Swapping

We visited the hive today with the goal of swapping the two main bodies.  Bees tend to move up the hive and we want them to stay low when the queen starts to form brood and work up through the season.  This will also help to keep the brood cells low so that the "Supers" on top are only used for honey storage (and hopefully harvesting by us!)

We first removed the one Super we had on the hive.  Last summer we had put it on with a queen excluder between it and the 2 hive bodies.  The excluder is to keep the queen from laying brood in the Super but it seemed to keep all of the bees from doing anything up there.  We eventually removed the queen excluder but they still never really showed any interest.  We are removing it now until later in the summer.  After it was off we used the hive tool to unstick the hive bodies and lifted the top one off.  I was very surprised how many bees were around and how heavy the top body was.  It was obviously very full of honey still and it really looks like our bees did a good job getting through the winter as their numbers are high even though it's doubtful any new brood has emerged yet this year. 

The lower hive body was much lighter as we swapped their positions.  It was about 56 degrees and the bees were very active.  We didn't smoke them and they really seemed to be annoyed at us, flying into our masks all of the time and landing on us quite often.  We really were not set to inspect the individual frames without the smoker going so we'll leave that to later.  The bees also would not leave the Super we took off so we left it sitting by the hive hoping they'll leave by the next few days when we come back.

All in all we think our hive is going to do good this year.  Their number are good already and things have not even started blooming.  When we installed them last year most of the fruit trees had already passed their blooming.  We hope that our friends will see better fruit production this year as a result. 

Why are you not doing anything in the super?

About 2 weeks ago we put our first "super" onto the hive with a queen excluder between it and the hive bodies. Today we got back to look for the first time and were surprised to see... almost no activity in the super. There were a few bees up in it, maybe 25, but as far as we could tell there had been no drawing out of comb yet.

Before we put the super on the hive bodies were mostly full of brood and honey. We did have to pull out a bit of comb they had built in a space where we had left out a frame, and sure enough they were rebuilding it as we still were missing a frame since then. The thing we are wondering is if this is the reason they are ignoring the super. Since they had the space in the top hive body were the determined to use it up first? Or is it the queen excluder and they just refuse to go through it?

We've left the queen excluder on and will see how they do now. The empty slot in the top hive body has a frame now with duragilt on it. I wonder if they will now spend all their time on it instead of in the super?

What happens when you don't put in all the frames?

Last week we added a second hive body to our bees. At the time we only have 5 frames assembled so we just put them in the middle and figured we'd add more in a few days. Bees always start in the middle, right, and work their way outside. It should be fine.

Well, I guess we were wrong. First off, we waited too long. We planned to get back in a few days but it ended up being a week. When we opened up the hive and lifted the top board we had a surprise as you see in the picture. The bees had built their own comb hanging down form the top board.

The bees had also done a bit of work on the frames as well, but seeing this is a bit disappointing. It was beautiful, but we would rather have had the bees spending their energy and resources on the frame.

So, we added more frames in as was our plan. From a class the beekeeper mama had taken last week she learned that many beekeepers only put 9 frames in a hive to make it easier to move things around so that was our plan. We were able to do this and leave the opening right where this comb hangs down. So for now, there is no loss. However when we get ready to put on supers I'm sure we will have to break this comb off to get the top board on top. Maybe we can break it off and just set it in the empty frame slot.

One other thing we did at this inspection was to pull out the white bottom board to see if there were any mites. We didn't see any but did notice a bunch of ants come out as soon as we pulled out the board. The started crawling all over obviously disturded. Plus, there was a smell. It was almost like something dead. Both the smell and ants showed up only when well pulled the board so we're sure it's related but don't know what. A dead mouse perhaps? Does anyone have any thoughts on the ants? Do we need to worry about them being under the hive body? We've also seen a few roaches in and around the hive. Are these something to worry about?

Ants below the hive that came out after disturbed.

Bees at 7 weeks, time for a home expansion

It's now been seven weeks since we installed our bees and nearly three weeks since our last visit. We brought a second hive body along thinking they might be ready to expand. Sure enough it looked like they were ready. We didn't pull the frames at all but you could see bees between each one with some comb built out. We added a second body and five frames to it. In a few days we'll head back to fill in the other five frames once we've got them put together. Images below are before and after adding the second hive body.












It would have been nice to pull frames and look for the queen, but we really don't want to disturb their comb any more when we don't need too. The number of bees has certainly gone way up and it will be interesting to see how soon they fill up this second body. We have two suppers ready to be assembled and a queen excluder too. Hopefully we'll get some good comb production and be able to add them in another few weeks so that we'll have some honey to harvest in the fall.