Update

It has been a few weeks since my last post so it is time to catch you up. I ended up being able to get a package from Georgia to replace Hive 1 and installed it a week and a half ago. Last weekend the queen was released and the foragers were out and about bring back pollen and nectar. Unfortunately no eggs yet but it is still early. This year I think I will replace the queen with a local one. I was hoping to try to overwinter a nuc in the back yard but my homeowner's association is giving me some problems so I'm not sure that will happen. Oh, and of course when I was setting up the hive I forgot a couple of frames. I had to put one in that didn't have any foundation. A week after install it was about a third built out. It is interesting to see the natural process of building without foundation.

Hive 2 is still struggling. The queen just won't start laying. As my last try I dumped a few hundred bees from the package into Hive 2 thinking a little extra coverage for the brood might spur some new egg laying. Nothing doing. Same small area of capped brood there has been since winter. I just need to find a queen before they completely die out. Can I count this colony as surviving the winter? Hmm.

Fun For All Playground

I won't do this often but occasionally something comes up that that is not bee related that I will support through this forum. There is a great accessible playground that will be built in Warrenton, VA. This playground is specially designed for special needs kids with features like:

• Barrier free ramp system which will allow a child in a wheel chair to reach the highest points
• Bright colors to help children with vision impairment
• Different textures to stimulate sensory development
• Swings and spring toys with hand holds and back supports

The goal is $300,000. As of March 20th they have raised $209,000. Please visit the Fun For All Playground web site and if you feel inspired, make a tax-deductible donation. All kids deserve a fun, safe place to play. Let's get it built!

Hive 2 Survived

I was out to the mountain yesterday. It was a beautiful day; 70 degrees, sunny, blue sky. The foragers are out and bring back pollen, mostly a cream colored pollen. I hiked around some and didn't see anything that looked like it was nectar producing yet. But the important thing is they are still alive. Not only alive, but they appear to be thriving now. They sucked down all the sugar syrup I had put in less than two weeks ago.

The bad thing about the bees being so far away is that I don't get to see a lot of what happens in the hive. It is really too bad because I could sit and watch these little creatures for a lot longer than you would think. At this time of year only a few spiders, the bees, and some flies are out so it is nice to go out there in that regard also. This time I got to see something I thought was kind of funny. The flies were trying to get into the hive and the guard bees were trying to keep them out. Watch the 21 second video here.

Hive Postmortem

I started going through the dead hive Saturday. It was a cool, rainy, depressing day so it seemed appropriate. But as I started into it I actually felt better. Maybe it wasn't me. There was quite a bit of honey left in this hive. Now I think what happened is that the cluster got locked in a position that when it turned really cold and we had the big snows for a couple of weeks they wouldn't break the cluster to get over to the honey and basically starved and/or froze in place, still covering the brood. You can see in the picture there is a small but well filled brood space (the picture that shows a spotty pattern was the outside of the outside frame. The others looked better.) that was covered with bees when I pulled the frame out. The other frame I left the bees on for the picture. The queen was still present in the middle of the cluster. You can see the marked dot on her back. Also notice a bunch of bees at the top all the way in the comb trying to get the last bit of honey in them. A couple inches back from the brood the honey begins. It is like this on all 3 of the frames the brood was on with the honey starting in the exact same point like they could eat back that far but not get over to the ends. The brood and cluster are pretty small. Since this is my first year I don't know if this is normal size or not, but this is the time of year the population is at its lowest.

It is impossible to say now but maybe the other colony was better positioned within the hive to be able to get to honey or maybe their genetics are such that they could survive a few degrees cooler. Also, there is a ton of pollen in this hive. Way more than they would use by the time the flowers would have started. If the other hive has a bunch I might think about putting a pollen trap on the hive and capture some of it.

Alive and Kicking

My wife and I went out to feed my one remaining colony again. It was a nice day today; 50+ degrees, beautiful blue sky, and the snow is even melted away in some spots. I was so worried that this colony would be dead when I got to it. But I took seeing a bee fly in front of the truck on the dirt road to our property as a good sign and it was! I could see bees flying around, it was alive! A quick pop of the telescoping cover showed that one of the feed bottles was not quite half empty and the other was maybe a quarter empty. I topped them off and closed it back up. It is supposed to be in the 50s during the day and 30s at night all week although rainy at the end of the week. I sure hope a little warmer temperature will take some pressure off the bees and allow them to cover the brood a little more loosely. Then they can cover a larger brood area with the same number of bees. I'm still worried that the number of bees may be too small to get them through to spring and warmer temps but at least they are still alive now.

