My bees looked a bit sparse and weak going into winter, so when I had the opportunity to order a new package of bees through the Backwards Beekeepers a few months ago, I went for it. I wasn’t sure if my hive had survived winter (or would survive spring), especially given how strange the weather has been, but it was then or never on making sure I had bees this summer. I figured it was worth a gamble – either my hive would die, and I’d want a new package to replace it, or my hive would survive, in which case I could try to sell my package to someone else or (gulp!) start a second hive.

I lost track of time this spring, what with focusing on Hacker School and all. So when I got an email a few days ago saying that I had to come pick up my package on Friday, I was in a bit of a panic. I hadn’t checked in on my bees at all since last fall. I had no idea if I had bees! And I sure didn’t have any spare hive to put the package into if it turned out my bees had made it through after all, or anyone to buy the package from me last-minute.

After some hurried consultation with my delightful bee purveyor, I stopped by Hayseed and picked up a spare bottom board, inner cover, and outer cover along with my package. Can’t hurt to have spares just in case, and if I did need to start a second hive, that was the bare minimum equipment I needed, given that I have some extra medium supers and frames that I tend to use for honey a bit later in the season.

Turns out, I have a LOT of bees.

(Yeah, I need to pick up some more cinderblocks for the new hive to stand on. That milk crate was the best I could find in a pinch!)

You can see that the new hive is just one super at the moment, while the old one is three supers high. (Or was two days ago, anyways.) I use all medium supers for both brood and honey in my hive(s!). And right there in front of the new hive is the box the new bees came in.

A package is a box with about 3 lbs of bees and a little cage with a queen in it. When you want to install a package, you basically just reach in and gently remove the queen cage, then pry the mesh off one side of the package and shakeshakeSHAKE your booty all the bees out into the hive. That’s it, really. I scold them lovingly and literally brush them from the tops of the frames down in between the frames, but mostly just because it’s fun. And finally, you just leave the box out in front of the hive so the rest of the stragglers can follow the queen’s scent and find their way into their new home.

I suspended my queen cage in my hive, then closed it up. The idea there is that the queen is trapped in her cage by a sugar plug. The bees have time to get used to her scent while eating her free, and so are more likely to accept her once she’s out among them. I tend to use a business card and a thumbtack to hang the queen cage between frames in the hive. This time I used Kyle‘s business card (he’s a Hacker School alum who now works with Tumblr), since we’ve chatted by email already and I know I have his contact info saved elsewhere by now. (Hi, Kyle! I hope you’re charmed rather than offended by this. You’ve become part of a rather delightful process, it turns out!)

I went back this morning to make sure the queen was released properly. Tomorrow would’ve been better, but bees depend on weather and my work schedule, after all. They’d mostly gotten through the sugar, but not entirely – her handmaidens were free, but the queen herself was still in her cage. Everyone sounded happy, though, so I manually released her and watched for a moment to make sure that the hive continued to sound cheerful and that they didn’t start balling her immediately. Everything looked fine, so I closed that hive up with a sugar syrup feeder on top and moved on to my older hive.

The weather was nicer today, so I wanted to get deeper into my big hive to see what was really going on in there. They were chill as can be, friendly and relaxed, so I figure they’re probably queenright. I saw some very young larva in there, too, along with some older brood and honey and pollen and assorted bee stuffs. And so many bees! That hive is seriously busy. Not too many queen cells, surprisingly, so they didn’t seem in imminent danger of swarming, but they were starting to back-fill the brood nest with nectar. Time to take action!

No prob. I closed up the hive, went downstairs, and got my last remaining super and set of frames. I checkerboarded the top two of the now four supers on that hive, to confuse their swarming instinct and give them more space to lay and to save whatever nectar they may find this early in the year. I’m going to gave to buy some more supers and frames at Hayseed, stat! I don’t have any spares left for my expanding new hive or to collect honey in the old hive.

One more thing to take care of before I was done. I had a bit of a varroa mite problem last year (remember my snow bees?), and I want to stay on top of reducing the mite population as much as possible. How lucky, then, to discover a nearly fully capped frame full of drone brood!

