Beekeeping

 

 

How expensive it is: There may be less expensive ways to do it, but I bought the hives ready to go from my local hobby bee supply store. I suppose I could have bought a nuc (nucleus colony) and the woodenware, but I just went with the whole hive. I think each one of the original hives ran about $350, then I also had to buy additional woodenware for top brood box. A painted, assembled box runs about $75.00. Again, there are less expensive ways to do it, and I’m hoping to get a couple of unpainted boxes that I can make beautiful this winter while I wait for the spring when I hope to be able to do at least one split. More hives, yay!

The expenses don’t end with the bees, either. Other purchases to get started include a bee suit, a smoker, hive tools and on and on and on.

How important it is to have two hives: Because it is so expensive, I ignored advice to not get only one hive. Well, sure enough, a had a queen fail because I let her become honey bound. Of course it was the day before we were leaving for 8 days, so I had to do something quick and I couldn’t find just a queen to buy locally. So, I bought an entire new hive. It’s a long story. Anyway, if I’d have had a 2nd hive already, I could have borrowed some brood from the healthier hive and perhaps let the ailing hive requeen itself.

How much to feed and when to not feed: I only got my bees in late May. Here in Texas we harvest honey over the Independence Day holiday (early July, for those of you not in the US). The popular advice I was getting starting in mid July was FEED, FEED, FEED. But here’s the thing. I hadn’t harvested any honey. My girls had all of the honey they had produced for their very own selves. Yes, you do need to feed your bees here in Texas starting after you harvest honey..because you just took a lot of their honey. But I didn’t take any! Plus, I assumed feeding them meant that you needed to make sure you have syrup available to them constantly. I would go out mid week and refill the feeders because the girls had consumed it all. So, my industrious hive did what bees do and stored resources. This took up all of the room that the queen needed for laying eggs. It didn’t end well for that poor queen. She has now been replaced.

I believe I have a better understanding of how to watch for when to feed and how to monitor the resources in the hive. At least I hope I do. I guess we’ll see.

Keep spare frames and boxes. At one point in my honey bound queen situation, I needed to have another deep box to put on. I didn’t have one. I did have a honey super that I ended up not needing, so I used that. The bees didn’t end up building it out, but it would have been nice to have an extra box. As I mentioned above, I’m going to get a couple and take my time painting and decorating them. It will be fun and I’ll them have a couple of extras.

How heavy a full box is: A medium box has 10 frames in it. Each frame when it is full of honey, weighs 10 pounds. Do the math there. Go ahead, I’ll wait right here. When I’m doing a hive inspection, it requires lifting some pretty heavy boxes. Some people use shallow boxes so that each box is lighter.

That my hives needed to be 100 feet from the property line: The wonderful lady whose land I have my bees on, she asked me to put them close to the fence line so that the flight pattern of the bees would be encouraged to be up and over the fence so as not to bother people. Well, as it turns out, our city ordinance requires that hives be located at least 100 feet from a property line. So, I had to move them and that was a bit of a pain.

How much fun it is: This is the biggest one. I assumed that I would enjoy beekeeping and find it interesting. Obviously, or I wouldn’t have done it. I have many interests, lots of things on which to spend my time. I have a demanding job and travel a lot. I don’t have time for things that I don’t love. And beekeeping? I LOVE! Every weekend (that I’m home) I can’t WAIT to get into the hives. If you follow my page on Facebook you’ll see that I’ve gone live several times for the whole hive inspection. I suspect to many people that that is incredibly boring to watch but I LOVE IT. I got a spam email the other day saying that my email had been hacked (it hadn’t). In it was a threat to send an email to all of my contacts with a list of the online videos that I’ve watched. I laughed out loud because it would be video after video of bee hives and hive inspections.

I went to an advanced beekeeping class a couple of Saturdays before. I just can’t learn enough. I could sit in a bee class every single weekend I think. I love every moment of it.

While I was in Chicago last Wednesday I got a phone call at breakfast. It was from the vet clinic whose pasture I use for my chickens and bees. They had gotten a visit from animal control because one of the neighbors whose yard borders the pasture had complained of seeing bees in her pool.

Lovely.

I assured the vet’s office that I would take steps to eliminate the problem and that I would reach out to animal control as soon as I got home. On Friday I spoke with the animal control officer who was very nice and professional.

Here is what I think happened. Remember last weekend when I moved around a hive? Remember how I regretted having done it during the day because that mean that the bees who were out foraging didn’t know where their hive was? Do you also remember how I put a layer of newspaper between the two hives? Well the existing hive was on the top. So, the bees from the existing hive who were out foraging wouldn’t have been able to get back up to their home when they returned even if they did find it. They would have had to enter through the new (lower) hive and a) they just wouldn’t have done it and b) if they had the bees down there wouldn’t have allowed it.

So, I think there were a number of very unhappy bees wondering around for a few days. I suspect that that is what the homeowner witnessed.

Another couple of points. Animal control didn’t go to the home of the homeowners, and I certainly haven’t been there, so for all I know they weren’t bees at all. Additionally, I have no ideas if there were three bees, thirty or three hundred.

