june update

we managed to get through swarm season and we hope that we're done for this year!  we went from four hives to eight.  we have several new queens. 
the first is sheba, who is the daughter of jamaica and granddaughter of astoria. she has the hive that astoria lived in. 

sheba is lovely and dark like her mother and is already on the job, trying to rebuild the population of her hive, which was severely decreased when astoria passed away early this spring. 

the next new queen is orla, now head of the hive jamaica swarmed from. she is jamaica's daughter. she hatched after a secondary swarm from jamaica's hive happened on may 28th. the secondary swarm took off with the little black virgin queen we spotted previously. we weren't home to catch the swarm, however, even if we had been, they clustered 30' up in a tree behind the hive, so we wouldn't have been able to capture them.  

anyways, we found orla in the hive during our inspection on june 5th. she is golden!

we saw the third new queen in our four-frame nuc. she is also jamaica's daughter.  she's already got all kinds of eggs, larva and brood in her little home. we used one of jamaica's extra swarm cells to get her. she is striped! we decided to call her dido.

finally, on a very sad note, we have to report that we were unable to see rosie in her hive last wednesday, but found the hive full of emergency cells. we can only surmise that something happened to her during the previous inspection we did - either we lost her or squished her. it is incredibly sad, she was really beautiful and a very good queen. this was our first attempt at an artificial swarm. i must say everything went terribly wrong.  we culled nearly a dozen excess cells from the hive on the 6th, and we're waiting for rosie's daughter with great anticipation - she's due on the 12th or 13th. 

Really?

Erin Forbes, master bee-keeper from Portland, Maine, tongue-in-cheek declared may 17th to be the official opening day for swarm season here. well, she wasn't far off at all. on wednesday, may 15th at 11:00a.m., Jamaica swarmed and all of a sudden, our backyard was full of bees in the air. since we had seen some indication of swarming on our last inspection, we had decided to pull Jamaica from the hive and do an artificial swarm at the beginning of the week, however, the weather was very cool and windy and Lawrence didn't like the idea of exposing the brood.  of course, with the first halfway-decent weather on wednesday morning, she was "outta there".  the swarm landed in one of our hemlock trees in the backyard and after lots of discussion, we ended up topping the tree and shaking the clump into the waiting, baited hive.  the operation seemed successful, since everyone stayed in there. the moment we were done we went up to the nursery and performed a preemptive maneuver, removing Rosie from her hive to begin the artificial swarm process, although her hive wasn't nearly as ready to swarm, as Jamaica's had been. the following day, Peggy and Lawrence went through Jamaica's old hive and found 20 (yes!) queen cells in various stages of development. they removed four for our two nucs and left two really lovely ones in the hive and culled the rest. with that the swarm episode concluded and now our backyard apiary looks like this -

plus we have two more at the nursery. never a dull moment with bees.

Spring Has Sprung

the girls are back and so the beekeepers' work has resumed.  we made our first inspection of our hives on April 24th.  Jamaica's and Rosie's hives were 

           

          Jamaica

Rosie

going gangbusters. we saw many frames of eggs, larva and brood in each. With both of them doing so well, we decided to put them on a swarm watch, with the idea of preventing a swarm if possible. 

we carefully inspected Astoria's hive and alas, we saw no eggs, larva or brood, no sign of Astoria and a greatly reduced number of bees in the hive.  after consulting with Peggy and Richard (our bee-mentors) we guess that Astoria probably passed away sometime earlier in the spring.  she was one of our original queens from Bob Egan and we figured that she had been born in the summer of 2010, which would have made her nearly 3 years old. she was an amazing queen and wonderful egg-layer.  after she swarmed last year, she repopulated her new hive in record time. many of the pictures of perfect brood frames in this blog were from her hive last year. of course, we were very sad to lose her, however, Peggy and Richard suggested that we insert frames of eggs, larva and brood from Jamaica's hive (Astoria's daughter) so that the remaining bees could make a new queen for themselves.  we did that and are now eagerly awaiting Astoria's granddaughter!

finally, we took a look through crazy Katherine's hive and saw some brood, larva and eggs, although not nearly as much as we would have liked to see.  we're not sure if Katherine was able to mate well in the autumn last year. we did see her, but, I have to confess that she looked rather thin and small - not at all plump and rotund like a well-mated queen should look.  we added a couple of frames of brood from Rosie's hive to help out Katherine's colony, and we will give her some more time to get laying before we make any decisions about her. 

Auf Wiedersehen

auf wiedersehen, meine biene-mädchen!  i think that when you have bees and care for them throughout the summer, it is very hard to say goodbye in the fall. we've been so involved in their lives and activities since the early spring, that it is hard to imagine being without them for five months or so.  alas, that is what beekeepers must face - straight out bee-withdrawal.  it is painful.  today, we checked Catherine's hive just a wee bit, to make sure that their honey frames in box 3 were right in the center.  it was sad and happy to see them one last time! we especially hope that this hive will survive our nasty maine winter. i will rejoice in april when i see that they have wintered through. auf wiedersehen, meine biene-mädchen!  stay clustered and warm!