Sad, Sad Day

What I have feared happened. I have lost my first colony. It is weird because it isn't like loosing a pet. They are just insects after all. But they are my insects that I have put a ton of time and effort into. Worse yet, I might have been able to prevent it. I did a quick look and most of the frames are totally empty. There are a few spots of honey but nothing substantial. The weird thing is that there aren't a bunch of bees with their heads in the comb, as I have heard it would be with starvation, and there was a bunch of bee candy they didn't touch. I didn't take the hive totally apart because I want to see if a more advanced beekeeper will go through it with me. I want to do this because if it was starvation I can reuse this comb. If not, what was it? And is it safe to use the comb? It would certainly help the next colony if they didn't have to start building comb from scratch but I don't want to put another colony on this comb just to have them die out from some disease.

I'm not real happy about Hive 2 either. They are still alive and there is enough heat coming off of them so I know the queen is laying but the cluster is pretty small. There might not be enough bees to keep the brood warm. It would help if it warmed up around here but that isn't supposed to happen at least this week. All I can do know is feed and hope the warm weather comes quickly.

So there are some things to learn from this for me and for you. Location is important. Very important. My property is off the beaten path, which is good for a lot of things (nobody messing with my hives, reduced threat of pesticides, lots of wildflowers) but when we get record snows it is not so good. I couldn't get back to them for the last couple of weeks. If I had maybe Hive 1 would still be alive.

The bigger thing is to watch the honey stores closer. Going back to last fall I was suspect that the honey store was low. If this had been a mild winter maybe that would have been ok. As one of the coldest and the snowiest winters we have ever had they needed even more than usual to get through. So now I am going to go every weekend until our nectar flow starts and hope to get Hive 2 through March.

Winter Check

44 degrees, sunny, 5 inches of snow on the ground. No pictures this time since I was alone and working as quickly as possible. This entry is posted late. The visit was on Feb. 4th. The next day we left to Florida for a week vacation. Thank goodness! The snow came and came and came. We had to dig out of if today when we got back but the vacation was fun and watching the last nighttime space shuttle launch was amazing!

Normally I wouldn't have gone out and disturbed my girls but at the last beekeeper meeting I had talked with my mentor about my bees and she was concerned that they were already at the top of the hive. The theory being that they have eaten their way through the honey in the middle hive body and have now eaten their way through the center of the top hive body. You aren't supposed to disturb the cluster in the winter so it is impossible to see what is going on in the frames they are clustered around. My mentor recommended making some 1:1 sugar syrup to feed to them in case the honey was all gone. So I worried about them for a week and a half until I could get back out to them.

One word of advice - in the class they recommended picking a location for the hives that you could get to in all kinds of weather. Because of the topography of my land the options were limited but I thought, "Ah, this spot is pretty good. I can get here except when there is a ton of snow or it has been raining a lot." And guess what happened this winter in the Washington D.C. area? Uh huh, record snows.

So here I am trudging through 5 inches of snow with my bee bucket, my bee suit (bees apparently don't like the cold, more on that later), two hive bodies, two bottles of sugar syrup, and some bee candy. Maybe I need a second bucket to carry this other stuff. I get to the hives and there is very little activity. In fact, I first thought I might have a dead colony, but when I got closer I could see a handful of bees flying around. Still alive! I started with hive 2 this time. I typically move all my stuff in position and then put the bee suite on. As I am moving all my gear from under a pine tree, where there was no snow, to inside the electric fence I noticed more and more bees flying around. It seemed odd because there were only a few bees flying around when I got there and now they all seem to be attracted to me, and more of them. Once everything is staged I crack open the outer cover. I could see the cluster through the hole in the inner cover and could see there were quite a lot of bees. Another good sign. Then I took off the inner cover. Oh boy they didn't care for that one bit! Now bees are everywhere, landing on me and flying everywhere. I had been working without gloves the last couple of times and so I didn't have any on this time either. Naturally I get stung the first 20 seconds I have the inner cover off. The way they were behaving this particular trip I quickly decided to put gloves on. I might have to think about some other feeders for the winter so I can skip disturbing them so much.

I needed to see how much honey was left. Before I started I did the "heft test" and it seemed like the hives were still fairly heavy so I figured there was some honey. The cluster was on one side of the hive so I could pull a couple frames on the other side to check. Yep, honey. That's good. They hadn't touched the bee candy I put in last time and, in fact, they weren't even crawling on it. I put a full frame back against the cluster. The one I had taken out was empty on the side that was facing the cluster so I put the empty side against the hive body. My worries have been alleviated at least for the time being. Once the queen picks up her laying it may take some effort to keep them well fed.