29 Apr 2012

Spring has sprung with a LOT of bees.

beekeeping

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 Recurse Center 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 Recurse Center 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!

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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.)