Thanks to the Rapture......

Thanks to the rapture, all the bees are dead. No survivors. The hives are full of honey so they didn't starve. We will be taking a year off. The cold and wet spring weather will make it impossible to start new hives. When the weather warms up we may be able to harvest the honey from last year since the bees didn't use it.

Cross your fingers.. winters here.

A week ago, after it snowed about a foot, Dad, Kelly and I went out to check on the bees. We knew the north hive was dead and we needed to collect the empty boxes for winter storage. To our surprise the south hive was alive. There were not many bees in it but maybe that wil be what saves them. We did not take any honey, and if we check them in early February we might be able to nurse them through, if they are still alive then. The middle hive is very full of honey and bees. It should be fine. But.... it will depend on the weather. Good luck nectar suckers!

Dead Bees

Dad informed me yesterday that the north hive is dead. Apparently we didn't take enough bees when we split the south hive. Oh well, we will be doing this again next spring if we can get the other two to survive the winter. I have real concerns about them having enough honey stored. It's like they are stuck in idle. They have not even begun to use the honey supers yet and the season is almost over.

Another experiment.....

Late July 2010, As I have been describing the hives I realize now that I spend a lot of time identifying each one to you. So to make things easier I will describe each hive and give it a name.

First, you should know that the 3 hives sit in a North-South row. The hive that survived the winter and then lost it's queen is in the center. This hive has the newest queen and I will call it the middle hive.
The new hive that has never lost it's queen and accepted the failed hive during the merge is the south hive. And the hive that was created by splitting the south hive is called the north hive. Clear? ( I have edited previous posts and added 'north', 'south', and 'middle' to help out if you are just now catching up)

We noticed that the queen in the north hive (created from the split) was not laying very much brood. Dad suggested that she is only laying brood that can be cared for by the workers in the hive. We estimate there is about 200-300 bees total so that kind of makes sense. (the middle hive could have 300,000 - 500,000 bees which is why we could never find the queen)
We decided to conduct another experiment. We took several frames from the middle hive and did the newspaper trick to see if we could merge them to increase the population of the north hive. This experiment came with some risk of course. If the bees did not assimilate, would they just leave? would they kill the queen? would they be treated as intruders and be killed?
Well, it did not work as planned. It appears that if the bees have not been without a queen for a while, they are not interested in becoming part of a new hive and will immediately try to return to their own hive. Thankfully they did not kill the queen, but it is obvious they did not stick around very long once they made it through the newspaper because we still only have a few hundred bees in the north hive.

(this post catches us up to July 29th 2010)

Honey will not bee harvested this year.

July 2010, We realize now that with the combination of weather, and dead queens that we will probably not get any honey from the bees this year. They may not even make enough to survive the winter. We'll need to watch closely and make sure later on, as it starts to get cold, that they are storing enough honey. If not then we will need to feed them as long as the feeders do not freeze.

We checked the (middle) hive that survived the winter, and while we could not find a queen it showed some sign that there was one. The brood we found was in an organized pattern, but I suppressed my hopes until we found brood cells capped that were not the typical bullet shaped drones. This was our proof that we had a queen. I was relieved and amazed. It is obvious that nature has it's order, bees have survived millenniums without humans, and will continue to survive without us, probably forever. I am blessed to be able to observe bees at work. Correcting mistakes and adapting to the world around them. Surviving, multiplying, carrying on, day after day. They just don't give up! I am sure there is a life lesson here... if only i could find what it is...

Anyway.. all is well. We have three hives with queens. Now get busy gathering honey!

Fred.. is.... the... man!

My conversation with Fred gave me a lot to think about. I actually had some hope that I could save this lost hive. So Dad, Kelly, and I went out and took a queen excluder, set it on the new hive (south) with a good queen, added a sheet of newspaper and placed the lost (north) hive on top of that and then put on the lid. This is how to merge the hive without a queen into another hive so the bees are not lost. The scent (pheromones) from the queen would seep through the newspaper and the bees in the upper box would start to respond and become a part of the hive as they ate their way through the newspaper in about 2 days. This worked like a charm!

The next suggestion was to remove a couple of frames with eggs and brood from the strongest (middle) hive, place them in an empty box at the top of the strongest (middle) hive, wait till the next day and then move the box on to its own base. This would make sure the bees that were on the frames were 'nurse' bees and ensure the eggs and brood would be taken care of after we split it. Then, because the brood and nurse bees were taken out of the hive, away from the queen, they would assume the queen was dead and create queen cells and raise several new queens in hopes that one would return and rule the hive.

One problem..... when we went to get the brood frames from the strong (middle) hive, we couldn't find any. The queen from the (middle) hive that survived the winter was gone. I don't know if she died, was killed, or just decided to leave, but there was no queen. There was about 20 queen cells though, so we left it alone and hoped they would correct it themselves.

So, with no brood to gather from the strong (middle) hive we went to the new (south) hive that we had just merged. We found a couple of frames of brood and separated it. Waited for two weeks and checked the brood. There was a couple of queen cells! cool. Waited another ten days and the queens had hatched, but we could not find one. Waited another ten days, by then it was mid July 2010, and checked it again. We found a queen and she had begun laying eggs!

