Tuesday, July 24, 2012

July 21, 2012, Inspection of Both Hives

There have been events in the bee yard, particularly with Sue's Langstroth hive that require some follow up.  So this past Saturday, we did a full inspection of both hives.  Sunday was Maine Open Farm Day, and I had planned to open the hives and show off our bees, so I also wanted to know ahead of time what was going on in the colonies.

First, the Top Bar Hive:

The bees in the TBH are making steady progress.  Currently, I have bars in slots 2 through 22 (out of 30 total slots).  Slot #1 is open to create a chimney effect, so that the heat can escape the hive.  Top bars #2, 3, and 4 are still empty, #'s 5 and 6 are being worked by the bees, but only to the extent that they have filled most of the cracks and small holes in the top bar with propolis.  Bars #7, 9, and 22 have new comb on them, drawn out to about 6 inches tall by 8 inches wide. #7 is filled with nectar and uncapped honey on the side that faces in towards the brood nest, and the other side is empty. And #9 & 22 are filled with uncapped honey and nectar on both sides.

Top bars 10, 12, & 13 are all fully, or nearly fully drawn out, that is, the bees have made comb as large as possible in the space they have available, and all have a mixture of eggs & larvae, capped brood, capped and uncapped honey.  Below you can see the capped honey, which the bees store along the top of the comb, and below that, in the center is all capped brood, with uncapped eggs and larvae around the edges.



In this picture, you can see the uncapped larvae.  They're the white "C" shaped worms.  To the right of the larvae are capped brood.  This is where the larvae pupate before emerging as adult bees.  This brood is all worker bees.  And if you zoom in, you can just make out the eggs in a few of the cells between the edge of the comb and the larvae.  Eggs look like grains of rice.


Top bars # 11 and 19 look like this:


This is all honey stores.  Notice how the bees make the individual cells larger than brood cells, so they can store as much honey as possible!  Honey cells (and drone brood cells) are about 3 to 3.5 cells per inch, where as worker brood cells are about 4 to 4.5 cells per inch.  THIS is the good stuff!
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Top bars 14, 17 & 18 are all fully drawn out, and they have capped brood, larvae, eggs, capped and uncapped honey, and pollen.  In this photo, the pollen is the pasty looking substance in the cells that appear to be half full.  


Top bars 15 and 18 are where the excitement was for this inspection!  #15 has lots of capped honey, capped brood, uncapped larvae and eggs, AND MY QUEEN!  See if you can spot her without my help...


Did you find her?  If not, she's in the oval in the center of the picture below.  Another interesting, albeit unfortunate finding on this top bar is circled on the right hand edge of this picture.  Look closely and you will see a brownish dot on this worker bee's abdomen.  This, sadly, is Varroa destructor, the infamous Varroa mite.  I say "unfortunate" because it has now been almost universally accepted that this mite is in every honey bee colony to some extent.  Right now, the population of Varroa mite in my hive is very low.  They typically affect drones, more so than workers, but I have an extremely low drone population in my hive.  I took dozens of pictures for this blog entry, and I've zoomed in and scanned them all very closely, and I could only find two mites on the 16 bars that have bees on them.  So for now, I'm not going to treat the bees.  I'll monitor the mite population, and treat when the numbers warrant it.


This is the second time I've observed the queen, and it's always a thrill to find her!  However, my excitement was tempered a little when I got to top bar #18.  On the bottom of the comb on this bar, I found a queen cup.  Finding a queen cup means your bees are thinking about swarming!  The workers have selected a larva, and are feeding her extra royal jelly to create a new queen.  This could be because they feel crowded, or it could be their population is so strong that they're comfortable splitting and forming another colony.  The bees, just like any creature, are all about procreation, and swarming is the way they do it.  The queen cup can be seen in the picture below.  It's a fat cell that is right in the center of the picture, on the bottom of the comb.  Right now, it is not capped over to pupate, so I'll check it next weekend and see if there's been any change.  If it looks like it's on a path to swarm, I may have to do a split, and make a new hive.


That's it for the Top Bar Hive.  Sue's Langstroth hive has been a very interesting experience!  We are now about 4 weeks post swarm, and we've been checking the hive each week.  In the past couple if inspections, we've found queen cells and queen cups (queen cell is the term for a queen cup that has elongated and been capped).  The population of bees seems to be quite good, although there are a lot of drones in this hive.  So we haven't been too worried about the colony since the swarm happened. 




 Last week, when we opened the hive, we noticed that the queen cell had hatched, the queen cups were the same as they had been the week before, i.e. not developing into queen cells, but we were a little disconcerted by the appearance of a supercedure cell.  A supercedure, a.k.a. an emergency queen cell is usually created when the queen is failing, or not laying properly for some reason.  Below you can see the queen cell before it hatched.  It's the peanut looking object on the right edge of the frame.


And here's the supercedure cell (the bright egg shape in the top left of the picture) and an immature queen cell (in the hole in the comb, more towards the center of the picture).


With all of these queen cells, queen cups, and supercedure cells you would think that everything would be hunky dory in the Langstroth hive.  But alas, that's not the case.  In fact, things are a little tenuous right now! We did a full inspection on Saturday, looking at every frame in all of the boxes, and we couldn't find a queen.  Additionally, there was no sign of eggs, larvae or brood either, which means that the colony has been queenless for a period of time.  Not a good thing!  If the hive goes queenless for too long, the workers start laying, but being sterile, all they produce is drone brood.  We did discover that the nice, big queen cell that is two photos up had hatched, so our hope is that we have a virgin queen running around inside the hive.  If that's the case, she would be very difficult to spot because she would look like and be similar in size to the worker bees.  Scenario #2 is that we have a virgin queen that has left the hive to take her mating flight (or as I call it, "popping a few drones"), and she'll return in the next few days to start laying eggs.  Scenario #3, and we hope the least likely, is that the hive is indeed queenless, in which case we need to replace the queen ASAP.  Our plan is to check the Langstroth hive again on Sunday.  The queen should have returned by then and started laying.  Keep your fingers crossed!  And we'll keep you posted!














Wednesday, July 4, 2012

July 4, 2012 Top Bar Hive Inspection

Happy Independence Day!  We did a full inspection of the top bar hive this morning.  Here are the videos for you!

July 4, 2012 Top Bar Hive Inspection Part 1
http://youtu.be/Pd9pGJE6N4E

July 4, 2012 Top Bar Hive Inspection Part 2
http://youtu.be/4-JFzX0mzjM