Checked out the hives last week. I had expected that with the cool weather, the hives would be as stunted as my tomato plants, but was pleasantly surprised to find both hives had filled both the honey supers they had access to. I know I'm supposed to add a new super when the old one is about 2/3rds full, so this left me late to the game. Ah, overachiever bees, we should all have such problems.

Actually, although I say the supers were completely filled, what I really mean is that they were completely filled except for the few plastic frames I had left in there. They did end up working over one black plastic frame (left), but it was clear from its state of completeness that they had started on it later than the frames around it, no doubt reluctantly. I gave away my remaining plastic on Craigslist for free.

But check out the chunks o' honey in the other frames. Full capped and back-breaking heavy!



Now, you may remember that last year I experimented with encouraging the bees to build burr comb around objects I put in the hive as a sort of bee-human sculptural collaboration. It worked out well last year, so I decided to try it again this year.

It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to put in there. I did spend a day biking around to various garage sales and toy stores in search of an appropriately sized Winnie the Pooh doll (thanks for the suggestion, Nader Enthusiast), but came up empty handed. (Well, found one Piglet, but what's a Piglet without a Pooh?)

And then I hit on it: Christmas lights! When it's done, I can drain the honey and hang them from somewhere as lighted decoration.

I poked around in the bins of lights we have in the attic (for parties, not Christmas, nor Jewsmas, I'm just not much of a holiday-decorator) and found a goodly-sized string, but when I tried plugging it in, the bulbs felt too warm too quickly. I was afraid they'd melt the wax the first time I turned them on.

Fortunately, digging around in Burning Man bins, I found a short string of battery-powered, LED lights. They're perfect for wrapping into a costume to be seen at night, and perfect for stringing through a bee hive.

I took one of my crappy, bees-hate-em plastic frames, popped out the plastic, and strung the lights into the frame. I tried to get it as flast as possible so it would fit into the natural pattern of the comb, tying the bulbs to the adjacent cords with thin wire, but I'm still pretty sure the bees will balk at the odd shapes in places. To help them feel more at home, I painted the cords and bulbs with a thin film of beeswax I melted down from burr comb I stripped out of the hive last week.

I can't wait to find out how it turned out. I'm worried that I put it in too late in the season for them to build new comb around it. Last year when I added empty frames this late in the season, they didn't build it up, and a commenter said they won't build if the summer's too advanced, so we'll see.



As always, I'll keep you posted.

I swear, you can't make things like this up. Last year, Nerve.com published a Sex advice from a beekeeper article, featuring advice from yours truly, among others. Now, here's what I found in my inbox this morning:

Hello,
My name is Elisha and I am a Casting Assistant for ABC's hit show "Wife Swap." I hope you don't mind me contacting you. I'm currently searching for a beekeeping family! Are you a beekeeper who shares their passion of beekeeping with their family? If you are interested in sharing your family philosophy with us, I would love to hear from you.

The premise of "Wife Swap" is simple: two moms from two different families get the opportunity to swap lives for a week to experience what it's like to live a different lifestyle - and to see what they can teach each other about their own!

Potential families can live anywhere in the United States. Families must consist of two parents that have at least one child between the ages of 5 to18. Families that appear on the show will receive a financial honorarium for their time and commitment. If you refer a family that appears on the show you would receive $1,000.

If you and your family are interested in participating, email elisha.deleon (at) castingrdf.com ...ASAP with a description of your family, photos (if available) and contact information.

And wouldn't ya know it, Michelle and I are expecting our first child in November, so we don't qualify (cuz I'm sure Michelle would have jumped all over the idea, otherwise). So sad.

But hey, if you go for it, tell them you read about it here. Thousand bucks, yo.

My neighbor Lesli popped over yesterday to drop off some empty jars. She'd been asking for a tour for some time, so I took advantage of the excuse to take a break and tend to the hives.

