sugar syrup

occasionally, beekeepers need to supplement their girls’ diet with sugar syrup. nectar dearths, helping a newly-swarmed hive draw out comb on many empty frames, or helping to stabilize a hive with a brand new queen are a few good reasons. recently in southern maine, beekeepers are experiencing a rather severe nectar dearth. check out the excerpt below from our local bee club -

“there are several areas in York County (micro-climates) where, right now, beekeepers are finding no nectar in their hives - many of them inland locations. Some of the coastal areas are experiencing the opposite situation and honey supers are filling up causing overcrowding and swarming. A few other beekeepers from our area with whom I spoke last night are experiencing what we are with the nectar dearth. So... to keep feeding for a little bit continues to be a good idea until the bees have a chance to backfill their brood chamber.”

given this situation, all four of our hives are now being fed. nectar is the bee’s natural carbohydrate, but we use sugar in a 1 to 1 dilution. it mustn't be too hot or too cold - just right! we pop it in a freezer bag and place it on the feeder board at the top of the hive. the feeder board has a hole drilled in it so the bees can come up and have dinner. we make 2 slits in the plastic so the syrup seeps out. bon appetit!

getting organized

i met peggy at 9:00 to go through all the hives at the nursery. i’ve come up with names for all of the queens (with creative input from andrea and diana). the old swarmed queen is astoria and her successor daughter is bellarosa. the quirky, survivor, bald-head-loving black queen is jamaica and as you will see later on in this entry, our newest yellow queen is bianca castafiore.

peggy and i started with the old hive that swarmed and quickly spied out bellarosahanging around in the upper deep. we caught her in the queen cage (left) and placed her on top of the frames of the other deep to see how attractive pheromonally she was to her bees. very quickly, the cage became an orange-sized clump of bees positively in love with her. peggy and i saw many drone cells on the frames and no larva or capped brood. we also saw at least six supersedure cells scattered throughout the frames. it’s a bit of a puzzle as to what is going on with this hive. the bees obviously really like bella’s pheromone, however the presence of the supersedures may indicate that they don’t have confidence in her as a queen. she could very well be our youngest queen and perhaps she needs a little more time to really start laying eggs. we will check in on her again in a week and hopefully we will see larva and worker bee brood.

next we turned to the recently merged nuke hive. today was the day to take the piece of newspaper out. we carefully lifted off the upper deep and saw that the bees had eaten out a frame-sized hole in the paper. peggy said, “yay - that means they’re friends now!” we found the lovely jamaica lurking around again in an upper box, so we caged her and moved her down and rearranged the frames a bit. jamaica is a very strong new queen and already has a beautiful laying pattern. they are doing very well and will soon need a real home. time for dad to come home and build it for them! ps - we also had to excavate 3 pieces of very creative comb sculpture from one of the frames.

finally, we opened the old 8 frame hive. previously, we hadn’t seen a queen but we had figured that the hive underwent a supersedure, since we saw many spent supersedure cells and observed a very distinct holding-open pattern in the frames. again, in the top deep, peggy spotted the new queen. she is a total blonde, so, of course, we had to name her bianca castafiore. we did see some larva and brood already and we decided to keep feeding this hive, since 10 days earlier, we had found it very dried out and short of nectar, due to the dearth that is going on right now.

all this took 2.5 hours! i still had to talk with peggyabout what to do with the bees at home that i had gone through on sunday. the procedure she described kept getting more and more complicated by the minute, so i was extremely relieved when she agreed to come over to the house to help me with the swarm hive. we opened the hive and found astoria in the upper deep, just as i had observed the day before. we caged her and set her aside as we did a major overhaul of the hive. astoria has been extremely busy populating her colony, but then again, she is a wise and experienced queen. she has an exquisite laying pattern. peggy and i sorted through all the frames and managed to get anythingthat needed a bit more drawing out on the top deep and all of the brood, eggs and astoria herself on the bottom deep. there will be a population explosion very soon in that hive, so i will need to go to bee pride and buy a third deep, paint it and install it hopefully, very soon. don’t want this hive to swarm again! yowsers! peggy only got stung twice!