Busy couple of weeks

A week and a bit ago (the last weekend of May), John and I went out to Farmer Katy's to split the Italian and Sicilian hives . Side by side splits are an incredibly easy way (in theory) of increasing your apiary numbers. It sounds just like it is: you take the top hive body off of a hive and put it to the side of the bottom, add another hive body to the top of each and, viola, you have two hives where you previously had one. The big issue here lays in whether or not you let the hive that suddenly finds itself queenless requeen themselves or install a queen you've procurred elsewhere. Lack of funds from planting a garden dictated the first move for us. But we ran into another problem before we even got that far.



The Italian splits on the right and the queenless
Sicilians on the far left



Two weeks before we planned to do the split I did a quick inspection of the Strasburg hives and found them to be active and well populated. Much earlier in the season we had added honey supers to get them started on production and to easy the potential of overcrowding - something that, if the hive feels it, causes them to kick off a swarm (see "Our first swarm collection" and "And the second…and third…and fourth…" for more info on swarming).



 Everything seemed hunky dory at the time, but I probably should have done a more in depth inspection. As soon as we opened the Sicilians we knew there was something wrong. First, the population didn't seem as large as it was two weeks previous. Second, the stored pollen, known as bee bread, was waxy looking. During a beekeeping class last year at DeLaney Farm, a part of Denver Urban Gardens here in Aurora, Marty Hardison told us a secret he learned a long time ago. You can teel a hive is queenless before you don't see any eggs or new larva by looking at the bee bread. If it has a waxy or glossy look, the queen is gone. Judging by this and confirmed by the lack of eggs and really young larva, and taking into account the smaller population of the mean little...bees, we decided that the old queen had swarmed off with a good chunk of the hive.



Honestly, it was hard to figure out if we should be bummed or do the happy dance. On one hand, the Sicilians produced some great and copious amounts of honey last year. On the other, we know they had put a hit out on us a some point (later, John would get stung six or seven times in the head when one got inside his veil and a bunch others snuck up on him when he was trying to clear it). In the long run, I am glad for the possibility of bringing in a new queen and I'll get to our solution shortly.

 

We checked the Sicilians the rest of the way to make sure that they were queenless and moved on to the Italians. Always more agreeable than their cousins, the Italians were well situated to split. The queen had laid lots and lots of eggs, plenty of capped brood was present, and decent honey and pollen stores were present. So we set up the side by side and hoped for the best.

 
John developed a great idea to build up the Sicilians and requeen them at the same time. We had the swarms we captured the previous week at his place so why not add the smaller swarm to the Sicilians? It was small enough to easily add to the existing population and we knew it had a queen. Plus it cost is nothing - always a good price! The plan was in place, just impossible to execute at the moment, so we planned for the next weekend.

A frame of ferals from the Top Bar Hive

Our inspection of the TBH ferals gave us a large amount of encouragement. About half of the front brood frames had newly drawn comb. At least one of the three queens we had accidentally joined together survived because eggs were aplenty in that new comb. Also encouraging about the ferals was there calm demeanor. They only got riled when I was trying to get the frames back into the hive without squishing any of them. Yeah, gonna need some new technique on that. But the TBH keeps most of the population from being exposed and thus helps keep them calm.

A quick look in the nuc that we had the the fourth swarm in showed that they would do well also. The queen was laying a good number of eggs in the comb her girls had drawn on four of the five frames in the nuc. So we wrapped them in a sheet and put them in my trunk for the journey to their new home.



An inside look of the ferals in the TBH



The trick to building up a single hive from two, I have heard, is to separate them with a piece of newspaper. So that's what I did. I used a spare hive body (one that should have been taken by the Sicilians had they stuck around long enough) and put the frames of ferals in that and placed it on the top of the Sicilians. Now we wait. In theory, the queenless Sicilians should slowly get used to the ferals as they chew threw the newspaper and start to catch the scent of the feral queen. Once they get used to the new queen, they will add their strength to the ferals and vice versa. Most importantly, the Sicilians will be gone in about 6 or 7 weeks: there may be some capped brood, but they will be the last of our little mobsters.

The ferals on the left with their new high rise digs

And the second…and third…and fourth…



The swarm Bob collected on Sunday









This last week was rather exciting. We learned that Beth and Kent’s house acts as a swarm attractor and that the three clusters we collected were likely not from the same swarm, but rather were virgin queen swarms. As I mentioned in the previous blog, we captured a swarm on Beth and Kent’s backyard awning last Thursday (their backyard backs up to a drainage way, providing a natural path for anything wild to cruise up and down). On Friday, Beth called me to say that her husband, Kent, noticed two more clusters on a pine tree near the awning. I coordinated with John to stop by Saturday morning to pick them up.



The capture in progress - a swift knock or five got most of
the bees in the box

Our initial thought was that these additional bees were just more from the same swarm we picked up on the previous night. We figured more bees to add to the hive meant a better chance for success and it just seemed too coincidental that the same yard would attract three separate swarms. John decided to post the question to www.beesource.com, a forum for anything bees. The response he got surprised both of us as, despite the large number of articles, books, and otherwise we had read about bees, none had mentioned the phenomenon of virgin queen swarms.





