Queen Cell !

Queen Cell

I haven’t written much about my bees this summer because, well…. there really hasn’t been much to write about! It was a very dry Spring and early Summer but it really didn’t seem to affect the bees much. They seemed to find enough pollen and nectar from the native trees and plants that could withstand the drought, and being in a suburban neighborhood, there were also many garden flowers and fruit trees that kept them happy,  and the queen kept the hive full of larvae . I checked the hive every couple of weeks in early summer looking for signs of swarm development, but with the drought, it appeared that the hive was in “maintenance mode”…. the newly hatched bees simply replaced the dead workers and the colony didn’t grow much.  I decided to encourage them to split by creating a crowded condition.  I took out two bars of filled honeycomb and pushed the divider board right up to the last comb. In this way, I hoped the bees would get the hint, assume they were outgrowing their hive box and create some new queens. Not much luck  Then the annual monsoon rains came .  Starting mid July we have had quite a lot of rain… some of it very heavy causing a lot of flood damage.  In a couple weeks everything turned green and plants began to bloom again, and it’s been that way through August.  That must have been the trigger.  I did my weekly check of the hive and to my delight, I found a gigantic queen cell.  Then another!  And another.  I had to act quickly and split the hive.  Sensing the imminent arrival of a new queen, half of the workers will usher the old queen out of the hive and look for a new home, leaving the queen larvae and the other half of the colony behind. ( there can only be one queen to a hive) They will swarm on a nearby branch, or pole, or house while the search party looks for a suitable new home for the queen. To prevent this from happening, and lose half of my bees, I had to locate the queen and move her to another empty hive along with a large number of developing larvae ) the brood) and workers to assist her in her queenly duties ( laying more eggs)  I got very anxious when after a couple passes through the hive, inspecting each comb for the queen, I couldn’t locate her.  Had the hive already swarmed? No… there were too many bees in the colony…. I just had to find the queen!  After about 15 minutes I found her, and placed the comb she was on into the empty hive box along with some bars of honey, brood, pollen and lots of workers.

I closed up both hive boxes and now I will await the outcome.  The old queen and workers have been tricked into thinking they just swarmed…. there is plenty of room for them to expand in their new hive box.  The queen larvae in the original hive will continue their development and the first queen to emerge will then kill her rivals.  After about a week, her workers will taker her out of the hive for her mating flight, where she will mate with up to a dozen drones, return to her hive and reign supreme…. building her new colony.

Will this be successful?  With the old queen and her workers accept the new hive box that I  put them in?

Will the new queen hatch out successfully and have a successful mating flight?

Will the new queen return to her hive box and begin to develop a strong colony of workers?

Stay tuned!

 

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Here come the drones!

Drone cells

I took advantage of a nice mild early spring day to look in the hive to see how things were going, and saw this group of drone cells.  Drones are the male honeybees that develop from unfertilized eggs that the queen lays in cells that are slightly larger than the regular worker bee cells.  You can easily identify them by the fact that they really bulge out the top of the cell as they are pupating.  The appearance of drones is a good sign that the hive is preparing for Spring.  Last year, as summer came to an end, the colony kicked out all the drones and they died. All of them. The drones have no chores and contribute nothing to the maintenance of the hive. They don’t even feed themselves. They would be a real drain on the limited supplies of food over the winter and that is why they are expelled from the community.  Sounds harsh, but that’s one survival strategy they employ to make it through the winter. And besides, the Queen can always make more in the Spring. Which is what you see here.  The only role the drones play is to fertilize virgin queens that will be emerging in the next couple months from other colonies in the area.  Every day, the drones fly out of their hive and hover at special areas up in tree branches. There they await virgin queens who are escorted to this area by their attendants and mating occurs. And another cycle begins.

Hungry Bees!

Wow. It has been a while since I last posted.  And you know why?  Not much has happened to my hive. The colony went into winter strong and healthy, but I only harvested one bar of capped comb in early November. I’d rather have them have too much honey than not enough.  I can always harvest the excess in the Spring. The queen was strong;  the hive had about 10 bars of brood, and about 6 full bars of honey… which made it just a little over half full. I wished them all a healthy and Happy New Year and left them alone.  The workers seal all the cracks of the hive with propolis, which is like a “bee glue” that the bees make by mixing saliva with beeswax and resin and sap from tree buds and bark.  The bees allow some air flow into the hive for good circulation and to prevent moisture from building up.  Opening the hive, and breaking the seal too much in the winter when it’s very cold will stress the bees as they then have to go around and re-seal the cracks.  Temperatures now are reaching the 50’s during the day, and that means that the bees emerge from their hive to defecate and find water.  There is nothing blooming now but they are determined to find something to eat.  What to do? Feed them!  I mixed up a solution of 1 cup sugar to 2 cups water and poured in into a pan with stones and sticks in it. Honeybees are very poor swimmers and will easily drown unless you provide them lots of climbing spaces to grab onto in the sugar water.  Once they discover the sugar water, they go back to the hive, tell the others and within a short time they will eat it all up.  The sugar is an energy source, but they will also look for pollen, a protein source.  A beekeeper friend of mine told me about providing them a high protein pollen substitute and gave me a sample to try out….. the bees loved it and made short work of it. They collect it on their hind legs and take it back to the hive just as if it were real pollen. It’s an interesting mix of vitamins , lipids, minerals and a complete amino acid profile.   I gave some to another friend who has bees and she had the same result.  So we decided to buy our own.

