It has been a while since I have been on to post about the bees. The last post was back in April. I have been extremely busy since then with the ups and downs with trying to grow a healthy and happy apiary. I have had my challenges this year; splits gone wrong, some robbing. Yet, I have had some successes as well; weak colonies growing strong and the best harvest of honey so far since I have been keeping bees. I will take the good with the bad.
With that said, I will define what a split is, in beekeeping terminology. A split is when you take bees and frames from a hive, placing it in another hive. You look with eggs or a developing queen in a queen cell, in hopes to prevent swarming and creating a new colony. As I mentioned earlier, my splits did not go as planned. I performed two splits off of one hive and I had queen cell in each of the splits. The queens seemed to emerge, but probably didn’t make it back from mating flights, plus there didn’t seem to be enough bees in them to maintain a queen to lay eggs. So I tried to combing the splits and then add a new queen that I purchased. Unfortunately that queen died and since there were some bees left in there so I combined the hive into one brood box, just incase I missed a queen that could be in there. I did another split from another hive because I saw an intact queen cell. The split was successful, after a few weeks, I saw a laying queen in the hive but the hive that I split it from was queenless. So I purchased another queen and had a successful re-queening of that hive.
If that wasn’t enough trouble, during my inspections, I noticed that one of my hives had numerous opened queen cells in there. I was hoping if I was patient enough that a queen would start laying, but that did not happen. Again probably a queen going off on a mating flight and not making it back. If a colony is queenless long enough, a worker bee will take on the responsibility of laying eggs. That is problematic because a worker bee does not go out on mating flights and will lay unfertilized eggs. Those unfertilized eggs develop into drones (male bees) which do not contribute to the colony maintenance; gathering nectar and pollen, raising brood, cleaning out brood cells, etc. I was hoping that I caught this issue in time and I tried to introduce a new queen bee to that hive. They weren’t quite of accepting her. So I pulled her from that hive and placed her in a nuc (nucleus) brooding box. (Nuc brooding box is a hive body that holds 4-5 frames for the bees and is intending for creating a safe space for bees to raise eggs and brood. I have double nuc box, it is the same size as a 10 frame Langstroth hive, but has a wooden divider down the center to divide the two colonies from each other.) I took the bees the were left from the combined split and placed them on one side and placed the queen, in her queen cage, on the other side with a few bees that seem to be attracted to her. Reduced the entrances as small as I could on the nuc box to prevent robbing and left the colonies survive side by side.
The plan was to have these bees release the queen, have her start laying and reintroduce her to the hive that I was originally re-queening. The next inspection of the nuc, I found the queen released from her cage but there were not a lot of bees hanging out with her and there was a still a small cluster of bees from the split on the other side. So I made the decision to change the nuc inner covers to a regular inner cover. This would allow the bees to intermingle between both sides of the hive and hopefully those bees will accept a new queen.
If your mind is a blur right now, so is mine, because during the Frankensteining of those splits and re-queening, I harvested honey, two times, and I’m not sure exactly when during that mess though. After I harvested the honey off of one of strong hives, I placed a brood box with waxed frames on top of a queen excluder in hopes that the bees will start drawing out the frames with new comb and to give them the space that I just took from them with the removal of the honey supers. I also gave the bees in that strong hive some sugar water in efforts to help them draw out new comb. This ended up being beneficial for the next inspection of the monster of a split/re-queening drama that I have caused. Maybe, I will just call it the little hive going forward.
At the same time of next inspection of the little hive, I had plans to place the honey suppers back on the big healthy hive, which means that I had to add the bees that were in the brood box back into that hive or if needed move some of those frames with bees on it into the little hive. First, I inspected the little hive. I was happy to see that all of the bees were on the queen side of the hive, but again there weren’t enough bees to get her to lay. The lack of bees could have been partially a result of a super fat daddy-long legs that I found in the now non bee side of the nuc hive. I removed the spider and I also removed the frames from empty side of the nuc box and added 4 frames with a bunch of bees from the brood box to it. Hopefully, this will be enough bees to get the queen to start laying. My fingers are crossed.
The rest of my hives are doing well. The colony that I received that was considered a DOA package (aka the baby hive) is doing well. I have added a second brooding box to it and I am happy that this colony has expanded so well. Hive #4, is constantly bearding, bees hanging on the outside of it. I’m surprised it hasn’t swarmed (knock on wood). Another one of my smaller hives from the spring has expanded well and the successful split appears to be doing well. I haven’t popped my head into those hives recently though, they are due for an inspection. My goal is to have happy and healthy colonies strong enough to make it through the winter, not just for this year but for every year.
At this time I would like to thank you for reading and please 🐝 kind. I will leave you with some pictures from this spring and summer.
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