Our Backyard Bee Journey!💗🐝

[Sally PB]

I know you shared a couple of threads, do you have one of your own?

https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/sallys-gf3-thread.1579174/
That's my "kind of a blog" thread.

 

[drstratton]

https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/sallys-gf3-thread.1579174/
That's my "kind of a blog" thread.

Thank you! That's kind of how my threads are. I will visit it soon!

 

[drstratton]

May 20th
We finally saw the queen from one of our nuc's. She was in the 2nd deep on an outside frame laying eggs, which surprised me. Pays to be extremely careful when lifting every frame. She's beautiful and is a laying machine, her daughters are just as amazing. We also have a super on her hive and those girls are in overdrive drawing out comb, tending brood, storing lots of honey and pollen. A little honey will be nice to have, but I'm really hoping to help them to be healthy and strong when going into winter, so they come out the other side.

You can see the queen circled in blue. Queens have a longer body than workers and drones. She needs to be able to lay a single egg in the bottom center of the cells. When we inspect our hives we're looking for eggs, larvae & a good brood pattern. We rarely see the queen. As long as we see eggs and a good pattern, we know things are good.

This frame had a lot of recently emerged worker bees. It's also loaded with pollen and honey to feed the larvae.

Sometimes when you lose a queen you can have a laying worker problem. You can tell if that's what's going on, 1: they lay multiple eggs in the cells, 2: the brood is all drones, because worker bees have not been bred and all they can lay are unfertilized eggs, which are drones.
It was a good inspection.

 

[drstratton]

May 22nd

The girls are getting a tad warm today! We're thinking about doing an arbor of grapes above their hives. It will help to keep them and us cooler when we do our inspections. It's only 73°F and we can have many days of triple digits in the summer, we live in Eastern Washington state.

They are also all over my raspberry & blackberry plants.

 

[drstratton]

Fast forward to June 2nd.

We just caught our first swarm. My husband was out playing golf, he calls me and says, "There's a swarm between hole 18 & 10". So I ask him if he wants to catch it and that's what we did.

I will have you know it was not like I've seen in the videos. It wasn't all tidy on a single branch, it was on a dead sagebrush stump, a large weed and the ground.

I sprayed them with some sugar water and sprayed the inside of the tote that I brought, scooped up the biggest ball of bees and put them in, set it on its side next to the remaining swarm. We had to make at least 10 cuts to get them. We placed all that we could into the tote and then the bees started to crawl into it, so I'm pretty sure we got the queen. What a fun experience.

Once again we found ourselves scrambling to get a hive set up. We didn't have any more deep brood boxes, but we had supers and some deep frames. So that's what we had to use, but it could only be temporary. They are in two supers with deep frames, way too much room below. They can build a lot of comb when they have extra space and it can make a big mess. So we had to pick up lumber in town the next day to build some new deeps.

 

[R2elk]

The bee was funny, Dale had just asked me if the bees liked it. I told him I didn't think they'd notice and then one landed on a flower, bee approved...lol

This is not a bee. It is a Drone Fly.

 

[5Australorpasaures]

I wish I could just vacuum them up. That would be amazing.

The problem is that the mites attach to the bees, like a tick. They hide in the cells with larvae in it before it's capped. Then they lay male and female eggs in there, they hatch, breed and live off of the bee larvae. By the time the bees emerge you can have a mite bomb go off and the cycle continues, the hive dies off if not controlled. They make the bees susceptible to viruses and disease.

Drones (male bees) take longer to emerge, 24 days and the mites need that time to reproduce. Drone cells are larger in diameter than worker bees (female, which emerge in 21 days)(queens emerge in 19 days) and somehow the mites can sense the size of cell. So, they tend to use the drones to multiply. That's why we can use drone frames to kill off mites naturally. The sad thing about that is, you also have to kill the drones, but a hive can have over 40-80 thousand bees in it and the summer bees only live around 45 days. So, it's a method that saves more bees.

I'm tapering my shop-vac hose as we speak!

 

[5Australorpasaures]

Fast forward to June 2nd.

We just caught our first swarm. My husband was out playing golf, he calls me and says, "There's a swarm between hole 18 & 10". So I ask him if he wants to catch it and that's what we did.

I will have you know it was not like I've seen in the videos. It wasn't all tidy on a single branch, it was on a dead sagebrush stump, a large weed and the ground.

I sprayed them with some sugar water and sprayed the inside of the tote that I brought, scooped up the biggest ball of bees and put them in, set it on its side next to the remaining swarm. We had to make at least 10 cuts to get them. We placed all that we could into the tote and then the bees started to crawl into it, so I'm pretty sure we got the queen. What a fun experience.
View attachment 4172411
View attachment 4172412
View attachment 4172413
Once again we found ourselves scrambling to get a hive set up. We didn't have any more deep brood boxes, but we had supers and some deep frames. So that's what we had to use, but it could only be temporary. They are in two supers with deep frames, way too much room below. They can build a lot of comb when they have extra space and it can make a big mess. So we had to pick up lumber in town the next day to build some new deeps.

Bee math is worse than chicken math, plan on making splits in the upcoming spring judging by how nice your bees look and you can get them through winter. I got back into bees after having 20+ hives back in the 80s, 90s. Just wanted one for honey and now I have three and already planning on milling up more deeps and mediums along with bottom boards and other pieces parts that go along with 'em this winter. DW wants to know what happened to my "I only want one hive" statement. Have the cinder blocks set up so I think DW knows what's coming next spring.

 

[drstratton]

This is not a bee. It is a Drone Fly.

You know what, I think you're correct. I just thought it was one of the older bees. Didn't really look at it that close. Thanks!

 

[drstratton]

Bee math is worse than chicken math, plan on making splits in the upcoming spring judging by how nice your bees look and you can get them through winter. I got back into bees after having 20+ hives back in the 80s, 90s. Just wanted one for honey and now I have three and already planning on milling up more deeps and mediums along with bottom boards and other pieces parts that go along with 'em this winter. DW wants to know what happened to my "I only want one hive" statement. Have the cinder blocks set up so I think DW knows what's coming next spring.

We will probably keep the 4th hive as a resource hive. I'm thinking about turning it into a observation hive. More than 4 hives are not in our plans. We're retired and have to much going on as it is, but we're really enjoying our bees. I hope we can get them through winter. It will be a totally different experience from this year. We plan on doing the demaree split method. Hope we can keep them from swarming. Also, just having comb built up will make a huge difference. If they make it through winter, they can hit the ground running. We totally missed the apple and cherry blossom this year. It's huge here in Eastern Washington state. I'm really hoping to catch it next spring.

Good luck with your bees and not letting bee math get the better of you...lol