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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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.

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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 )

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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!

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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!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Crystallized Honey

 

My friend Jannine brought me a jar of her crystallized honey for the holidays. It is so good!  It got me to do a bit of research on why some honey crystallizes and some doesn’t.  First of all, it does not mean that it has “gone bad”. Honey has a very low moisture content which deters bacteria and yeast, so it rarely if ever spoils. It turns out that the main reason honey will crystallize is due to the proportion of fructose and glucose, the two main sugars in honey. And this comes from the source of the honey. Honey that is high in glucose  ( and lower in fructose ) will have a tendency to crystallize sooner than the honey that is lower in glucose ( and higher in fructose).  Honey that comes from nectar from apple, goldenrod, sunflower, alfalfa, dandelion, mesquite and chamisa is high in glucose and will crystallize more than honey derived from the nectar of locust, sage milkweed, poplar, borage and buckwheat, which has a high fructose concentration.  Many people like the crystallized honey as it is easier to spread on toast and seems to have a milder flavor.  If your honey has crystallized, it’s perfectly safe to eat.  And if you’d like to turn it back into liquid form, just put it in a pan of hot ( not boiling ) water for a few minutes.    Enjoy!

If you want to learn even more about crystallization of honey, here is a good link:  http://www.montcobeekeepers.org/Documents/Honey_Crystallization.pdf

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Happy New Year!

Yes….. 2015 sure went by quickly. My one colony did quite well and went in to winter quite strong.  It’s a large colony so I will have be on the lookout for it to swarm come spring and make a split. I have two empty hives waiting for such an event.  Meanwhile, the bees are hunkered down for the winter and we are having a doozy!  El Nino is living up to it’s name, dropping a lot of snow on us and bringing in frigid temperatures at night. So what do the bees do? They cluster around the queen and vibrate.  This produces heat, much the same way as rubbing your hands together.  This keeps the queen warm and the bees circulate outward bringing in the colder, outermost bees into the center where they warm up.  All this vibrating requires energy, and that’s why they store the honey.  Bees are one of the few insects that can live through the winter as adults, and that’s how they do it. But even all this preparation may not help if the winter is particularly cold and long.  I just have to wait and hope they will make it. Did you know that they will not poop in their hive?  That’s right. They hold it in when it’s cold outside, and when the temperature outside warms up to 45-50 degrees, they will fly out, defecate, and quickly hurry back into the hive!

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Fall honey harvest

My single hive this year was very productive. The colony has expanded greatly and I know I will have to split it next Spring.  I inspected the hive and determined that I could safely remove 4 full bars of comb.

Comb in hive

I removed the oldest combs ( the ones that were the darkest).  Each time a bee larva forms a pupa within the cell, it leaves behind a very thin cocoon shell in the cell.  The worker bees clean out the cell for the next larva but don’t remove the cocoon.  After a while, the combs get darker and darker as the shells build up and it’s good practice to remove them as not only do they make the cell smaller, they can contain small amounts of toxins and harmful organisms that the bees have brought into the hive and can create problems.

Comb and sieve

I then cut the comb off the bar and crushed the comb into a sieve. Leaving the comb overnight allowed the honey to drip through, leaving the wax and debris behind.  The next day I poured the honey into the jars.  I then melted the wax in a separate pot and poured it through a fine sieve lined with cheesecloth. The result was a clean block of wax.

Crushing the comb

From all of this I collected over 9 pounds of honey and ¾ pound of wax.  Success!  Thanks to the hard working honeybees I have a nice supply of honey to eat and share with friends and family and the bees have plenty of honey to last them through the winter.

Honey jars & wax

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Swarm!

Spring is swarm season. The queen bee has been busy laying eggs for the past couple months now, and in many hives, it’s beginning to get really crowded.  When the bees sense that they are running out of room, they create three or four queen cells and once they see that the new queen larvae are doing well, the old queen and half the hive simply leave and look for a new home. After they leave the hive they will find a spot to hang out until the scouts have found a suitable cavity  to build a new hive in.  And that is a swarm.
Yesterday a friend of mine who will was doing some work in a public garden looked over and saw this swarm of bees.  She called me up and asked if I could capture the swarm…. “Oh yes… I’ll be right over”.    OK…. I must admit. I had never done this before, but I had read all about it…. Now I was going to do it.  Lucky for me the swarm was in a honeysuckle bush and easy to get to.  I put a large box underneath the swarm and then gave branch a good shake.

The entire ball of bees just dropped into the box. .  I collected more bees off the branch by brushing them off into a bucket, then shaking them into the box. I lightly closed the flaps of the box and waited. I saw that the bees were flying to the box and crawling under the flaps into the box!  That’s when I knew that the queen was in the box as well.

I taped up the box, drove home and gently shook them into my empty hive. I added two bars of empty honeycomb that I had saved from last year, and a bag of sugar water to give them some food to eat. Then I closed up the hive.  I was just amazed at how calm and non-aggressive they were throughout the whole ordeal. The next morning, I checked on them and they were just fine. It was if they had always been there.  I will check on them in three or four days to see how the queen is doing….. she should be laying eggs and starting up a brand new hive!

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What’s in your honey…..and what isn’t?

Honey without pollen

Did you know?

Natural unprocessed honey contains pollen. Lot’s of pollen.  And pollen can indicate where the honey was produced.  Food Safety News writes…”The food safety divisions of the  World Health Organization, the European Commission and dozens of others also have ruled that without pollen there is no way to determine whether the honey came from legitimate and safe sources.”  Why is this important?  The U.S. has strict requirements on the quality of honey imported into the country. It must be free of pesticides and other harmful chemicals.  By removing the pollen through ultrafiltration, a country can hide the origin of the honey and thus export honey that normally would not meet the strict standards. Look at the label of your honey container…..  Know where your honey comes from. Bottom line: buy local if possible. To read the entire article click here.

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