Swarms are a natural response by bees to a sense of overcrowding in the hive (a variety of things cause this sense: the population is too big, there are too many new worker bees compared to brood for them to care for, or the hive senses that the old queen is laying less eggs and raises up new queen cells). When the swarm impulse begins, the old queen trims down to prepare for flight by slowing down and then stopping laying eggs. Scouts begin checking out new places to go and, when the time comes, lead about half the hive with the old queen to new pastures, so to speak.



The parent hive raises those multiple queens to maturity. When the first queen hatches, she rushes off to see if she can kill the other queens before they hatch. Sometimes one will hatch out and the two will have a fight to the death to see who gets to rule (though this is a bit of a misrepresentation of the hive and its population: the queen is just as much a slave to her role as the workers and drones, but all work toward the benefit of the hive or the species: survival and propagation is the true king and queen of the bees). However, there are rare instances of the new queens not killing each other off. To cope with this situation, since only one queen can abide in any given hive, the virgin queen and a one or two thousand workers will swarm off (I give this number based on what we saw with the four total swarms we caught in the last week – prime swarms generally are much larger).



Surprisingly calm, but very curious



Not knowing this initially, John and I combined the first swarm with the two swarms we captured on Saturday as they seemed to get along nicely. The response he got to this on the forum was that virgin queens haven’t produced enough pheromones to lay claim to anyone, so the workers that swarm with any given one are just as happy to hook up with any queen. Our guess is that the queens did have a battle royal and that only one is left at this point.

One last thing, I mentioned a couple things that, if you were paying attention, would look like plot holes the size of Mack trucks. Between Thursday and Saturday we captured three swarms (all with no protective gear, must say; swarm collection is awesome bee PR!), but you may have noticed I said that we collected four clusters. While I was working on the top bar hive that we would install the initial three clusters in, Kent called and told me that a fourth had landed in the aforementioned tree. I texted John and we had the same thought that we could put this swarm in a nuc and would have nothing to lose and a hive to gain.



The Sunday swarm is in the nucleus hive on the left



This cluster was larger and yielded a pleasant surprise. While I was showing Kent and Beth the difference between a drone and worker bee, I saw the queen! Before this I had seen a whole of two queens: the replacement Carniloan queen we purchased and a queen from a TBH class that the instructor had pointed out. But here was my third, and a fortunate find at that! She was about 25% larger than a worker and most of that was in her abdomen.



The combined swarms in their new top bar hive



Finding this swarm’s queen made a really good day into a simply fabulous day!



The other thing is why Beth and Kent’s yard was such an attractant to the swarms. About two weeks ago, they had noticed a large swarm in their tree but then it disappeared. The swarm left pheromones behind that made the area attractive to other swarms, plus the yard is likely very close to whatever hive they swarmed from. Second, the swarm never disappeared. Instead, it found a home under a bay window. I’m also guessing it holds an unmated queen as a dozen or more drones were attempting to gain access to the hive and being repelled by workers. Quite an odd sight!

Posted by Bob Nelson





Our first swarm collection

Last Thursday John and I rescued a small swarm of bees a friend of his had spotted in a neighbor’s yard. I say rescued because their ranks appeared decimated by the cold and rain. We found them on the side of an awning over a back porch in two small clusters. The smallest had already succumbed completely to the cold (or so we thought…), but the other (about the size of two softballs) showed some movement and life.

With the help of a timely coincidence – namely John’s wife running into the president of a local beekeeping club who just happened to have a bee vacuum in her car – we collected the swarm with speed and ease. A bee vac is a low powered vacuum designed to suck up bees. This one had been rigged to attach to the top of a small bucket to deposit the bees in and ran off of a car battery jump starter kit. The bees were so chilly that they put up only minimal resistance and only two or three took flight.

And all of this added up to one simple truth: we could not have asked for better circumstances in which two neophyte beekeepers collected their first swarm. We didn’t wear any protective equipment except what we already had on to combat the chilly weather. The neighbors that spotted the hive, friends of John’s from his church and Bible study group, were really excited to see the show and Beth, the renter of the house that harbored the six-legged squatters, was really happy to see them rescued.

The bees have a long trip ahead of them. Assuming the queen is still alive, she’ll need to rebuild a very damaged population – and she’ll have to wait until Saturday to start. While I have most of the top bar hive that we were planning on using to rear captured swarms put together, I still have a bit more to go and won’t have it ready till this weekend. The good news is this: John transferred the swarm from the bee vac bucket to one of the nuc boxes that we had leftover from our bees last year last night and, to paraphrase for gentler ears, they were ticked. However, remember my “or so we thought…” comment? We had sucked up most of the cluster that appeared dead, yet John found no dead bees – not a single one – in the bucket when he made the transfer. Our suspicion is that these bees were so cold they were near death, but not quite there. Once they warmed up they found life again. My hope is that this means the bees still have the vigor to stage a comeback. My fear is that we’ll have another batch of Sicilians on our hands.

Only time will tell!

Posted by Bob Nelson