What a long, hot, annoying weekend full of bees. Karl hadn't opened the hive for nearly a month and he was getting concerned that it was too crowded. If a hive is too crowded, the queen freaks out that she doesn't have enough room to lay eggs and she up and leaves the hive, taking a whole lot of worker bees with her. Some folks say that when a queen leaves and the hive swarms it's a sign of a healthy hive, but nobody really wants their hive to swarm. If it swarms, you need to hope that the hive will have raised a new queen and that she's healthy, mates, and then comes back to the hive to start laying eggs. This all takes time and while this all happens, your diminished hive of worker bees is growing older and bees are dying with no new baby bees to take their place. Anyway, Karl was concerned that they were running out of room so he built these frames from the materials I picked up last week.
The other problem is that Karl saw a couple hive beetles in the top of part of the hive. Apparently, hive beetles are fairly common in the southern hives. They have adapted so well that the honeybees can't sting them, can't chase them out and the beetles actually mess with the honeybees in such a way that when the bees are surrounding the beetles to isolate them, the bees feed honey to them. Karl wanted to battle the beetles.
So on Saturday morning, with the temperature expected to crack 100 degrees, Karl donned his bee suit and opened the hive. To make a long story short, the hive was a mess. He found that the frames in the top super had melted because they had been made of paraffin, not beeswax. The bees had started building honeycomb on the frames, but everything just collapsed. These were frames that Karl's dad had brought down for us from Massachusetts to get us started. New England hives can have paraffin frames for the bees to build comb on because it doesn't get as hot as it does down here. Southern bees need beeswax frames in their hives.
Karl then tried out a homemade made trap for the hive beetles. Bottom line -- it didn't work, made a huge mess, Karl got really upset and I was able to have a teachable moment with Kai and Malin about YouTube not always being expert advice.
Then, when Karl started checking on the frames below the queen excluder, he never did find the queen. Unfortunately, he did see a couple of queen cells that the bees had built which mean that the hive was getting ready for their queen to leave. We hope that now that Karl took out the messy melted frames and added a new super to give them more room, the queen and a bunch of workers won't leave. Unfortunately, Karl's dad says that once a queen decides to leave there's no stopping her. So either Karl just averted a swarm that was only days away, or we'll have the bees move away in the next few days. We'll just have to see.Just to top it off, Karl put the melted frames out in the backyard. Even though there wasn't that much comb on the frames and that which was there was really messy, there was some honey stored on it. Karl put in a cooler so that the bees could rob it and bring the honey back to the hive. We had dozens of bees flying around our backyard all day.
The weekend's over. We hope we still have happy bees.
By way of an update (this is Karl) I stayed up past midnight last night reading about swarms and swarm prevention. Wikapedia (and Julie’s right, you can’t trust what you read on the net necessarily) has a large page on swarms, prevention, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarming_(honey_bee) I was hopeful when reading these two bullets…
ReplyDelete“Beekeepers that do not wish to increase the number of hives they have may use one or more of the many methods for swarm control… [cut]
• Simply keep the brood nest open. In preparation for swarming, bees fill the brood nest with honey. The queen stops laying to be trim enough to fly, and her newly unemployed nurse bees go with her. The concept of this method is to open the brood nest to employ those nurse bees and get the queen laying again and redirect this sequence of events. This is done by any number of slight variations from empty frames in the brood nest, frames of bare foundation in the brood nest or drawn combs in the brood nest, or moving brood combs to the box above to cause more expansion of the brood nest.
• Checkerboarding. In the late winter, frames are rearranged above the growing brood nest. The frames above the brood nest are alternated between full honey frames and empty drawn out frames or even foundationless frames. It is believed that only colonies that perceive to have enough reserves will attempt to swarm. Checkerboarding frames above the brood nest apparently destroys this sense of having reserves.”
As it turns out, I sort of did both of these techniques over the weekend (on gut more than knowledge, I have to admit). I nearly doubled the amount of space in the brood chamber by adding a deep super full of a mix of spun out frames, virgin frames or semi full frames. I put all this below the existing brood chamber – so if the queen is still around but is in the mood to go, she’ll have to walk down over some prime real estate with all her girls on the way to the door. If that doesn’t make her think twice, well, we tried.
I also talked to a neighbor keeper over the weekend who was very helpful. She thought I’d perhaps already had a swarm and that in either case my hive sounded very strong and would be fine. I don’t want to be “that keeper” who loses the girls, but it was comforting.
A little correction to Julie’s account – the beetle traps I’d made and had ready would have worked if I’d ever gotten to the bottom of the hive. Instead there was a bit of a distraction with a near-swarming hive, so beetle traps became something I’d just have to focus on later. I slid one under my lid this morning with a little beetle-accessible but bee-excluding box I made out of some flashing and lumber. We can take a photo and update you on how that works if you like.