I lost swarms 2 and 3 and these were from my Sally line and the Cleopatra line. These I would have loved to keep. I really should requeen the swarmy hives, but now they are on to the next generation and might be less swarmy for next year.

I really need to read up on how to combine these swarms into an existing hive without the queen. I would just like to get the population up for the black locust nectar flow. I am up to seven hives now and I don’t want that many. Four seems good for me.

This hive swarmed on either April 14 or April 18. I’m not sure which (there were four swarms in the past week). Something curious happened on April 15. You can see how the hive temperature had been dropping at night closely following the outside temperature, but on April 15 it didn’t stayed warmer all night. I am guessing that maybe this hive swarmed on the 18th after a couple of days of increased activity in the hive. This is just a guess based on a single hive and set of data, but it is interesting. The temperature stayed high and steady even several days after the 18th, however, so I don’t know what that would mean. The Broodminder is just another tool in the beekeeping arsenal, but I am already finding it to be useful and interesting. I have purchased the next generation sensor which will include hive weight. I am very excited to test that one out as well. It is scheduled for June or July, probably available right after the honey harvest which is when it would have been the most useful. There is always next year – if the battery doesn’t die!

I only observed two of the four swarms leaving the hives, so I can’t be sure where the other two come from, but I only had four hives and I don’t think one of them has swarmed yet. That would mean that at least one of these was an ‘after swarm’ and as such will have a virgin queen. This whole concept doesn’t make much sense to be, but Liz is certainly a believer as she experienced four or five after swarms out of her observation hive last season. I should note that two of my hives came from that ‘swarm stock’ of 2015. In fact, this swarm from hive 3 is one of those, albeit a second or third generation, So it could very well be that this is a second swarm from hive 3.

On Monday I observed a swarm collect on a nearby tree trunk. I think it was from hive 3. Liz came over to help collect the swarm. We basically scraped them gently down off the trunk and into a cardboard nuc box and in a few minutes it was apparent that we had the queen as the workers were marching into the entrance. Liz headed home to install these.

The thing to learn here is that this hive made the decision to raise a new queen and swarm before the first of April. March usually still feels a lot like winter around here, but the bees are looking ahead. We had a relatively warm Feb, so that might have contributed to the early build up of bees and the decision to leave. Next year I suppose I should put my honey supers on in March.

This past Monday, I was in my front yard when I saw a swarm on the move. I was hoping that they were going to find a tree to settle on, but it turned out that they were on the move to their new home. I followed them for several hundred yards heading slightly south of due west. I had never observed this before. They stayed in a cloud and were moving at a few miles per hour. I could have easily followed them, but they were heading across many properties and fences and I didn’t want to scare my neighbors or get shot. I took a video of my chase but you couldn’t really see the bees so I didn’t post it.

An hour or two later a second swarm emerged from hive 4. This was the hive set up last year by Kristien and Liz with a reared queen. I think they said that it was from the Cleopatra line. I took three videos of this swarm as it emerged, gathered, and landed. It’s a pretty impressive sight.

When I took a close look at the bees, it didn’t appear that they were doing a lot of waggle dancing, so I assumed that they were many hours away from finding a new home. I ate some lunch, got some boxes ready to receive them and walked back out to the swarm to find that they had left. What a disappointment. They were only on that briar bush for an hour or less. So it was not a good day for me. I lost two swarms. I just hope they found good homes.

I decided to pull my supers today. The process went fine. The fume board worked like a charm even though the juice is about three years old.

Liz brought over a nuc with one of the new Q1 queens. Are these from the George line? Anyway, we looked this evening and they didn’t seem to be taking much if any syrup. When should I check to see if she has emerged? Maybe just wait a week? Or wait three and check for eggs and small larvae?

[See image gallery at www.littleluceyfarm.com] There were lots of bees on top of the frames when I opened the covers, and lots of bees on all the frames with brood. That is a lot of brood to keep warm on these cold nights. We still have plenty of below freezing nights ahead of us.

I would love to propagate the Sally line, but I don’t want to mess with my only hive. So I will leave it alone. If it swarms, then I will hope to catch it and will get my Sally 3 after all. If it doesn’t swarm, then hopefully they will make lots of honey for me this year.

I definitely want to get a new hive before winter, so that means catching a swarm or getting some bees from a split from someone else.

I also didn’t treat for Varroa last year. The mite counts seemed low and with all the new queens and swarms, there were interruptions in the Varroa life cycle and that may have been the reason. This year, however, I will treat probably twice, and will use the sugar roll technique this year for the count.

