the hive to not squish any bees in the hive.

Maybe this is how my hive ended up queenless in the first place.

Are these queen cells?

June 3, 2007

A very eventful day. I suited up and my wife was standing by with the camera.

The first photo I had taken was of one of my frames. I was concerned by the pattern. Seemed like no eggs or larvae:

On another frame, I blew on the bees a bit to move the bees. Again, not a very good pattern and I saw THIS:

That appears to be a queen cell, front and center on the frame. That really concerned me.

Another frame looked kind of disorganized:

This picture is one of my older frames, it looks more like what I was expecting with a nice patch of capped brood in the center:

Another odd frame, note what might be another queen cell down in the corner:

Yet another queen cell:

A good frame again:

In general I saw lots of capped brood, a little capped honey, and I even saw a bee hatching. However I saw several queen cells and didn't see any eggs or larvae. The eggs are hard to see sometimes, but I would think larvae is usually really easy to spot.

Here are close ups of the queen cells:

I wasn't sure what to make of all this so I went to the exchange on www.beesource.com and asked for help.

The folks on the bee source exchange were (as always) incredibly insightful and generous with their help.

From the many responses I got I generally learned that my situation was one of:

1) My queen was dead, sick, or gone. Possible that she died of natural causes, or maybe my newbie hive handling skills squished her. This theory was supported by the fact that I didn't notice any eggs or larvae and that my younger frames didn't have a very good pattern.

2) The queen is fine but the bees were reacting to the imbalance of age groups in the new hive by creating new queen cells. Essentially the bees think that the queen as failing. According to "Beekeeping for Dummies" this sometimes happens at the six week point and that was exactly the age of my hive.

3) The bees for whatever reason wanted to swarm.

Based on all of this information I decided that if it was option 1, I could either buy a new queen and go through requeening procedures (tricky since I'm still not too good at spotting the queen) or I could let the supersedure go and hope I get a healthy new queen.

If it was option 2 then I could either cut out all of the queen cells or let the queens hatch and supersedure.

If it was option 3 then I could either let the swarm happen or take steps to prevent it.

I decided to wait, and let the bees sort it out. Hopefully I will have a return to normal in a couple of weeks. I'll probably check the hive again in a week and see how things look.

Stay tuned.

Tiger by the tail

May 27, 2007

Hi Everyone,

Another check of the hive yesterday. Population seems to be good, and it's actually getting a little intimidating to see so many bees when I open the hive. When I checked the hive I noticed that the frames were about 75-80 percent filled with honeycomb so I put a second box on.

I also was a little worried to see a couple of what I thought might be queen cells. They were about one third of the way down on one of the outer frames. Two little peanut looking things sprouting out of the honeycomb. They were each about .75 inches long, and I'm really not sure if they were queen cells, and my wife wasn't around to take a picture but I cut them out because I was worried.

I plan on moving the hive out to my in-laws place in the winter (they live on 10 acres) but I wanted the bees close by the first season so that I could watch and learn better. I am hoping that I don't end up with a swarm. I think I'll wait a week and give the hive a thorough check and see if I see more of these cells, and make sure I have a camera handy so that I can take pictures.

Stay tuned.

My First Three Stings

May 20, 2007



Not my best day as a beekeeper. I made a couple of mistakes that ended up being quite memorable.

The first was to open the hive when it was cloudy and overcast. The hive was crowded, which was not a big deal, but the real mistake I made was leaving the hive open when it started raining.

I was almost done checking the hive so I decided to stick it out. The bees didn't enjoy the rain at all.

This wasn't too bad, but the real mistake I made was I didn't check my suit and I think somehow I didn't have my veil properly zipped. I'm checking the hive when I notice that someone is crawling across my cheek and I see a bee on my veil, but it's on the INSIDE of the mesh.

I am proud of the fact that I didn't panic. I closed up the hive, walked a little bit away, and took off my gloves so that I could unzip and remove my veil. Unfortunately there was a bee sitting right on the zipper so when I reached for the zip pull I got a handful of unhappy bee (sting 1). Then I was trying to unzip the zipper, but it's not easy to do as it's a zipper that goes all the way around your neck, so I managed to upset one of the bees that was walking across my neck (sting 2). I finally got the veil off and unzipped my suit and there were probably a half dozen or so bees in there with me. One got me on my ankle as I was removing the suit (sting 3).

I'm actually pretty pleased with the fact that I handled it pretty well, though I wish I knew for sure exactly how I incorrectly attached my veil. From now on I have my wife check me real quick before I go outside to make sure I'm properly done up.

The hive was progressing well, population seemed to be growing and as near as I could tell all looked good.