All of that said, I decided to use this as an opportunity to conduct an expirement. I did some research about various ways to attract bees to a water source. I’m trying four different water sources to see where the bees go. Three of the four are in orange Home Depot five gallon buckets. The fourth one is the baby pool that I fill with ice on hot days for the chickens. As it turns out, the chickens do most of their drinking out of that baby pool as well. I have had lots of wine corks floating in that pool for a while because bees were drowning. I added more wine corks today for additional bee support.

As far as the three Home Depot buckets, they are as follows:

Original Bucket with Plain Water: I poured out the somewhat stagnant water that was in there and put in plain fresh water along with additional wine corks.

Additional Bucket With Sugar Water: I put a couple of inches of the sugar syrup I feed the bees in the bottom of the Home Depot bucket along with a layer of wine corks. I filled it most of the way up with water.

Additional Bucket With Lemongrass Oil: Again, a layer of wine corks, filled the bucket with water, and put 10 drops of lemongrass oil.

We’re only one day in, but so far I still see bees busy at work in the baby pool, and no bees in the other three buckets. I’ll come back and update this blog post periodically to share what happens. So, stay tuned!

On yesterday’s post, I explained that I got my hives “honey bound” by overfeeding them. My task since then has been to figure out how that happened. Here is what I have figured out. If you have some feedback, I’d love to hear it in the comments.

I signed up for the monthly program at Texas Bee Supply where I get an email that tells me what I need to be doing in the bees each month. I read that I should be feeding them, and I am nothing if not diligent, so I was feeding them as much as they would take.

From what I’ve been able to figure out, the advice they were giving was based on me having harvested honey in early July. Since I only got my hive in late May, I did not have any honey supers and did not harvest.

So, my hive had every bit of the honey they had produced…and how I was feeding them unlimited syrup. It makes total sense that they went overboard and filled up all of the space which left our poor queen with nowhere to do her work.

So, I guess the answer is to keep an eye on your frames. If the honey stores are low, pitch in. If they’re okay, let them bee!

So, yesterday was an exciting bee day for me and I must tell you about it.

Today we are departing on our family vacation in beautiful Mexico. (Incidentally, dont’ believe anything that would lead you to believe that the resort areas of Mexico are anything but a wonderful and lovely.) But, back to the bees.

Yesterday was filled with activities to prepare my various agricultural concerns for me to be gone for just over a week. This included adding syrup to my hive and installing a pollen patty. Whenever I open a box I can’t help but look at a few frames because I find the whole bee process so fascinating. I pulled out the first hive. LOTS of honey. No brood or eggs. Hmmmmm. Pulled the next frame. No brood or eggs. That’s strange. Next frame, the same thing. I went all the way through the top box. No brood. Lots of honey. I started through the bottom box. I got about halfway through when the thought finally sunk in. I have a problem. I may not have a queen. I’m leaving tomorrow. When I get back, this hive will be all but kaput.

I immediately messaged the mom of one of my employees who is a more experienced beekeper than I am. She agreed that I have some kind of a problem and that if I didn’t want to lose the hive, that I needed to rectify it before leaving.

I called Texas Bee Supply as soon as they opened to ask if they had any queens available. They didn’t, but they gave me the name of someone not too far from me who did have queens recently. I contacted him and explained my situation. He said he couldn’t sell me a queen by itself, but that he did have nucs or hives available. We discussed it and decided that the best course of action would be to go with a hive since I don’t have any extra woodenware laying around.

He even decided that it would be better if he met me at my pasture since his bee yard isn’t that far from me and I drive a Honda CR-V so he would have had to prepare the hive to be inside an enclosed vehicle. At 3:30pm we met at my pasture, new queen and hive in tow.

I asked him if, since he was there, if he would mind taking a look at my hive to give me his opinion about what was happening. He graciously agreed. We fired up the smoker and opened up the hive.

Believe it or not, he found the queen!

It looks like what happened is that my hive was what they call “Honey Bound”. It’s when the bees use much of the available space to store honey and the poor queen isn’t left any room in which to lay her eggs. So, she was hanging around with no where to do her job.

In order to remedy the problem, here’s what we did. Let’s call my original two box hive, “Hive A”. We took the top box off of Hive A and put it on top of the newly purchase “Hive B”. We put a sheet of newspaper between the two hives with slits, which is supposed to help the two populations of bees have a more gentle introduction to each other. Then, I took the only woodenware I could quickly get my hands on (a shallow 10 frame honey super) and put it on type of the original Hive A.

With any luck, the workers in Hive A will build out the frames in the new honey super which would give that queen space to lay some eggs. I’m not supposed to check on them for a least a week, which is handy since I’m not going to be in the country anyway.

When I get back, I’m supposed to get ahold of two deep boxes. I’ll put one deep box between the top and bottom box of each hive. This will give each hive room to grow. We also dumped out the whole 2.5 gallon feeder of syrup so that the bees would have to eat some of what they have stored in the hives.

So, time will tell. Will the queen in Hive A start laying again? How will the bees in the new Hive B get along? Stay tuned.