Hive-Mind

Perhaps a bit overdue since my last visit (3 weeks), I went in today to see whether my switcher swapperoo trick of adding frames of brood from Hive 1 to Hive 2 to help them create a new queen worked. And, lo and behold, it did! This is one of the two frames I added from Hive 1, and you can see right smack dab in the middle there is an empty queen cell, hanging down long. Suh-weet! I didn’t see any fresh brood laid by the queen in there, but I figure it’s been only about two weeks, so she had to mature, hatch, get herself right fucked, and then she can come back and start laying eggs. Well, sweet thing, good luck to you and have fun!

I also took advantage of the fact that I was all suited up to flip the bottom board on Hive 1. It has two sides, one is a bit shorter than the other. Funny thing, though, while I was in there, I found some mouse or rat poop in the back of the hive (see picture below). Man, that’s one bold rat! I checked the frames around it and they didn’t seem to be touched, so I figure the rat came in looking for a snack, woke the girls and got…well, please excuse the pun, scared shitless. Funny, the turds were encased in propolis, a waxy substance they use to seal off holes and the like. I’ve read that occasionally a field mouse with wander into a hive, die from the girls’ ministrations and the girls will mummify the corpse in propolis. Spooky.

Finaly bonus picture. This is a frame of honey I pulled to check how things were doing. See how the honey changes color as the season progresses? Cool.

On Jean’s instructions, I went into the hives on Monday to clear out the queen cells. Like so much of my life these days, it was a good news / bad news situation.

The good news was that there were no queen cells in either hive. The bad news is that Hive 2 had no queen.

No queen means no baby bees. No baby bees means no worker bees. No worker bees means no honey, and I want me my honey!

How did I know there was no queen? Well, take a look. The picture on the left is a frame of brood from Hive 1. Each of those capped cells has a little baby bee in it, itching to get out and collect me some honey. The frame in the middle is a frame from the brood chamber of Hive 2. See all those empty cells? Those are just ripe for egg-laying, but there is no egg-laying because there is no queen. The picture on the right shows the closest thing that Hive 2 could muster to brood. Those bullet-shaped cells have drones in them. Drones are boy bees. Boy bees don’t work. Boy bees don’t make me honey.

Regular worker bees can lay eggs that become boy bees, but they can’t lay eggs that become other (female) worker bees. Only queens can do that. Now, I’m pretty sure some search engine is going to pick up all this talk of queens, boys and getting laid and start classifying this site as a gay porn site, so I’ll leave off the bee reproduction lesson there.

Where did the queen go? Well, see my previous post, titled “Yay, problem solved! Oh…Oops. Crap!” She probably swarmed and left the colony with half of the workers. Ordinarily, she would have left another queen behind, but for some reason, in this case, she didn’t.

So what the heck do I do? Jean from Beez Neez said she wouldn’t be getting any queens in for another few weeks, and that would blow my season (great, more search engine fodder).

Well, what I did was open back up Hive 1 (I didn’t realize the problem with Hive 2 until I had completely reassembled Hive 1, in full body double-layer protection in 75 degree heat), grabbed two frames of newly laid brood and pop them into Hive 2, while pulling out two empty frames from Hive 2 and depositing them in Hive 1. What should happen is that the Hive 2 bees will be able to make themselves a new queen from the freshly laid eggs in those frames. Remember, the way a queen becomes a queen is that the workers feed a regular worker larva tons of royal jelly, some sort of bee magic potion that transforms ugly scullery maid bees into princesses.

Now, you may be asking, won’t the bees in Hive 2 realize they’ve been cuckolded, and are being asked to raise the young of a different hive? No, not really. Bees will carefully guard their hives from bees from other colonies, but brood is brood, and they’ll tend to it as if it were their own.

Now, Julie just pointed out to me that there’s a danger that the new queen won’t get out and get her some hot bee on bee action (search engines, take note, this is Insect Porn, not Gay Porn) and thus get herself into the family way. In that case, I could end up with a virgin queen in the hive, meaning no brood. Actually, as I type this, it occurs to me (a week late), that maybe that’s what I have now. I mean, the reason I think there’s no queen is that there is no brood, but that’s what you get from a virgin queen as well as from no queen. Hmmm…Jean, expect a phone call tomorrow.

