A Humble Hum

Two major triumphs during last Tuesday’s inspection. I can’t even decide which to be more excited about:

1. Meet our new queen of the Charlie Brown hive, Lucy (of course)!

2. I kept the smoker going the whole time – that’s throughout inspection of three hives. I’m kind of a big deal.

Okay really the new queen is more exciting (isn’t she gorgeous in the video) but um mastering the art of the smoker is really hard. I probably won’t be able to do it next time but yay.

Three weeks ago I did the first inspection of the year, and split a small nucleus hive off the bigger (green/blue) hive to help discourage swarming. I didn’t purchase a queen to give the nuc, so they are raising their own queen. Last Tuesday, I checked the nuc first and it had a nice number of bees and… eggs! That means one of the frames I gave them must have already had a queen cell in progress, and she emerged and mated successfully, OR that I have laying workers and the nuc is doomed. When a hive goes too long with no queen, some of the workers’ ovaries will develop just enough and they will start laying eggs. But, having never mated (and not having that ability), they will lay only haploid eggs which only have one chromosome and thus all turn out male. All drones = failure. Since drones do just about nothing.

The Charlie Brown hive was looking really nice with bees covering up the frames, and as I pulled out one of the middle frames I saw the queen before I even got a good hold of it. As you can see in the photo and video, she looks a lot like her mother & aunt with a caramel-colored body (“Sunkist Cordovan” I believe the apiary called the line I bought her mother from), and she’s nice and plump. Hopefully she will be a good queen. She has just started laying so I won’t know how solid of a brood pattern she lays until the larvae mature a little.

The bigger hive was busting with bees. MAQs didn’t slow them down a bit. There were even some queen cups and I tore down a single capped queen cell so there might be some swarm instinct going on. Since then, I’ve gone back and added a brood box and checkerboarded the existing frames with wax foundation ones. That should make them feel like they have more room and hopefully I can avoid a swarm this year. Swarms are heartbreaking.

I hope it warms up soon. The bigger hive has two partially-full supers on it already so if they can get to work soon we should be in the honey this year! Even the Charlie Brown hive is starting to use its super.

Oh and here is my assistant cleaning out the syrup bucket.

Do they hibernate? Well, sort of. I’ll tell you what the bees are supposed to do and what mine do. But first of all here’s what I do during the winter: worry. I go a few weeks without seeing any coming and going and I start to wonder if they’re still in there. Did they all die of starvation? Did they freeze to death, or succumb to the viruses brought by varroa mites? Are the combs slimed by wax moth or small hive beetle larvae? Did a well-meaning mouse crawl in and cuddle up? There’s a lot that can go wrong. So on the random warmish days when the fretting beekeeper finally sees a waft of bees in that corner of the back yard (like the day I took the photos above), it’s a big relief worth toasting with a $20 bottle of wine instead of your usual Rex Goliath.

In North Carolina, as far as I can tell in my two winters and from what I’ve heard around the bee club, it seems all the pantry it takes to get your girls through most of our mildish winters is one mostly-full hive body – or safer, a hive body plus a super full of honey. That is, I have to restrain myself from harvesting ALL of their honey stores because they need at least 6 or 7 frames to get through winter when nothing is blooming – more if it’s an especially cold or long one.

When it gets below 55˚, the bees (all workers because they kick out all the boys in late fall) will gather into the “winter cluster,” a tight little ball of bees in the center of the hive. They vibrate their flight muscles (but without moving their wings) to generate heat, and rotate who is roasty toasty next to the baby bees and who is on the colder outer edge of the winter cluster. In this way they can keep the hive at least the minimum temperature they’ll stand which is around 57˚. During this time, brood rearing slows down drastically or even stops altogether. The life span of a worker bee in the winter is several months as opposed to the 2-3 week lifespan they have in the summer (when they’re worked ragged). They stop raising drones (boys) completely until spring approaches.

Also, they don’t defecate in the hive (unless they have nosema which is a like bee dysentery). So when you have a warmer day in the midst of winter you don’t want to stand in front of the hive or you’ll come away covered in adorable little yellow-orange bee poops.