Population Boom

May 17, 2007

I opened the hive up to fill the feeder and noticed that it seems like the hive is a lot more bustling. It could just be that I caught the hive when a lot of the workers had come in for the night (it was in the early evening) or it could be my imagination, but it seemed like there were a lot more bees in there than before. I hope this is a good sign that the hive is established and getting well populated.

My plan is to check the hive on Sunday and see if they're ready for a second hive box.

Some other highlights:

-As I was pouring the syrup into the feeder bin I saw bees run up and start drinking the syrup straight from the little stream of syrup that came from the pouring.

-As always there were about 50 or so bees on the inside of the lid so I am always careful to set it so that they don't get crushed. When I put the lid back on I did so slowly to make sure I didn't crush any bees and I noticed that as soon as the lid got close to the open hive top the bees all started to meander in the direction of the hive. Perhaps they were following the phermone scent of the hive, but it was kind of cool to see all of the bees suddenly marching in the same direction right into the hive.

Solar Wax Melter

Hi Everyone,

Since I had accumulated little bits of burr comb over the last few weeks I decided it would be fun to build a solar wax melter.

My goal was to have something that could turn a small pile of honeycomb into a nice clean brick using only solar power. I had a secondary goal of having the contraption be cheap, not too big and using as many "around the house" parts as possible.

I based my design on common designs I found on the internet, I mostly had to work on scaling it down since I wanted a much smaller version of what I generally found on the internet.

Here are my trials and tribulations:

Version 1.0 - a black plastic mini paint roller tray that had a hole poked in the paint reservoir part so the wax can leak out. Under the hole is a strainer and a margarine tub to catch the wax and the whole contraption goes into a rubbermaid bin with a sheet of glass over it. I liked the fact that the paint roller tray had a nice slope to it already.

Results: It worked if anything too well. It got so hot that the paint roller tray melted! I came back to a puddle of wax at the bottom of my rubbermaid and a paint roller tray that was so melted it was practically unrecognizable. I went to the hardware store to hopefully buy a tray made of metal or heavier plastic but they didn't make mini paint roller trays in metal, and the full size trays wouldn't fit in my rubbermaid bin and I didn't want to buy a new bin if I didn't have to. So much for my first attempt.

Version 2.0 - instead of the paint roller tray I bought one of those small disposable cookie sheets from the grocery store. I put it in the bin so that it had an incline to it (using a piece of styrofoam to elevate one end of it) and used a nail to poke a drip hole at the bottom of the incline. Same strainer, tub, bin, glass.

Results: Much better, the wax melted beautifully and all of the gunk (larvae, pollen bits, etc.) were left on the tray. The problem was that I think the melting heat was coming from the temperature of the metal sheet, so when the wax dripped out of the pan it cooled quickly so I ended up with an "icicle" of cooled wax coming from the drip hole and a blob sitting in the strainer (it had cooled to the point where nothing came through the strainer). Plus the drip hole seemed almost plugged up by the cooled wax.

Version 3.0 - I removed the strainer entirely (it seemed to be superfluous anyway), and instead of a little drain hole I made a bigger drain slot.

Results: Better still, I got a nice wax melt and the wax flowed into the margarine tub. The only problem was that I think the wax cooled the moment it dripped off of the hot pan so I had a stalagmite of wax sitting in my margarine tub.

Version 4.0 - Instead of a margarine tub I'm using a mini pie pan. I'm hoping that the metal pie pan will hold enough heat so that the wax will cool more slowly and I'll get a nice flat disk of wax. I'm trying it out today (assuming we get some sun).

Results: The best so far, in fact I think this design will work. I got pretty close to a uniform piece of melted wax.

Here are some photos of the "final" design:

You can see the bits of pollen, larvae, and other gunk that was left behind on the tray. The chip clips were so that the piece of glass didn't slide down. I put a piece of wood under that end of the plastic bin to elevate it.

This is the melter with the glass and baking sheet removed. Not much in there, just a piece of styrofoam on on end to keep that end elevated and the mini pie pan that I used to catch the wax.

The wax collected in the pie pan. If I'd had more honey comb I might have gotten a nice disk of wax, but since I don't have much comb I got a half moon of wax instead. The wax is clean and solid, so I would consider this a success.

One Month In

May 14th, 2007

Well the bees have been in for almost a month. They have still only drawn out about 60% of the comb, so I'm going to wait a week before putting another hive box on.

Some things I noticed:

-They use the ventilation hole in the hive almost exclusively. They actual bottom entrance of the hive is pretty much unused to far.

-The newest honeycomb seems to be a slightly different color. The original honeycomb was almost white while this new comb has a yellowish tinge. I hope that I can attribute the new color to the bees gathering more nectar and pollen.