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!

That’s a close-up of the queen cage with a few bees hanging out all over it. (Bigger version.) This was taken after we shook off most of the bees that were clinging to it when we first pulled it out.

Beekeeping is amazing. Thrilling, relaxing, and meditative, all at once. Immensely satisfying. I end up covered with the smell of smoke and sugar syrup together. It’s like firespinning and working with liquid nitrogen all rolled up into one. Focus, sublime focus, and a dangerous pleasure that only works if you can enter a state of smooth calm when working with it.

This is my setup:

The box on the ground in front of the hive was the package. We’ve since fully cleared it of live bees and thrown it away. It looks like most of the bees that remained there after we left last time did manage to find their way into the hive without freezing to death. Phew!

We opened up the hive and pulled out a few frames, hanging them on this useful doohicky with two arms that hooks onto the edge of the hive when it’s open. The bees didn’t seem to mind at all. This let us pull out the queen cage to examine it.

The queen and her attendants were still trapped inside the cage by the sugar plug, which was only partially eaten away. She looked fine. The other bees were totally covering the cage, but they didn’t seem hostile, just interested – I don’t think she’s in much danger of being balled. (When a colony rejects a foreign queen, they kill her by surrounding her as a group and overheating her to death.)

I poked a wider hole all the way through the sugar plug with a screw – not wide enough for the queen to get out, but surely enough to really help inspire them to finish the job. If they haven’t released her when I check back in a few more days, I’m probably just going to do it manually. They’ll have had a week to get used to her scent, and they don’t seem to be acting aggressively towards her, so it should be fine.

Yep, that was Selena being insanely badass and beekeeping in a skirt. The rest of us wear pants, and pull our socks up over our pants to keep bees from climbing up inside. But oh, no, not her. She has to be all tough. It’s like she’s all, I’ve been to the waaaaaaaaaaar, this is nothing.

Those little glints of golden light in the air in front of her? Yeah, those are bees.

That’s it for now. The bees have started building some comb, and they seem to be doing well. Anderson has been emailing me to reassure me that they haven’t suddenly disappeared. I’ll try to get some better photos of their progress next time! They are gorgeous.