I said that they cluster at temperatures below 55˚, but MY bees tend to brave much colder days – I’ve even seen them out even when it’s a breezy 45˚ or so. I don’t do much to prepare my hives for winter, really. I put an entrance reducer in to cut the doorway down from the full width of the box to just a few inches, and I swap the screened bottoms for solid ones. You’re also supposed to leave a hole near the top of the hive as a condensation exhaust (either by drilling a small hole or by putting bottle caps under the top cover) but I’ve never gotten around to that. I thought my Charlie Brown hive wouldn’t make it through winter because they didn’t have but 4 or 5 frames of honey but they’re looking even stronger than my bigger hive at the moment based on the number of bees I’ve peeked at. You don’t want the hive to be much bigger than the space the cluster takes up because they’d have to heat it and protect it all from small hive beetles. So it’s possibly my big hive seems weaker because they’ve had to use more energy.

In northern states, beekeepers often wrap their hives in insulation & black garbage bags to help them absorb heat from the sun. Even snow acts as a good insulation. And I know a lot of beekeepers give their bees pollen patties or candy boards to give them some nutritional help nearing the end of winter. I’ve given mine sugar syrup on warmer days and both have a good bit of coming & going on days like today where it’s above 50˚. One day this winter it was even over 70˚ so I got to peek in and see that bees covered every frame. I didn’t take any frames out because I didn’t want to risk chilling the brood.

The textbooks don’t address these warm winters where there are lots of days the bees can leave the hive to forage.  Won’t they expend a lot of energy (and thus, honey & pollen stores) flying around looking for nectar & pollen but not finding it? Or get fooled into amping up brood rearing but not be able to care for them? I blame last year’s warm, short winter for the swarm I lost. I would have split the hive earlier to suppress the swarm instinct had I known they were building up so early. So this year my plan is to treat for mites in early March (if it’s 60 most days by then) and split as soon as they recover from that treatment.

Of course it never goes quite according to plan.

Charlie Brown did get combined with the nuc. If you read the last post, you know Carly Rae went missing from the CB hive and on Wednesday I went to determine next steps. Well, she was nowhere to be found, so I had to combine the nuc with her old digs. But, it had to be ghetto because a nuc is 5 frames and the hive is 10 frames and you can’t just stick the 5-frame box on top of the 10-frame one. Then there would be a bunch of exposed frames. So, I stuck the 5 frames from the nuc into the empty NCSU hive body and put that on top of a piece of newspaper on top of the CB hive. I know I said I would never leave less than 10 frames in a hive body again but here I am with no other choice.

You know how when you go into someone’s house you kind of notice that it has a different smell than yours? Sometimes in a bad way but with most of my friends I either think their smell is good or at a minimum neutral. In particular Robyn’s house smells good to me. Anyways, see, each bee family has a different smell (at least to the bees – they all smell the same to me – kinda sweet but woody and a little insecty too). If two bees meet who smell different they will fight. Which means bee deaths and possibly one very important bee death (the queen). It’s a good thing we don’t have the instinctual urge to fight to the death with someone whose home smells different than ours! So with two honeybee colonies you have to force them to get used to each other’s smells by sticking some newspaper in between the two families. The smell goes through slowly so that they begin to all smell the same to each other, and they gradually start using their specially-designed mandibles to chew up and carry the newspaper out the front of the hive and can live happily ever after until the beekeeper screws something up again.

When I went to give them some syrup today, I took a peek at their progress (btw this is a very ghetto way to feed them while they are combined since I don’t have another super to use the top feeder with). It’s only been two days and there are some very decent-sized holes in the newspaper. And nice work on the crossword ladies! If you don’t know the answers, throw it away – that’s my motto too.

On Sunday I will remove the newspaper as well as the 5 least-useful frames of wax so they can all be in one deep with HRM Tamar at the head of the family, perfectly poised to bring in a whopping fall flow and make me lots more honey.