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.

The New York Times Magazine had a beautiful set of bee-themed fashion photos today. I couldn't find an on-line version, so I snapped a few pictures with my camera, below.



I love the New York Times photography. It's so much more than just illustrations for the article. Each shot is a work of art in itself, often telling bits of the story better than the supporting text could. Take this picture of the swearing in of Russia's new President and Putin puppet, Dmitri Medvedev. A thousand words indeed.

In terms of my art, I've started to plan my next bee-hive sculpture. Last year, you may remember, I put a bride and groom into the hives and let the bees do their work (below).


So my question now is, what next? What smallish object or objects would look good entombed / enshrined in comb and honey? Suggestions sought.

I also got an inquiry today on whether I'd be interested in selling the sculpture above. Hadn't thought explicitly about selling it, but it's a nice compliment (and, as they, everything's for sale if the price is right).

As promised, my slides from the Jackson Fish Market talk. They got a little munged in converting from Powerpoint, and they probably won't make much sense by themselves, being mostly pictures, but maybe it will be like that game where you get to make up a story to go along with a comic. Imagine that instead of talking about beekeeping and technology, I'm actually talking about Keynsian economics.

Just finishing up prepping my beekeeping talk for tomorrow night's talk at Jackson Fish Market's product launch. If you're in Seattle, stop by. Hopefully, the fact that I'm somehow trying to cover agriculture, algorithms, art and the apocalypse all in 10 minutes will be rendered less bewildering by a delightful and distracting stream of pretty pictures. I'll post the slides when I'm done.

In strictly beekeeping news, the two new colonies are busy cleaning out the moldy frames I left them. They've been a bit hampered by the bizarre weather we've had here in Seattle (78 degrees last weekend, then snow and hail for the last three days), given the piles of chewed wax and old pollen on their stoops, they're busy inside.

The bee Santa Claus came to town today, and I felt just like a kid on Christmas morning...a Christian kid...cuz I'm Jewish, so Christmas morning was kind of a non-event in our house...

But please, don't let my desire for precision interfere with the metaphor here. The point is, it was a big day, because the bees arrived.

I got the call from Richard around 2 p.m. letting me know he'd gone to Beez Neez and picked up my new girls, plus Alyssa's as well. Richard is a new beekeeper, so I headed over to his place to walk him through the hiving process. It's ridiculously simple, but it's still nice to have an experienced hand around. Richard was a champ.

I was interested in his hive set-up. Instead of a simple plank for a bottom board (translation: bee house floor), he had a mesh screen with a removal tray underneath. I'd read about these, but hadn't seen one in the flesh wood. They're useful for counting mites (which fall through the mesh) and generally for keeping things clean. I gotta get me one of those. Maybe for bee Chanukah.

Once Richard's girls were settled in, I head back across 520 (Question: Do 50,000 bees qualify you for the carpool lane?) with Alyssa's bees and my own to get my two colonies settled in.

My frames had a fair amount of mold on them from being in the garage with uncapped honey and leftover pollen all winter, but I'm not particularly worried. The bees are industrious housecleaners and should have it tidied up in no time.

It was a pleasure going through the simple motions of hiving them: spraying them down with a bit of sugar syrup, pulling the queen in her little cage out, popping a marshmallow in the end, settling her in, then pouring the rest of the bees out into the hive. The smell was a mixture of honeycomb and slightly humid poo (they'd been caged up for a few days and took the opportunity to relieve themselves, leading to that familiar rain-like tappity-tap sound of bees crapping all over my yard).

Alyssa womanned the camera while I poured the first hive, but five or six feisty ones took exception to her shampoo and burrowed in. The sound of a furious bee in one's hair is one that I'll just never get used to. You know the sting is coming and there's not much you can do about it, and the rattlesnake warning of its wings tangling up just makes it worse. We spent a joyful few minutes ferreting them out of her scalp and sent her home to take care of her own hives (in a suit!)

Within 15 minutes, my girls were hauling debris out the front door, so I've little worry they'll enjoy their new home. Can't wait to get out in the morning and see exploring.