Fall Bees

the days and nights have been a lot cooler here in maine in the last two weeks.  there is no more nectar outside for the bees to collect. the bees know that winter is coming and they need to prepare for the long, cold season.  that is why they are cranky, very cranky!  gone are our happy-go-lucky, calm, peaceful summer bee-girls.  now, they've turned into nasty girls (but only because they are so cranky!)  

lawrence got stung three times in one of our last inspections of  Astoria's hive.  (perhaps the fact that he sort of dropped two different frames of bees had a bit to do with that.)  we've been feeding the bees a 2 to 1 dilution of sugar syrup to enable them to really stuff their hive full of nectar (and eventually, honey) for the winter. sometimes, even opening the roof of the hive a crack to check their supply can lead to disaster. 

last week, i checked Astoria's hive, just cracking the lid up two inches or so to peek in.  there was syrup left in the feeder tray, so i wanted to let the roof down, but two bees had popped up on the edge of the feeder.  wanting to get them back down into the box, i foolishly blew at them.  within a millisecond, one of them stung me on the wrist.  of course, i hadn't even thought of putting on any of my bee attire just to peek in the top of the hive. i dropped the top and took off, racing through the back yard with the second bee dive-bombing me.  i reached the side porch and raced into the mudroom and slammed the door.  i could still hear slight buzzing, but i saw no bee inside the room. i cracked open the door and the buzzing increased, so i knew she was lurking on the porch, looking for me. just then, a friend came by to drop something off, so i had to go back outside to meet him.  no problem with the bee, but as soon as i got back on the porch, she smelled the "banana oil" alarm scent on me and was all over me again. i panicked and ran off the porch, tripped on the stairs and landed flat on the walkway.  my friend thought i was deranged.  in desperation, i ripped off my pullover and threw it on the grass.  fortunately, this trapped the bee in the fabric. my friend, however, insisted on picking up the shirt, and despite my warning not to, he began to turn the garment inside out.  when he got to the second sleeve, out popped the enraged bee, who promptly went after him. he left batting his head, running to his car.  i ended up with a lovely sting and scrapes and bruises from my fall. 

today, we had to go into catherine's hive to treat it for mites with apilifevar.  even with my full-combat gear on (hat, gloves, shirt, tied-down pant legs), there were a bunch of guard bees trying their best to breach the defenses.  where have our lovely bee-girls gone?

The Mysterious Ways of Bees

this is an update to the situation in bianca's hive - despite our efforts to intercede and provide a mated queen to the hive, when we inspected the hive on 9/14, we found a wild queen, not the yellow-marked queen we had purchased, in control of the hive. as usual, the bees were as quiet and contented as we had ever seen them. we spotted her in the third deep, running around.  she is very big, and rotund - signs pointing to her having mated successfully, in spite of the lateness of the season.  we thought we had  also seen a few eggs in cells and some milky substance in the bottom of cells. a week later, 9/21, we inspected the hive again and saw two frames of brood with eggs and larva in the second deep. we spotted the queen again and she looked very fit and happy, obviously laying eggs and doing her best to boost the population of this hive for winter.  it is really a miracle that she was able to mate at all, given how late in the season it was. so, for now, we have a new queen and we have decided to name her Catherine the Great, since the Russian Catheine also had to overcome great obstacles on her way to becoming one of the greatest rulers of that country. the next hurdle for this hive is to repeat a mite treatment.  we did a mite drop on a board in that hive a week ago, and found that there were nearly 60 mites on the board in a 48-hour period. this is a rate that requires treatment, especially before winter, when all the bees will be housebound and very susceptible to mite infestation. we've decided to treat them with apilifevar, a product that is not associated with extensive bee mortality. the population of this hive has dwindled, due to their issues with queens, and we would like to be sure to knock down the mites, but leave as many bees alive in the process.  we will update our main page with a picture of Catherine asap!

Autumn nectar

when we looked into Jamiaca's hive on 9/1 we found the entire third deep filled with this reddish nectar.  at the time, we worried that there might be something wrong with this nectar (usually nectar is clear or yellowish).  peggy informed us that our bees have been busy harvesting nectar from the knotweed plant.  this tall bush is actually an invasive type of bamboo from japan.

apparently, knotweed nectar makes a delicious honey similar to buckwheat honey.  we are very lucky that they have this autumn nectar source in our neighborhood.  unfortunately, our bees are still not storing anything in their honey supers because the frames are not drawn out with comb.  so only the bees themselves will enjoy delicious honey all winter, not us.  we will need to sort out our honey super disfunction next year. we think we have a plan.