Both had two honey supers, and both were almost full, with the outer frames filled, if not completely capped (below left). There was quite a few drone cells in the sunny hive up in the upper super, with some worker cells as well (below middle). (I don't use a queen excluder. I tell myself its because I want to 'go natural' and let the bees tend the hive their own way, but really it's because I'm exceedingly and increasingly lazy.)


I added a third honey super to each, this time slotting it in between the two existing supers rather than layering it on top (consistent with the advice I received on my Movin' Up post) and sealed it back up without digging down much further.

As I went to write this post, I happened upon the pictures I took last year, and realized that I had put on four honey supers on the sunny hive by mid-July 2007. Another sign of a dry year.

One of the treats of having bees in your backyard is that you can just sit down next to the hive whenever you feel like it and pass the time, watching them go about their day.

I was doing just that the other day, when I noticed an odd behavior. There was a bee out on the stoop with slightly shorter wings then her compatriots, and a larger bee was working her over. The larger bee stood over her, fondled her with her tentacles, licked under the wings, the works. A couple times, another bee came over and they had a three-way tete-a-tete(-a-tete). Notice, too, in the bottom photo that it's clear that smaller bee had less hair on her back than the others.

I couldn't quite figure out what was going on. Was this a newly born bee being cleaned of her afterbirth by one of her sisters, or a runty girl being bumrushed out of the hive?

Take a look at the photos below and let me know if you know the answer.

Amanda, a reader of this blog, wrote to ask whether new supers generally go on top of existing honey supers or below. I answered that the second super usually goes on top, and after that, I'd seen diagrams of swapping the new super in to the middle of stack, but hadn't tried it. She responded

Well, that's exactly what we did and they wouldn't touch them. I guess we will just extract what's already on there and return the drawn comb back to them.

My suggestion was as follows:

• Make sure you're using wax frames, not plastic
• Take outer frames from the existing, filled super and swap them out with middle frames from the new top super
  
• Spray frames with sugar water
• Swap the order of the supers

Any other suggestions for Amanda?

Alyssa gave me on update on the results of yesterday's debacle:

Well, this morning I went and found them just as we left them, all nestled into the nooks and crannies of the ivy and ornamental wall. after explaining to them as nicely as I could WHY they should move into the nice box, complete with honey and drawn comb, they flat-out refused and rebutted with animated buzzing. So I resorted to trying to grab them, first by the fistful, then using a garden trowel, and drop them into the box. No real luck. So I left them for a while. When I left they were pissed, and all over the place.

Came back a few hours later, repeated the futile efforts of earlier (Pavlov was wrong!), the results were no different. Maybe they were more annoyed, hard to tell....

At about 1:00 I got a call from the neighbor who's house they were squatting near that they had swarmed again and were heading South. I drove around and tried to find them...... no such luck. The girls are just plain gone..... sad.

It's amazing the things you know that you didn't realize you knew.

I got a call from Alyssa today, one of her three hives had swarmed and she wanted to know would I come over to help round them up. Sure, it meant stealing precious time away from a backyard BBQ, but a friend in need is a friend indeed (if you knew what Seattle's weather's been like this year, you'd realize that this actually is a sacrifice).

Quick background for those of you not familiar: bees swarm when they feel crowded, under stress or otherwise just want to screw with you. They'll create a second queen, and one day half of them come pouring out of the hive with their new leader heading off to establish a new home. It's not a huge problem except that, you know, you just lost half your hive. The best you can do at that point is try to round them up into a box and establish them as a fresh colony.

The bees had settled down for the night in a neighbor's yard, likely planning to pick their new home in the morning. Unfortunately for us, they chose to settle on wall of those cement blocks with the funky patterns in it.




See the trick to rounding up a swarming hive is to capture the queen. If you can get the queen into a box, the rest of the bees will follow and you're off to the races. The problem is, the queen was likely hiding out in one of those little crevices, so we couldn't just scoop in the lot of them and hope to catch her.