Anyway, it being July 4th and all, Benni, Jole and I were having people over for a little BBQ and hot tub extravaganza, so I took advantage of having the hives open and plucked a frame of capped honey to feed to the guests. Picture on the left below shows what comb looks like after you’ve taken big spoonfuls of it and scooped it into people’s mouths after a Fourth of July BBQ. You can chew the wax kind of like chewing gum. Chewing gum you want to shortly spit out. But the honey is yum-yumalicious.

Oh, and the picture on the right is me with my new veil and gloves, in my California Department of Erections jumpsuit. Classy.

It’s been almost a month since I last checked on the girls, so I wanted to make sure the queens were properly situated in their brood chambers below the queen excluder. I suited up, more or less (I use cotton gloves, which they can sting through but slows them down, and a shirt with a full head veil sewn into it, made for mosquito-averse hikers) and pulled off the top of Hive 1. Given that I’d been stung the last umpteen times straight I’d been into the hives, I decided to use smoke this time to calm them down. I generally prefer not to use it, because it causes them to gorge on honey from the comb and thus sets them back a few days in their honey collection efforts, but I’m getting kind of sick of having hands swollen like a diabetics after every foray into the hives, so smoke ‘em I did.

As you may remember, Hive 1 is performing much more strongly (and behaving much more aggressively than Hive 2. My first surprise: Hive 2 had almost completely filled their third honey super. I thought that was pretty damn good, considering they had only filled two honey supers total in all of last year, and here it is just the end of June.

My second surprise: despite the use of gloves and smoke, the girls are still ornery enough to jab their little stingers through my gloves into my waiting hands. OUCH! Apparently, in my flailing and cursing, I swung my hive tool (looks like a miniature crowbar) a bit too close to my veil and tore a little rip.

Well, I didn’t immediately notice said rip, leading to my third and most startling surprise. There I am, pulling out the frames of comb, looking at the lush, sweet honey being built up in each, when I notice a bee crawling along my veil. No big deal, lots of bees buzzing around everywhere. I mean, I am a beekeeper tending his beehives, right? Well, what I noticed with a start about this particular bee crawling along my veil was that, rather than crawling along the outside of the veil, she was crawling along the inside. PERIMETER BREACH! The bees have entered the bonnet!

Omigod, I’ve got a bee in my bonnet! I don’t even know what a god dang bonnet is but sweet Lord above that bee with her stinger is on the wrong side of the veil, the side with my nose and eyes and lips, whereas everything I’ve got to protect myself is on the other side of the veil!

Now, I ask you, what would you do?

1. Put down your hive tool, walk calmly away from the hive and remove your hat and veil
2. Calmly pinch the bee between thumb and forefinger from the outside of your veil
3. Flail your arms wildly, batting and grabbing at your veil while prancing and stumbling madly away from the swarm of 50,000+ angry bees that are roaring about your exposed head

If you answered 3, you are well on your way to graduation from the Hive Mind School of Beekeeping. Fortunately, 3 actually turns out to work in this case, and the placid, mildly confused and tragically lost bee that has entered my bonnet is summarily executed between my thumb and forefinger a short while later.

Back to the hives.

So Hive 1 has almost filled their third honey super, which means that they are probably overcrowded now, and are probably getting ready to hatch a new queen and swarm. Hive 2, on the other hand, while having completely filled their first honey super, have not even entered their second. It’s really weird to look at, it’s like there’s this invisible ceiling above them that they don’t realize they can cross. In the bottom honey super, they’re packed in, overcrowded, and in the top honey super, inches away and without any obstruction, they’re not stepping a foot, the frames are still nothing but pressed foundation.

This isn’t underheard of, and I’ve read what you’re supposed to do. So I take a couple frames from the outer edges of the top honey super of Hive 1, shake off the bees, and a couple frames from the outer edges of the full honey super of Hive 2, and place them in the middle of the top, empty honey super of Hive 2, swapping in the undrawn frames from the top honey super of Hive 2 for the ones I removed elsewhere. This should have the effect of helping the bees realize that the top honey super is ripe territory for moving into.