Dr. Dewey Caron speaks to the Carroll County BA

Last night I went to a talk by Dr. Dewey Caron presented by the Carroll County Beekeepers Association. It was held at the Carroll Community College library. It was a great location and a nice room for a presentation. It was also a regular monthly meeting for the CCBA, but club business was limited to about 10 or 15 minutes. There were about 40 people there (just my guess) including three or four from FCBA. I sat with Rose A.
Dr. Caron spoke primarily about hive losses, overwintering losses in particular. He was pushing the efforts of the Bee Informed group. He presented lots of slides of the research done since 2006 with an emphasis on the work that was online for the past four or five years. He encouraged us to participate in this year’s survey which opens up in April. You can go to the website and sign up now for an email reminder of when the survey starts.

His bottom line was that regardless of what the actual loss numbers were, they are always well above what the beekeepers say are acceptable, sustainable losses and that is a problem. Overwintering losses have been pretty consistent at 25 – 35%, but higher for backyard keepers. The survey includes some large operations as well as backyard beekeepers. There are also losses other than over winter, so when you look at total losses for just backyard beekeepers, the yearly losses are close to 50%.

Varroa mites were a focus of the talk, both as a stressor in their own right, but also as a vector for viruses. Anything that can be done to reduce the mite load will help the colony. Dr. Caron went through most of the common treatments for Varroa, citing the effectiveness. All of this data comes from beekeepers through the Bee Informed survey. He prefaced his talk with a discussion about how this survey is not a random sample and not scientific in some respects. They attempt to correlate single actions with outcomes when these actions are not checked. They are unverified responses from the survey.

The second bullet on his list was about queens. He believes that a lot can be done to improve overwintering by managing queens more effectively. One of the things that can be done is survivor selection. He also believes that new queens are more vigorous and hardier through the winter and probably lay better in the fall producing winter bees. Russian and various hygienic queens also help.

Other bullet items included nutrition, pesticides and viruses. He suggested that the colony size should be between 20,000 and 30,000 and that too many bees might be detrimental although he didn’t elaborate on that.

It was an interesting talk and it reenergized me a bit to continue to work toward queen selection. I also bought Dr. Caron’s book, Honey Bee Biology and Beekeeping. It is a very nice book that was published in 1999 and updated in 2013.

A dead hive

I checked my hives yesterday. It was the first nice day in three or four weeks. The sun was out and it was in the mid forties – maybe warmer. I was walking the dogs and noticed that there were lots of bees flying around the front of hive 4. The last time I had checked hives 1 and 4 were alive, but it was difficult to tell how big the cluster was from the top.

I put on a jacket and gloves and went to take a look. Sadly, hive 1 was dead. The bees were still in a cluster with a few eating some candy. It was like a snapshot of a normal living hive, except they were not alive. I guess they just froze. But it was odd that some of them were out of the cluster, eating candy several frames away.

Could be a living cluster – but isn’t.

The good news is that the other hive seemed to be doing very well. I took off the lids and there were bees covering the frames. There were also lots of bees at the entrance and flying around. I had to push lots of bees out of the way just to add some candy on top of the frames.

Hive 1 was the only hive that overwintered last season and was the source of the first queen rearing, Sally. Hive one swarmed, however, so it had a Sally daughter, Sally 2a going into this winter. Hive 4 also had a daughter, Sally 2c. So although they were sisters, they could very well have different fathers. In any case, the lone survivor, Sally 2c, seems to be doing very well. It’s tempting to rear more queens with her, I really think that I might rather leave her alone and see if I can get some honey this year. Hopefully, I can start another hive somehow, but I would be happy to not have a swarm or do a split.

On another note, the new life in the title also refers to the fact that my granddaughter, Azra Elis, was born yesterday in Istanbul. Sarah and Azra are home and doing well.

It turns out that the queen that KZ and I marked with my new blue paint pen, and that I was worried I had killed, is alive and doing well in hive 1 after all. I found her in the second frame in the top brood box that I looked at, which was lucky and saved me some time. I saw lots of capped brood and also some uncapped brood in all stages. I even saw the queen lay an egg. I felt as though the top brood box was busier than the bottom, so I switched them. The hope is that, she will build up the bottom box for a while and maybe store some honey in the top. I have not been feeding, but the number look pretty good. My thought was to reduce the numbers slightly in August and September, but have the queen start laying more in Sep and Oct to produce a large batch of winter bees. I guess I will start feeding in Sep. I also put a queen excluder on the top brood box, with the goal of removing one or both of the supers in the fall.

[See image gallery at www.littleluceyfarm.com]

So what of the blue marked queen that appeared in nuc/hive 5? Well, for one, she is gone now and the hive is almost empty – just a handful of bees left. I don’t know where that queen came from or why she is now gone. Easy come – easy go. I had originally imagined that the blue queen from hive 1 had somehow migrated to hive 5, but that didn’t really make any sense and, in fact, didn’t happen. Order has been returned to the universe.

So here is the revised lineup as of August 16:

Hive 1: Sally 2a
Hive 2: Georgia 2a
Hive 3: Sally 2b
Hive 4: Sally 2c
Hive 5: dead