See how it bulges out? Drones (males) are bigger than workers (females), so they need more space to grow when developing. Worker brood has flat caps, but, well, you can see why we also refer to drone brood as “bullet brood”!

Varroa mites preferentially lay in drone brood. Drone brood takes longer to mature, and is bigger, so it gives the mite mama more bang for her buck, as it were. (Catch me in person and ask me tell you of my scheme to miniaturize my bees at some point, by all means! I have theories and plans. But it has been a hectic spring, so that will probably wait for next year.)

Point being, in addition to sprinkling powdered sugar everywhere, you can also cut down on your mite population by taking capped drone brood and sticking it in the freezer. The mites die, and then you return the frame to the hive, where the bees will clean it up, lay more drones, and restart the process. Frankly, my ladies don’t really need more drones around anyway. They’re not terribly useful. So we can do this all summer to try to reduce the number of bugs on my bugs. Fantastic!

So basically, what I’m trying to say here is that all is gorgeous and amazing out in the Brooklyn sky, which is where I’ll be most Sunday mornings for the next few months.

Happy spring!

The bees have had a busy spring! Despite all my checkerboarding and trying my best to confuse the ladies and give them plenty of space, they seem to have swarmed about a month ago. I ordered a new, theoretically mite-resistant marked queen, and installed her into the hive on the same day my father was re-installed as President of EMJC, the shul atop which the bees live. He was honored to share his installation date with Her Majesty, who was of course promptly named Queen Esther.

Queen Esther seems to be doing just fine, and I saw capped brood and larva and eggs when I looked into the hive a few days ago. Not only that – we found a full medium super of honey ready to harvest, and a second super that I expect will be ready in the next few weeks!

As you can see above, we carefully sliced the caps off the honey before spinning it in our new, two-frame little honey extractor.

A bit of straining later, and we were left with more honey than we got all of last year – and it’s still only June! What a wonderful start to a beautiful, sweet summer.

I’ve been meaning to post this photo for months, but of course the NY Times beat me to it.

In late fall, when all the nectar runs in our area were over, my bees started stealing honey from other hives in the area. It was only fair, I suppose, since they were being pretty heavily attacked themselves. They must’ve traveled over to some hives living loser to the maraschino cherry factory, and stolen a bit of their syrupy red honey.

See those bright red cells in my photo above? They sure do taste curious.

I’m posting this now to celebrate – I checked in on my hive last Monday, and my bees seem to have survived! I still have bees, they seemed to be in a fairly good mood, and I saw plenty of honey remaining to hopefully see them through the next month and a half or so until our first early spring nectar starts to come in.

Tonight I’m heading out to swarm prevention class. My ladies survived, so they may start getting that procreative itch once spring really hits. Swarms are fascinating (I absolutely loved reading Thomas Seeley’s Honeybee Democracy and hearing his lecture on how swarms choose and head to their new homes), but I’d still rather have a strong colony and happy neighbors than let my bees throw a swarm. Especially given that virgin queens don’t tend to mate well in NYC, according to the advice and warnings I’ve been given by my local mentors.

Think good thoughts for the ladies! I’m looking forward to petting happy springtime bees again soon.

On June 26th, I carried my new queen to my hive in a paper bag on the Q train, as pictured above. My then-second super was pretty much fully drawn out and getting filled up with what might be condensed sugar syrup and might be nectar (proto-honey!). I ultimately added a new second super in the middle, and put the queen excluder between the second and third, so that hopefully that drawn out one can eventually become comb honey. We’ll see. I tasted a little bit of it, and it definitely tasted like honey, not sugar syrup.

To introduce the new queen, I took a frame out of the first super and hung her cage in its place (cork removed and candy plug pierced carefully with a nail). This is how we hang queen cages in NYC: Attach a metrocard to the top of the cake with a thumbtack and suspend the cage between two frames by laying the metrocard on top of the frames.

When I went back three days later, on June 29th, the new queen had already been released from her cage.