Now, I'd seen in books and such that beekeepers will vacuum bees up to collect them. After a bit of poking, Alyssa's father came out with an old shop vac, freshly rinsed. We replaced the filter with my beekeeping glove: a perfect fit, which I took to be a good omen.

Stupid omens.

We all agreed that we weren't sure it was a good idea, but had little to lose (easy for us to say) and Alyssa set off to the races vacuuming the little guys up. I sat back a bit and chatted with her father.

As she vacuumed, I mentioned to him how I loved the distinctive smell of bee, a bit like honey, a bit like wax, a lot like...bee. I love it.

But...something wasn't quite right. That smell was a smell I recognized...

"Hey Alyssa," I said. "Why don't we take a break and see how they're doing in there, make sure the suction isn't too much for them."

Good idea, we agreed, and ever so slowly lifted the lid off the shop vac, trying to just crack it enough that we could see inside without letting the swarm of angry bees back out.

Oh, no worry there.

See, the smell that I knew without ever actually knowing consciously that I knew was the smell of crushed bee. Lots and lots of crushed bee, in this case.

Turns out, a shop vac is way too strong to suck up bees. Well, too strong if you want them to live, that is. You can kinda see the splatter mark there on the side of the bucket, can't ya?



Obviously, we were pretty mournful. I mean, I try to avoid killing even a few bees when I work with them, and here we had probably wiped out half the hive in one sucking frenzy.

We all kind of stared at each other, thinking "what did we just do?" We meant well, right? Ah, the path to hell is paved with good intentions, they say.

Ummm...sorry?

Mixed news on the hives. I checked in on them a couple weeks back and everything seemed pretty peachy. Good healthy brood pattern in both hives (see picture on the left there) and I even caught a surprise glimpse of the Queen in what I'm calling "Sunny Hive" (because it gets the morning sun directly). That's her in the middle and right there. Notice how her wings are a bit shorter and she's a lighter amber color then her daughters?



I had already given them two brood chambers and a honey super that was half-filled from last year. Sunny Hive was making good progress on them, so I doubled her up with an empty honey super. Shady Hive (so called because it's squeezed in there between Sunny Hive and my neighbor's garage) seemed to be spending more time eating the honey then storing it, so I her alone.

I'll also admit at this point that I've been almost completely remiss in my beekeeping duties, busy as I am trying to launch a new business (did I mention I quit my job at Microsoft?). That means that while everyone who knows anything says "feed the bees sugar water until they won't take anymore", my strategy has been "feed the bees sugar water until they drink the little you gave them, then don't."

Clearly less than ideal, and it looks like it's caught up with me. Four or five days back, Shady Hive was showing clear signs of an impending swarm: late in the warm afternoon, they were absolutely pouring out of the hive like kids out of school when that last bell of the season rings in the summer. The way they were circling the yard and humming and singing, I thought for sure they were going to go right then and there, but a dark cloud happened by and a cool breeze and I guess they thought better of it.

Four days of cool weather since has had them biding their time, but they were at it again when the sun broke through this morning, so I'm betting the next good day they're going to pack up and head out.

Oh, if only I had the time to do something about it, but I suppose the frequency of my posts here should be an indicator of how little there's been of that.

I will admit that I managed squeeze in a bit of an art project: my first step towards my green wall sundial. As you may remember, I've got a bit of an obsession with green walls / vertical gardens (here and here, for example). You may also know that I've got a bit of an obsession with sundials (here and here, for example).

Well, I've had this little plan for years now to concoct a combination. It started with having my friend Buphalo (creator of Fire Pod, among other amazingnesses) fabricate a 4' x 5' steel infrastructure. I sunk it in the ground, and...well, it's kind of a long story, and I think I've got a years work left to do, but here's a preview.



When all's said and done, there's gonna be mirrors and burning and growth and all sorts of coolness. But right now, there's going to be sleep, so I'll write another day.