2010... The year of experiments and learning

Late June 2010. I was sitting at work one day and with not much to do, started searching the web for information on bee-havior (I know!, funny, right?) I found two articles that described the condition of our lost (north) hive but nothing that would suggest a resolution. One article did say that we could introduce a new queen and that maybe there was a 50% chance that it would work. I figured, 'what do I have to lose' so I contacted the SLC company to see if they could send me a queen. Funny story about that phone conversation that I might share later, but it turns out they would not ship a queen to Idaho.
I knew they got the package bees from Northern California (no-cal) so searched the web for bee providers there. I found one in Sacramento and called them up. I asked the gal who answered if they would ship a queen to Idaho and she said they would but the cost was $60. Then she asked me to hold on and went to get her dad. I could hear her tell him I was in Idaho and was needing a queen. He asked me why I needed one. I told him the situation. He said I did not want to put a new queen in that (north) hive she would get killed.

I got a good education from a professional that day. His name is Fred Stewart and he runs Sacramento Beekeeping Supplies and his website is http://sacramentobeekeeping.com/ . He was really fun to talk to and gave me some great advice. He even asked me to call him back and let him know how it was going.

Here we go again....Wait, what the hell?

March 2010, Dad and I headed back to Salt Lake City to get two more boxes of bees. Down an back in one day and out to Kelly's place to set them up. We moved the only surviving hive from last year to the middle of the row with a new hive on either side. Attached the feeder bottles and left them alone for a couple days. Every 3 or 4 days we would make sure they had sugar water in the feeder bottles. The weather this spring was very uncooperative. Cold, almost freezing clear into early June. Lots of rain and wind. Not very good for keeping bees.

Early June 2010, when checking the status of each hive we discovered that one of the new hives (north) had lost its queen. (CRAP! - $75 bucks down the drain). I give the north hive credit though, as they tried to grow a new one, but with only one queen cell and the rain, wind and cold, the odds were against them. Eventually, without a queen the hive started to do weird things. One day I saw eggs in the cells and was excited thinking that the queen came back and all was well. Later we discovered that a worker bee (all workers are female and can lay eggs) was busy laying. The thing is that a worker bee can only lay drone bees. So no workers, or queen. In addition to that she was quickly creating a mess in the hive. Sometimes laying several eggs in a cell and in no particular pattern. We realized that with a growing population of drones and a shrinking population of workers they would soon be out of food and we would lose the hive. and with no hope of re-queening, we accepted this one as a lost cause.

Winter.... from..... hell.

Winter of 2009-2010 was harsh. There was not a lot of snow, but it was very cold with several weeks of below zero temps. As soon as we could we went to check the hives to see how they managed over the winter. It was February and there was still snow so we used Kelly's snowmachines to get to them. (Beekeepers on snowmachines, I wish I had a photo of that!) What we found was not good. Our strongest hive was dead. We realized too late that we had taken too much honey from them and they had starved and died. The other hive, (the one we thought would die) had survived! They were very close to being out of food so we immediatley began feeding them and decided to get two more boxes of bees for 2010.

Bees.... Part 2

Fast forward to 2008. It was late spring when my brother Kelly asked Dad and I if we were interested in starting up bees again.. He had just watched a show on TV about bees and beekeeping and although he was very young when Dad had the hives, he remembered it. Because it was too late to start up we decided to try for the next spring.

February 2009 we placed an order for two, five pound boxes of bees and started to prep the hives. Late March, Dad and I drove to Salt Lake City and picked them up. Two new hives were arranged at the back of Kelly's property out in the country. The weather that year was amazing. Warm, sunny, mild wind. Perfect for bees. They did very well and produced lots of honey. We harvested almost 7 gallons of the very best, lightest honey we had every had.

Bees...... the beginning

Years ago, when i was a kid, my dad had bees. He and his friends each have several hives and harvested honey to sell to people in the town. In the early to mid 80s, honey was a fad. Everyone used it for canning, cooking, etc. It was THE thing among the health food crowd. So.... a hobby turned in to extra money for my parents to raise 7 kids. We all helped, carrying boxes, fighting skunks (more on this later), de-capping frames, spinning honey, swatting bees during harvest in the back yard. Being the oldest, my dad counted on me helping with the heavy work. He also counted on me to do a lot of the dirty work and this is where we talk skunks. Bees and skunks???? OK so let me explain. Skunks eat bees. They walk up to the hive at night and scratch on the landing. The bees come out to investigate and the skunk licks them up. A single skunk can eat an entire hive in a couple of nights. Dad had a friend that had property out by the city dump and he let dad put his hives there. Lots of clover and wild flowers around but because it was near the dump, lots of skunks too. Dad placed foot traps at each of the hives. Each morning we would go check the traps. Almost every morning there were several skunks caught in the traps. Not dead, they were ALIVE.
Have you ever tried to free a live skunk from a trap?? I didn't think so. You have to kill them or you will never get them out of the trap. I got to be a really great shot with the 22 cal. and could often kill the skunk without it spraying, but not always. We spent an entire summer clearing traps and burying skunks. I estimated we trapped about 150 in just three months and it smelled like it! After a while the hobby got in the way of teenagers needs and was abandoned. Dad kept all the hardware and boxes in the back of the shed, just in case.