Sally's GF3 thread

[Sally PB]

My neighbor who had a heart attack 18 months ago passed this afternoon. I will miss her a lot.

Fly high and free, beautiful Jamie! Thank you for being a wonderful neighbor, chicken sitter, and friend.

 

[ShrekDawg]

My neighbor who had a heart attack 18 months ago passed this afternoon. I will miss her a lot.

Fly high and free, beautiful Jamie! Thank you for being a wonderful neighbor, chicken sitter, and friend.

 

[Sally PB]

Today one of our bee hives swarmed. This means that 1/2-2/3 of the bees and the queen left the hive to look for somewhere else to reside. I've never seen this happen; it was very interesting.

It was also frustrating, because we lost a hive of bees and we only have two. DH and I are very discouraged in our bee keeping adventure. This will be our 3rd summer and we have not gotten ONE DROP of honey. We know we must be doing something wrong, but we aren't finding out soon enough to correct the problem.

We have spend about $1200 on our bee adventure so far.

I asked DH what we have gotten out of it. He said we've gained knowledge and helped out with pollination locally. With that argument (the pollination, which is very important), we have no reason to quit; we have the investment in all the equipment (but might have to buy another colony of bees, and that's about $170-200).

I'd love to think that we're making all our mistakes/getting our bad luck at the beginning and that there will be a payoff in the near future. That we'll figure it out and get some honey for our efforts.

When we walked back from the hive, I said, "Well, we were in a car accident and walked away. And neither of us died yesterday. Things could be a whole lot worse and make this look like nothing."

Still, it is very discouraging.

 

[Sally PB]

Ok, some good news. It's raining, very hard. I will bet we're going to get a half inch out of this. I'll take it; I don't think we've had an inch of rain all month.

 

[saysfaa]

Won't the bees that are left raise a queen and keep going?

 

[cavemanrich]

Won't the bees that are left raise a queen and keep going?

That is exact question I have

 

[Sally PB]

Won't the bees that are left raise a queen and keep going?

Yes. The problem is this: This is PRIME egg laying/brood rearing time. The queen can lay 2000 (!!!!) eggs a day. They need to have lots of workers to raise brood and forage for nectar/pollen for food.

The colony knows it doesn't have a queen. (Called, appropriately, "queenless"). They have to have a less than 3-day old larva to feed royal jelly to make it turn into a queen. They will probably do this. 18 days later, one, but probably more, will hatch as a queen. There can be only one, so hopefully one hatches ahead of any others and kills the rest that hatch. Brutal, huh?

That's approximately 3 weeks from now.

She hangs around the hive for about a week, then goes on her mating flight. Assuming she comes back to the hive -- 20% don't for one reason or another (hit by a car, eaten by a dragonfly, etc.) -- she starts laying eggs. It takes 21 days to hatch the workers.

That's 7 weeks from now, or early August. That is when they should be filling up the hive with honey for the winter. And they will be just starting with new brood. Waaaaaay behind the curve.

Worker bees are female, they can lay eggs. The problem with that is that they are unmated, so they can only make drones, the males. Only a mated queen can lay fertilized eggs.

We aren't sure which hive swarmed. Hubby thinks it's the new hive, and it would be easy to tell when we open it. We bought a "nuc" (nucleus colony) and installed it about 10 days ago. If that hive swarmed, there would be very few bees remaining. The queen was also marked with a blue dot. (Yes, marking a queen is a thing that people who raise and sell nucs do. There's even a color code for the year. This year, all marked queens have blue dots.)

If it's our other hive, it will be hard to tell if they have a queen. (The term for that is "queenright.") That is/was a mature, thriving colony. When we bought that nuc, the queen was not marked, and they may have requeened since we got it. This is its 3rd summer.

We may sound like we know a lot, but really... we're still very inexperienced.

 

[Sally PB]

This has been a very sad spring. I lost my two favorite hens, Aart here on BYC passed, and my neighbor succumbed to heart failure on Wednesday. Then a hive swarmed and left. And I'm without my car after the accident last Saturday, and don't know how long it'll take to fix, or if they'll total it.

I'm trying to look on the bright side of things. We walked away from the accident without even a sore muscle. We do have another vehicle. We're both healthy. We can pay our bills. We just got an inch of much needed rain last night. All of these are positives.

 

[Sally PB]

We figured out the swarm issue. It's the original hive, and they have 2 boxes of brood and the box on top is FULL of honey! They ran out of room.

We think we saw a queen in with them, so they have requeened themselves. They planned for this, in other words. We think.

We'll know in a few weeks if this is not the case.

But. We. Have. Honey!!!!

 

[cavemanrich]

Thank you Sally for educating us on bee keeping. I just enjoy knowledge enrichment regardless of subject.
Yes,, you have had some trying times lately, but your positive attitude

So, with maybe a positive outcome on that bee hive,, do you think you need more bee housing on hand??
Meaning,, have an empty hive available when overcrowding happens?