Also, sort of amazing – the bees built this burr comb (comb in an undesirable location) in the empty space around the queen cage sometime between that Saturday afternoon and the next Tuesday morning:

One piece was hanging off the bottom of the queen cage, and the other was hanging off the frame above the empty space next to the queen cage. It’s empty and dry and gorgeous and alien. It smells amazing. I can’t decide what to do with it, but oh, I love it so.

On July 2nd, I peeked in again, just to make sure the new queen was laying. I saw very little comb production in the new second super, but to my absolute delight, I saw tiny eggs in several of the frames down in the first super. Success! She was accepted and has a good laying pattern! I fed them a bunch more sugar syrup again to help stimulate wax production, and left them to it.

On July 11th, my mother bravely donned a veil and joined me with the bees. I saw capped brood and uncapped larva in the first super. The second super was maybe 60% drawn out, and I saw a lot of eggs in there, beautifully arranged. The third super is still slowly on its way to becoming honey. It started to rain during my inspection, so I quickly closed things up – but ack, problem, since given their rate of wax production when they really get going, another week could be too late for adding another super.

Luckily the rain stopped quickly, so I dragged another super up from the basement and my father helped me insert it above the second super and below the queen excluder and third (now fourth) super. It’s full of wax-coated plastic foundation, which is a first for my hive. I guess we’ll see how that goes when I check in again tomorrow.

We actually didn’t bother to put on veils or light up the smoker before putting in the new super after heading back up to the roof. Everything just seemed so calm, and with two people it was a quick, simple maneuver. Our courage was justified and neither of us got stung. Man, I am going to be so surprised when I finally get my first sting from this hive!

Okay, ladies. Carry on. New bees should start hatching any day now, so maybe you’ll finish up some honey for us soon?

As you can see, the ladies now have a duplex of their very own. When I saw that they’d fully drawn out about 6 of the 10 frames in the bottom super last week, I figured I’d have to install a second super on my next visit. A week later, they’d finished drawing out 9 of the 10 frames. Whew, close call!

I swapped the one undrawn frame in the bottom super with a drawn frame next to it, so the bees would be more likely to draw it out instead of just moving upwards. Now they have tons of space into which they can expand their brood nest. Get to it, ladies! The sooner you build up the colony, the sooner I can start pilfering your hard-earned honey!

My other task this past weekend was dealing with an unfortunate mold infestation that started in the sugar syrup in my hive top feeder and on the inside of the outer cover over the feeder. I washed off the cover and the feeder with bleach and water, then rinsed them and put them back. All the syrup I’d fed the bees the week before was gone, so I poured in another gallon. This time, however, I mixed a teaspoon of bleach in with my 1:1 sugar syrup to keep the mold down.

I’m told by one of my local mentors that bees can handle even two teaspoons of bleach per gallon of syrup, but since I wasn’t being meticulous about scrubbing everything out after the cleansing, I decided to play it safe. Hopefully this’ll do the trick, and I will never have to bleach the bees again. The great and terrible Clorox genocide was a nightmare, as bees kept flying into my bleachy cleaning water and dying in there faster than I could get them out. I lost a dozen or two, easy. Ladies, ladies, I can only protect you from yourselves up to a point!

There’s a lot of beautiful capped brood in my hive, in a perfect brood pattern curving up from the bottom center of the frames. My first new bees should start emerging in the next week or so. Since my queen came from a different hive than the rest of bees, and I have no idea what sort of drones she may have sown her wild oats with, the new bees could be quite different from the ones I started out with.

The bees I have right now are astonishingly gentle. Even with a laying queen and improving morale, even with my clumsiness and unfortunate beeslaughter by bleaching, they haven’t stung me once. They’re just pretty chill, is all. But as they die out and are replaced by bees from different genetic stock, will hive remain as calm? I just don’t know. My queen was also bred for gentleness, but only time will tell.

I’m fascinated by the idea that my hive’s personality could shift drastically over the next few weeks, as the new queen’s offspring take over. Who knows who it might become?

My brother came up to visit the ladies with me this time. Everyone looks great in a beekeeping veil!