First Spring Hive Check

Well, it's a beautiful spring day, and time to open up the hive after the winter and see how everything looks.
I know my bees have been doing well, as I have checked the hive a few time through the winter, but it's only been an open the top cover and peer in, kind of thing. Today I did a thorough inspection of both deep boxes, and could not be happier with my girls. 
In the top box, I found the queen, looking great and very healthy.  I also found lots of capped brood, which means everyone has been busy! The bottom box was also jammed full of bees, with 6 frames of capped honey on the outsides, and 4 frames of capped brood in the middle. I saw only a very small amount of drone cells and possibly the beginning of a swarm cell in the top box.
So, in order to give them some more room, I reversed the deep boxes, so the honey frames were on the top of the hive. I also added a medium super to the top with foundation in 10 frames, and 4 of those frames contained some honey I had taken off last fall, and I froze the frames over the winter.
Mark and I have just taken a class about swarm management and how to control it by making splits. The bees natural instinct is to swarm in the spring, and the only way to head them off is to recognize the signs that they are preparing for a swarm, and split the hive, creating an "artificial" swarm for them. They are not upset with that because they were planning to do it anyway, and we just save them the trouble of glomming onto a tree somewhere and scouting a new place to live. It's a win win for all, because  I get a whole new colony of bees and more bees equals more honey!  We have a swarm trap which we will mount in a nearby tree, just in case we miss the warning signs and they swarm before we have a chance to make the split. This way, we catch them either way. 
Spring is an exciting time to be a beekeeper! Stay tuned!

Installing a New Package of Bees in the Top Bar Hive

Sorry for the noise from the wind, traffic, and the ducks and geese!

Early Spring 2013

Mid April is an in between season here in Maine.  Winter's pretty much over, but it's not quite spring-like.  However, with daytime temps approaching 50 degrees, the bees have started to venture out.  Silver and Red Maple buds are swollen, and the bees are able to collect some sap from them, and there must be some willows blooming because the few bees that have gone foraging are coming back with little tiny pollen packets.

Back in January, we had a couple of days where the temperatures got up into the 50's, and that gave us a chance to check the hives for strength and for food stores.  The bees in the Langstroth hive were out in force, but the Top Bar Hive was silent.  So I decided to see what was going on inside.  To my dismay, I found that most of the bees in the TBH had left, when I'm not sure.  But when I put the hive to bed in early November, there were plenty of bees, and I even saw them flying on a warm day in December.  But this is what it looked like when I opened it up:

There were just a couple of hundred dead bees at the bottom of the hive.  My first thought was that they didn't have enough food, but there were full combs of honey, as well as lots of bee bread (processed pollen).

 Full combs of honey (above), and Bee Bread (below)

In speaking with other beekeepers over the past couple of months, I've heard of at least two other hives that absconded in the late fall for no apparent reason.  Some have suggested varroa mites, but I monitored the mite population closely last year, and it was what would be considered "very low".  I wouldn't consider this "Colony Collapse Disorder", since the overwhelming majority of the bees simply flew away.  There's no sign of Nosema or European Foul Brood.  So, I think this is just going into the books as one of those unexplained bee phenomena.

Today, I cleaned out the dead bees and got the hive ready to receive a new package next week.  The new bees will have a head start with all of the drawn comb and honey that is left in the hive, so I expect to be able to harvest at least a little bit of honey this summer!

Cleaned up and ready to receive a new package of bees.

The Langstroth hive continues to thrive, a fact which Sue takes great pleasure in needling me about!  We're expecting to be able to harvest about 60lb of honey from it this year.  And, assuming we're able to capture a swarm, or maybe do a split utilizing our recently acquired nuc boxes, we plan to start another Langstroth hive.

Two new nuc boxes

So stay tuned... as the bee season commences, we'll be posting more entrys to the Bee log!