Below are pictures of almost fully capped honey, undrawn foundation, and the box of mixed drawn and undrawn comb.

That, I’m pretty sure, should solve the problem of Hive 2 and their empty honey super, but it doesn’t solve the problem of Hive 1 and their overcrowding. So today, I jumped in the car and headed up to Beez Neez Apiary supply in Snohomish with my shopping list:

• 1 Western (honey) super
• 10 new frames of foundation
• 1 new veil
• 1 pair of real friggin’ beekeeping gloves thick enough to keep those sharp stinger from constantly jabbing my poor, swollen hands

Jean of Beez Neez was, as always, a trove of information. I lucked out by arriving just as a beekeeper even more incompetent than myself left, putting her in a commiseratory mood. I gave her a quick brief on what was up with my hives, and here’s what she had to say:

• I did the right thing by swapping the frames around in Hive 2
• She was not surprised that Hive 1 had filled three supers. Whereas I thought my girls were bad-ass foragers having accumulated this stunning pile of wealth, Jean said that she often stacked as many as 9 honey supers. Oh. Wow. That’s alot. I mean, I’m going to need a stepladder just to get my fourth one on.
• Once the bees start laying extra queen cells for a swarm, they will continue to do so for the rest of the season, so I need to go in every couple of weeks and clear out the queen cells. I didn’t realize this. This explains that swarm that ended up on my neighbor’s sculpture. Oops.
• When clearing out the queen cells, there is a danger that I kill all the queen cells, the old queen leaves and then there is no queen. The avoid this, I have to look carefully for an empty queen cell. If there is one, that means that the new queen has hatched and it’s OK to kill all the queen cells I find. If there isn’t one, I need to leave one intact queen cell to replace that old queen that may have already left. This is very important, because it means I’m going to have to open the hives and get stung a lot more. Dang.
• It takes 20,000 bees to maintain the brood chamber. So if you’ve got a hive of 40,000 bees, only half of them are out foraging. If you’ve got a hive of 80,000 bees, then 60,000 of them are out foraging. These numbers are so large they boggle my mind and make me think maybe I just misplaced a decimal point. I did not.

Beyond that info, had a nice chat with Jean, talked to her about baseball and a boy she’s been mentoring in beekeeping for the past 5 or so years on the other side of the country. She seems very happy with her vocation, which she’s been doing since 1973.

Got everything on my shopping list, headed home. Threw a coat of paint on the new hive body, will finish up painting it over the weekend, then head back in with my new veil and bad-ass gloves to kill the queen cells.

As an urban beekeeper, I get asked the same questions alot, so I thought I’d start a FAQ. Here are some samples:

Q: Can you really keep bees in the city? Don’t your neighbors mind?
A: Yes, Seattle lets you keep up to 4 licensed beehives in your urban backyard. The neighbors generally don’t even know, as the bees range far. Mostly they’ll just notice an improved vegetable harvest.

Q: Do you get stung?
A: Yes.

Q: Really? But you must get used to it, huh?
A: No. Ouch. That really hurt.

Q: Don’t you wear that crazy beekeeper suit?
A: They can sting you OW! through OW! it. OW!

Q: Why do you keep saying ow?
A: I just got stung! OUCH! G-d d…OW!

Yeah, I just went into the hives, a frustrating and painful experience. First, I got stung 7 times. OW! No, you do not get used it to. The only mitigating factor is that when they sting me through my clothing, I can pull out the stinger almost instantly just by pulling on my clothing. Usually, when you get a bee sting, there’s a little barb that keeps the stinger in your skin and the venom sac pulls off with the stinger. That’s why bees die when they sting you: they leave half their rear ends pumping venom into you. Note too that that little pumping sac at the end of the stinger is still pumping venom after they leave it behind, so you’re best served to remove it quickly. However, don’t pinch it to pull it out, because that just shoves more venom in. Try to flick the stinger off, maybe with a credit card. Or just scream obscenities and flail at the air. That works, too.

