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.

When I pulled a frame from hive 5 there was a queen marked in blue! I’m almost certain that the banked queen was marked in yellow and it was worn mostly off. As far as I remember, there was only one queen marked with blue. Kristien was here and helped me mark the queen from hive 1 who is Sally 2a. She is the one that was lifeless when we put her back into the hive after I marked her. That might have been June 18 or maybe later I can’t remember. At least three, maybe four weeks ago. I haven’t wanted to take apart hive 1 for a full inspection. I wanted to let the blue queen recover and if she was dead or damaged, let the bees raise a new queen and wait until I could look for larvae, which I calculate to be almost exactly a month. If I do an inspection next week and find a blue queen, I will know I have lost my mind. If there is an unmarked queen, then she is a newby and the blue marked Sally 2a did in fact move to hive 5. This brings up a few interesting questions. What happened to Georgia? How did Sally 2a get from hive 1 to hive 5 and why?

So here is the new lineup since my post on queen status on June 30.

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

Sally 2 doing fine

Hive 4 queen

This is Sally 2 from the Q1 rearing. There was so little activity at the entrance, that I really would not have been surprised to find that Sally was gone. Instead I found a moderate number of happy bees storing honey in the top of the three brood boxes. I will do a better inspection later to see how the brood pattern looks, but for now I think things are doing well and I will hope that this hive can make it through the winter.

I didn’t pull any frames for extraction, and at the rate they are storing honey, I think this should be fine with a little feeding in the fall.

The package I bought had a Georgian queen I’ll call Georgia and was installed into hive 2. Georgia swarmed, was caught, and has made her way into hive 5 as back-up. Hive 2, therefore, made a new daughter queen, Georgia 2. This hive is doing well, but I might still want to requeen before winter. Hive 4 was the swarm, but after swapping queens, now has another Sally 2c.

Hive 1: Sally 2a
Hive 2: Georgia 2a
Hive 3: Sally 2b
Hive 4: Sally 2c
Hive 5: Georgia (backup queen currently in a cardboard NUC box)

[See image gallery at www.littleluceyfarm.com]

This weekend, we also set up the NUCs for Q3. There were grafted last Sunday (one week ago), and will likely emerge this Wed or Thu. Today we harvested the queen cells (from George and Lisa). I ended up with two George 2 queens. I set up the NUCs next to each other, but did not completely block the entrance to the empty NUC. It was being robbed  badly by this evening when I went to install the George 2 cells. I decided to move the NUC being robbed about 80 feet away (back to the original location) in hopes that the robbers would just stay or relocate, but not continue to rob. I also installed the frame of brood from Mel with some bees into this NUC. I hope the two groups of bees can get along. I now have Hives 6 and 7 raising the new George queens.

Hive 6: George 2a
Hive 7: George 2b (in Area 2)

This week I was checking on the native nuc from Allen and the swarm from Mel and found that they both were ready for a third brood box. (The brood pattern on from that swarm queen, Mel, is fantastic!  Not a single cell missed!)  I got to thinking, today, maybe I should check on the Q1 hive to see how things are going.

Well, it didn’t need a new box yet.  I sort of forgot that in the process of moving the deep brood up, we provided them with 6 frames of foundation to build out.  They are busy with that project.  And this is what I found:

They seem to have a distinct dislike for wire in the foundation.  I think this colony is just naturally a foundationless group!  What do you think?

You can see in the picture below that there are bees working to chew out some of the other wires as well!

I think when I do add the next box, I’m going to checkerboard it with foundationless frames.

Hive 3 is another mystery. I really think there is no queen in that hive. I saw a few emergency/swarm cells and destroyed one in the inspection (bummer). Again there was some capped brood but no young brood. I only pulled three frames and after destroying a queen cell decided to put it back together and hope for the best. Another week and the queen will be out if there is one.

This nurse hive (or queen builder) was set up like a nuc originally with brood and pollen and honey and when I moved it, I added a second box (medium) also with some frames of honey and pollen as well as some empty frames. There has always been some empty frames, so I didn’t think swarming was much of a threat. I know a swarm is programmed to build comb, but this wasn’t a swarm and I thought they would be happy with more frames with stuff on them.

It is still possible that there is a queen in the bottom section with eggs and young larvae that I didn’t see and that this hive is about the swarm, so I will be watching out for this in the next few days. On the other hand, if they are queenless, the question is, what happened to her. This hive had one of the new queens in it.

After the new queens were born, one was left in the queen builder box, which after another couple of weeks, I moved about 30 feet, It is now hive 3. It should have had one of the new queens in it, but I don’t remember if we ever found it or verified that it had successfully mated and was laying. The other three queens were moved to nucs.

Shortly after hive 3 was set up, hive 2 swarmed and I caught it and installed it into hive 4. The specific goal for me was to replace the package queen before winter. But now that the package (hive 2) had swarmed, there would be a half Georgian queen made in hive 2 and the original Georgian queen was then in hive 4.

One of the other queens made went into a cardboard nuc as hive 5. I waited a couple of days after installing the swarm and then removed the queens from 4 and 5. They were both marked yellow. They went into the garage for 24 hours (or was it 48?). Then I did the swap. I put the Georgian queen into hive 5 and the new queen into hive 4.

The problem has been that after about a week in hive 4, there was very little activity and very few bees looking in from the top. I was wondering why and if the queen was gone as well.

Today I inspected hive 4 and found maybe a couple hundred bees and surprisingly, the marked queen, too. This was bad that the bees were mostly gone, but good that at least the queen was there. I also confirmed that there was some larvae. I don’t know if they can maintain the hive with so few bees, so I hoped to swap in a medium frame of capped brood. I thought I had a better chance of finding the queen in hive 3 versus hive 2, so I inspected several frames in the medium brood box of hive 3, found a couple of perfect frames, but never found the queen. I looked really carefully and decided to move a frame of brood into hive 4. There was also some brood less than a week old, so there must be or have been a queen in there recently. I also found several emergency queen cells and some swarms cells. These may have been left over from the queen rearing. It doesn’t really make sense that they would be swarming. I really hope that I didn’t move the queen over into hive 4. That would be a shame. It was a calculated risk, but I really didn’t want to lose hive 4 with the new queen. On the off chance that something did happen to the new queen in hive 3, I hope that they will just make a new one again. We will also hopefully have some more new queens from our second round of rearing (Q2) within the week.

I still have the original Georgian queen in hive 5 in reserve. I will transfer those frames into one of my new nuc boxes in the new few days. I suppose that I should keep moving frames of brood out of the nuc so they won’t swarm. I can keep adding these to hive 4 if necessary.