Ultra Bee
High protein pollen substitute

Feeding the bees with Ultra Bee ( left) and sugar water

We ended up getting a 10 pound bucket of “Ultra-Bee” from Mann Lake, a great source of everything dealing with apiculture.    Ten pounds of pollen substitute is a lot!  We divided it up into 1 pound bags so we could pass it on to other bee keepers.  Today was another bright sunny day and temperatures got up in to the mid 50’s so I put out a tray of Ultra Bee and a pan containing a quart of  sugar water. By the end of the day, they had finished off almost all of the Ultra Bee and all of the sugar water.   If tomorrow is in the 50’s again, I will go in to the hive and check on the colony.  The queen should be starting to build up the colony in anticipation of spring.  That might be why the bees are so eager to bring sugar and pollen back to hive.

Ssssss….summertime!

It’s been quite a while since I last posted.  At that time it appeared that both queens had made it through the winter.  Unfortunately the older queen wasn’t able to handle the drastic warm/cold swings of our spring weather here.  I just added her bees to the remaining hive and hoped for the best.  The queen in the surviving hive was one that the worker bees “created” last year. It’s called “re-queening” and you can learn more about that here. She is now half-New Mexican. I am trying to develop a number of truly local queens for my hives.  Most beekeepers order their queens from California or Texas but I want bees that have local genetics and can handle the challenging conditions here in the high-desert lands.  It’s been interesting following the progress of this colony. She is a large and strong queen but has not been a heavy egg producer.  The hive is growing slowly but steadily.  I have been checking in on their progress every week.  They have filled up most of the combs with brood ( and some honey ) to the point where I decided to add another empty bar for them to expand in to.

Adding new bar

If they get too crowded, they will begin to create another queen and swarm. Notice too, I have a backer board at the end of the bars.  This creates a confined space for the hive. As I add bars, I move the board back until they fill the entire box.  This way the bees are able to control the temperature and humidity in the hive.  It’s been very dry these past couple months and although there is still pollen out there, there will be a lot more food once the mid-summer rains begin. I’m beginning to think this queen is responding well to this condition…. not over-producing brood when food supplies are low.  It will be interesting to see if she speeds up production once the rains come.  In any case, all looks good for now!

( I just updated this post so that it would go out on FB )

Hive inspection

After my last entry,(” Warm Spell” ) we did indeed have another cold spell with snow.  Ah… Spring! It’s now getting warmer and nights aren’t as cold; temp today got up to 60 degrees but will drop down into the low thirties.  Such changes in the weather pose a challenge to the honeybees, but they have adapted to our climate here and hopefully made it through OK.

I took advantage of the beautiful day to take a look inside and see for sure how they are doing. Hive #1.  This is the one that replaced their queen themselves…so she is now a “local”.  I was a small colony going into winter but I left them plenty of honey. I was excited to see her alive and well and beginning to lay. 

In this photo I circled the queen and put in an arrow showing a developing larva.  The brown capped brood cells are the pupating larvae…they will hatch out in a few days and little by little the colony will expand.

I also took the opportunity to put in a feeding bowl for them.  Even though there is still plenty of honey in the combs, I feel a little extra food wouldn’t hurt.  I mixed up 2 cups water with 1 cup sugar and put it in a 1 quart baggie in a plastic food container.  Then I pricked the surface with a pin.  This will allow the sugar solution to ooze out in little drops on the surface of the baggie. The bees can lap up the sugar water and they won’t drown as they would if I just put the liquid in the bowl.

The second hive looked just as strong. There was still some extra uneaten honey so I took one of the combs out… all the better, as I have just finished eating the honey collected last fall.  

So….. all is good with the honeybees for now.  We will no doubt get some more cold weather and even a stray snow storm yet, but Spring is definitely on its way. As it continues to warm up, and trees and flowers begin to flower the queen will increase egg production and the hive will really start to hum!

Warm Spell

A new year…. a new bee season.

The rare Rocky Mountain snow chicken made an appearance in January. Haha!

It’s the second week of February and the temperatures have been in the 50’s and 60’s.  Is winter over?  It’s hard to tell. It’s much too early but this sure feels more like mid March.  Winter was cold, temperatures got down in the single digits at times, good snowfall ( 103 inches up at the Santa Fe ski basin) for skiing and  making some fun snow sculptures.

It seemed to go by quickly. But I digress.  I checked out the two hives today . With reports of another cold spell coming in soon I didn’t want to open the hive.  The bees have it all sealed up and I figure it’s too early to start nosing about in the combs.  I’ll wait a week or two yet before looking inside.  I saw a lot of activity at both hives and upon closer inspection I saw bees coming in with pollen! Wow…. where is that coming from?  It’s very pale yellow… almost cream colored.  That tells me that it may likely be Chinese Elm. Hmm.

Entrance to the hive

It’s amazing how they can find this at a time when almost everything else is still

Closeup of bee bringing pollen back to the hive

dormant. In any case, this is a good sign, as that means there is brood activity inside the hive.  I really don’t know how much honey is remaining in the hive for the bees.

I’ll check in a week or so and if the combs are low, I’ll feed them sugar water.

Stay tuned!

Royal portrait

Today I took my camera to the hive to see if the new queen would pose for her royal portrait.  She wouldn’t stay still for long, so I had to photograph her as she quickly traveled across the comb, looking for just the right cells in which to lay her eggs.  I finally located her and she is a beauty!  Can you find her?  I’ll give you a hint…. her body is longer than the worker and definitely more slender than the big drones. Scroll down a bit to see where she is.  All is good!