Anyway, as you may remember, I’ve had this problem with too many broodchambers. Well, I got some good advice from some more experienced beekeepers who visited the blog (thanks Robo and Susi!) so I decided to go in and take care of it. The advice was to find the queen and move her down, or else just rotate the brood chambers so that the chamber she’s in is at the bottom. Or just leave ‘em, there’s nothing disastrous about having more brood chambers, and apparently many beekeepers do it on purpose.

OK, here’s the thing about the “find the queen” step in those instructions. There are 50,000 freakin’ bees in the hive and, no offense intended here, but they all look alike! I mean, I know the queens a bit bigger and more golden and she probably still has a little paint splotch on her, but it’s not like I’ve got a bunch of guys checking passports and filtering the girls through metal detectors. I looked, I looked, I looked. OW! I got stung and stung and stung and I couldn’t find the queen.

Well, maybe I’ll just leave it, right? Well, she’s laying great. Seriously, lots of brood.

In my honey supers.

That is not where she is supposed to be laying. That’s where the honey is supposed to go. Was I supposed to put in the queen excluder (a metal screen with spaces big enough for regular bees to get through but too small for the larger queen to get through) in already? For some reason I thought I didn’t need to put that in until later in the season.

Crap all. Same thing in Hive 2, by the way. Brood up in honey super.

Anyway, so I took out the bottom brood chamber from Hive 1 (it was full of pollen mostly and almost entirely inhabited by drones), moved the top brood chamber down to the bottom position (I dunno, maybe that will do something useful) and added a third honey super (they’re already filling everything they’ve got). I didn’t want to move the honey supers to the bottom, below the brood chambers, as that just seems like giving up on them as honey supers. I think it’s time to consult with a professional.

Ow! Ow, ow, OW! The girls were aggro today. I was out turning the garden (tomatoes, strawberries and zucchini is the crop planned for this year), near the hives, granted, but not actually in their flight path, and they kept coming at me. Not just a quick warning buzz, either, but a full on attack. Bees in my hair, buzzing around my head, bonking into my face. Most odd, they even chased me around to the front of the house. Usually, they’ll just nudge you enough to let you know it’s time to move on, and leave you alone once you give them some distance, but not today.

Then, as if that weren’t enough, I got stung on my ear when I wasn’t even anywhere near the hives. I’m just sitting there on my back deck, talking about how aggro they’re being, and zap bam OUCH! I got stung on my ear. Now the right side of my head looks like Prince Charles, all Dumbo’ed out.

I’m not sure why they’re being so aggressive. It could be the time of year, it could be that I added a box of bees last week and that left them agitated, it could be that the new bees are just bitchier.

Well, I gave up on trying to turn the garden bed (I’ll do it by floodlight at night some time this week), but I did suit up and check the hives. Hive 1, the more aggressive one, is thriving. I was a bit worried because I didn’t find any brood at all in the bottom brood chambers (which would mean there wasn’t a fertile queen in the house), but on second inspection, I found a bunch of freshly laid brood in an upper chamber. I missed it the first time around because it was brand new. In the first few days, it looks like tiny grain of rice, smaller than a poppyseed, right in the middle of the cell. It made sense that it was in the upper chamber, because that’s where I left the queen.

I had actually intended to take out the uppermost chamber, because I put it in kind of by accident. Usually you only have two brood chambers and the rest are honey supers. They all look the same, boxes with frames in them, but the brood chambers are taller. The honey supers are shorter so they’re easier to move around when they’re filled with delicious, sweet honey.

In any case, I couldn’t take it out because it had brood in it, so now I have three brood chambers and I’m not quite sure what to do about. Advice, anyone?

Hive 2 also looked good. Nice solid laying pattern, and they’re making headway on their first honey super. Hive 1 had gone through all the sugar syrup I had left them, but Hive 2 had only gone through about half of it, so I gave the three leftover jars I had to Hive 1.

Oh, and I got stung. Again. Through my pants.

Bitches.