Stung

Well, the first sting for me was this weekend. The colony has been incredibly docile, and I've taken to just a hat, no veil or gloves and now usually just shorts and a tshirt when I go down to do any work. But, I wanted to get a few pictures this time, and of course was paying a lot less attention to what I was doing and put the frames back in the box roughly, upset the bees and paid the price. So, I'll post the pictures but please remember the cost :-)

Bees and the pool

I know it's been a while since I posted anything but work and the garden have kept me busy. I am going to echo here a thread that's been discussed recently on the local beekeeper mailing lists, with a personal angle. How to keep the bees away from our pool.

It seems bees like a water source that has a strong odor and Chlorine is one of those odors and so a pool becomes a great attraction. At first this was cool, we could watch the bees drinking from the edge, or from the string holding up the thermometer or drinking off the mat where people get in and out (which of course gets nice and wet). But, some days there's a lot of bees and sooner or later ....

So we experimented, we moved the mat so as not to have a really big and easy drinking source, we moved a waterer I had already made closer to the pool and we removed everything from the pool that could be a "float" for the bees to drink from.

The waterer itself was pretty simple, one of those large dog water dispensers (works like a water cooler) and with a little added honey-b-healthy it was pretty strong smelling.

At first we put it next to the area where the bees had been drinking before and after a few false starts it worked. I had tried a simple plastic float to keep the bees from drowning in it but that seemed not to work so well so we fell back on the local do-everything tool of pine straw.

Now it seems very popular and while a few bees do fly around the pool on the way in and out it's the waterer they head for. So, day by day we've been inching it away from the pool and again it seems to be working.

While I don't claim this will work for everyone, and you never know it may not work for us for long, it's been an interesting exercise and certainly easier than trying to create a more permanent water source closer to the bees themselves.

Brushy Mtn English Garden Hive

For Melanie, the hive I chose to use comes from Brushy Mountain Bee Farm in North Carolina and is called the English Garden Hive. The hive is an 8-frame hive whereas the standard tends to be 10 frames per box;.Also the setup favors the use of medium boxes (6 1/4" frame) throughout for a standard size whereas a more usual hive employs deep hive bodies (9 1/8" frames) and a combination of medium and shallow (5 3/8") supers for honey production. Overall I like the hive a lot, it's easy to work with and not only do Brushy Mtn have a good selection of 8-frame equipment more and more catalogs provide it too.

This does mean it's easier to move boxes around however it does one significant drawback, if you see an advert for someone selling nucs don't get excited that you can fill your new hive with ready-made bees. Most people are still using the deep hive body combination and so most nucs out there for sale are going to have 9 1/8" frames and so they aren't going to fit into the medium supers in the garden hive. I guess until there are enough people doing things this way starting such a hive will be by package or by swarm.

The picture shows an 8-frame medium with the Brushy Mtn black superframe, a wax coated plastic foundation. Again I like the black for hive bodies as it makes eggs and larvae nice and easy to see.

Hope that helps

A slow start

Well it's been 11 days since a box of bees became a hive of bees and it was a little worrying as things took longer than the text books all say they should :-)

Basically here's the calendar:

• Monday: installed the bees
• Thursday: checked the hive and while there was no candy left the queen was still in the cage so I removed the wire and let her walk into the hive body.
• Saturday: checked again, comb is being drawn, sugar syrup is going fast and the queen is still active but no sign of eggs.
• Tuesday: quick check, much the same, plenty of foraging and some comb now has syrup and pollen stored. A little worried that the lack of eggs is a bad sign, but maybe we're just slow.
  
• Thursday: went down mainly to add a second hive body and top up the syrup - but who could resist checking, and there were plenty of eggs and even a few larvae!

So, going to have to resist temptation to check other than just topping up the syrup now for a while.

Pictures of the package install

Here's a set of pictures from the package install yesterday.

1. First the package as it arrived, you can see it's pretty healthy and even with the heat this time of year there are very few dead bees in the box.

2. With the hive disassembled it's time to begin.

3. Opening the package itself was uneventful, the queen cage was easy to get to, the feeder easy to remove - although the bees were pretty eager to escape right from the get-go.

4. Here we are emptying out the bees into the space in the hive, lively little things they are.

5. Just brushing a few bees off the queen cage here.

6. Closing up ...
7. Topping up the feeder (1:1 sugar water solution with just a little Honey-B-Healthy).
8. And finally, all closed up and done.

All in all it was pretty easy, I have the second hive all assembled but doubt I'll get it populated this year - but good to have it just in case the opportunity arises.

Woo Hoo!

Well the day arrived, started with a call from the Post Office to come pick up the package of buzzing bees. So this afternoon which was a great day, warm and with a light breeze after a really windy and rainy weekend, we put the girls into the hive. The kids watched as I stumbled my way through the process but it was still pretty easy and painless (no stings).

The only wrinkle in the process was that when I took the cork out of the queen cage there was no candy below and rather than put the queen in directly with the colony I put the cork back loosely and will hope for the best. I'll be back later in the week to check and fingers crossed everything is OK. I did walk down this evening at dusk and there was plenty of gentle activity, orientation flights, a lot of the dead bees from the package already dumped out front.

Will post pictures hopefully tomorrow.

Last week was busy...

Well, in anticipation of the arrival of bees last Friday all the last minute work had to be done last week. More weed cloth and mulch around the hive, mowing down the grass, clearing away all the brush for recycling and more. Thursday I got up at 6:00 to drive out to Brushy Mountain to spend some more money (my birthday gift from the family) and bought a second hive, some additional supers and a nuc. So Thursday afternoon everything looked good, I was ready, planning to work at home Friday, the weather looked good for Friday (not too hot not cold)...

The the call from Rossman, due to the cold weather over Easter and some loss of bees they are running behind in delivering out packages :-( So now it looks as if it will be this week, maybe, before the bees arrive so am a little bummed. On the bright side it meant I got to finish painting the new woodenware and also have a pair of Tulip Poplars to plant before the girls arrive.