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<\/a>Hive #1: Kicking Ass<\/strong>\nOur surplus-producing bees from last year came through with plenty of honey, which they have been burning through as they build up rapidly.\u00a0 Now with 10 solid frames of brood, they are still gentle (our only truly gentle hive) and have filled their super 25% full with fresh nectar.\u00a0 We can’t wait to see what early spring honey tastes like, assuming they get some filled and capped.\u00a0 They are building swarm cups, and we found two with eggs or very young larvae.\u00a0 We pulled these frames into a nuc along with a third frame of brood, one of honey, and one of mostly pollen, replacing them with foundationless frames to open the brood nest.\u00a0 If that goes well we should get a new queen (which will go into Hive #2) and convince Hive #1 not to swarm for a while.\u00a0 We discovered that we could really use a queen clip for operations like this; I spent about 10 minutes holding the frame with the queen, keeping an eye on her while Liz pulled frames to go in the nuc.<\/p>\n
This hive has an organization problem.\u00a0 We admired the solid-frames-of-brood laying pattern of their California queen last summer, but they never arranged the hive into a typical pattern with brood below pollen below honey.\u00a0 They are building up, but slowly and in a rather haphazard way.\u00a0 The diagram doesn’t tell the whole story, as the combs in the broodnest are 25% nectar, 25% pollen, and 50% brood all mixed up together.\u00a0 They could be preparing to swarm, but we didn’t see any signs except the irregular backfilling.\u00a0 With only 4 1\/2 frames of brood and a fair amount of empty space, they are falling behind.\u00a0 We found the marked queen looking very small; she seems to be running out of steam, or semen.\u00a0 Our plan is to requeen them with the nuc we pulled from #1, assuming the new queen successfully mates.\u00a0 If not we will have to buy a queen for them.<\/p>\n If you want proof that honeybees are genetically different from each other, don a good beesuit and pay a visit to our Hive #3.\u00a0 They have a pollen fetish.\u00a0 We gave them a super and they have filled it 25% full of mostly pollen.\u00a0 They don’t make surplus honey.\u00a0 They have an unstoppable swarm impulse.\u00a0 And they are mean.\u00a0 Very mean.\u00a0 Mean enough that should we ever try to work them without a veil and gloves we would very likely accrue the ~500 stings required to kill a human.\u00a0 They follow us back to the house, a few stragglers even coming inside.\u00a0 Today for a half hour after inspection a few angry bees even showed up to head-butt us and our housemates as we worked in the garden 200 feet from the hives.\u00a0 I took to catching them in a butterfly net and stepping on them.\u00a0 Eight dead bees later, they left us alone.\u00a0 Honey bees should not do this.<\/p>\n Three weeks ago, we guessed they would try to swarm early, but not quite this early.\u00a0 Today we found the hive full of swarm cells – perhaps 15 total, many of them capped.\u00a0 They were clearly planning to swarm in the next 2-3 days.\u00a0 We found the queen still laying and removed her with three frames of bees into a nuc, an “artificial swarm” so to speak.\u00a0 We should probably kill her, but it’s hard to kill queens in early spring when we don’t have replacements on hand.\u00a0 The remaining 40,000 angry bees will be requeening themselves soon, unless we can find a queen in the next week, tear down their swarm cells, and introduce her.\u00a0 That might be preferable, since there’s a good chance that daughter queens will share their mother’s unpleasant traits.<\/p>\n I called these our smart bees in an earlier posting for their ability to winter in a small cluster, conserving their honey stores.\u00a0 They are building up quickly now, not quite on pace with #1 but still appearing healthy.\u00a0 Last time we pulled a frame of solid drones and fed it to the chickens, replacing it with a foundationless frame.\u00a0 They must have remembered their “drone zone,” as they quickly drew the new frame to drone size and it is now 100% filled with capped drones on both sides.\u00a0 We left it in, as we will have queens hatching soon and it will be good to have a bunch of unrelated “survivor” drones in the mating pool.\u00a0 Once this batch hatches though we will pull it and insert a full foundation sheet this time.\u00a0 Hive #5 had no swarm cells yet, and we reversed the boxes – for three reasons really: to break the honey barrier between the upper box and the super so they move up faster, to stave off swarming, and to get the odd-sized semi-deep down below so we can do later swarm-prevention manipulations in the standard deep upper box.<\/p>\n Hive #6:\u00a0 Un-bee-lievable<\/strong>!<\/p>\n Here I introduce a new color: purple.\u00a0 Purple simply means we didn’t inspect the frames, finding no reason to after seeing eggs and no swarm indications in the upper deep.\u00a0 At the beginning of the month this hive was a single deep with three frames of brood, on the left above.\u00a0 On March 10 we gave them a second deep with foundation.\u00a0 By March 31 they had drawn comb on all frames, even the often-ignored outer sides of frames 1 and 10, and had filled the space with four solid frames of brood, two of pollen, and two of newly-gathered nectar.\u00a0 That’s a doubling in hive size in three weeks, in March, with no supplemental feeding (though they did have 4+ frames of honey\/syrup left from winter)!\u00a0 Something must be different this year (or maybe it’s the residual stores?) because we never saw anything like that rate of build-up last year.\u00a0 This is also the only hive that has not yet required a mite treatment.\u00a0 Thank you MarkliAnn for letting us put a swarm trap on your property!\u00a0 We have high hopes for this colony, and we gave them a super yesterday.\u00a0 Bring on the maple honey!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s certainly an early spring compared to last year, but it seems like most of our hives are “ahead of the curve” so to speak, and we’re already playing catch-up to head off their swarming instincts.\u00a0 In the diagrams below, … Continue reading <\/a><\/a>Hive #2:\u00a0 Failing to Kick Ass<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>Hive #3:\u00a0 At War With Their Keepers
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>Hive #5:\u00a0 “Smart Bees”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n