Bad Bee News

Anson says we had a beemergengy, that we had to act beemediately and that it was unbeelievable but I just said you've got to bee kidding me.  A little less creative.  We indeed had some bad bee news this weekend.  It started out on Friday for our first real beekeeping activities.  Like I said in a previous blog post, the main responsibility a beekeeper seems to have is to ensure the queen is alive and well.  The way to check for this would ideally be to find her but that is challenging among tens of thousands of bees.  The other way is to find eggs, larva or caped larva.  This evidence of brood would lead the beekeeper to the conclusion that there was a healthy queen laying recently.  Well, on Friday when we checked we did not see any evidence at all of brood.  We called Poppop and then a mentor from the Wake County Beekeepers Association and determined that there was no queen and that the only option we had to save the remaining bees would be to combine the hives down to one hive.  Anson and I are both so disappointed.  However, this has been and will continue to be a good learning experience!

Where did our queen go?  Well, it seems we never actually had a queen.  We can conclude this by looking at the development cycle of a worker bee:

Poppop told us that he had replaced both hive's queens before giving them to us.  To do this, you can make a new queen or you can buy one from an apiary.  Poppop buys his from Mr. Tapp of Busy Bee Apiaries in Chapel Hill.  They mail him a queen in a tiny box.  First, he has to locate the old queen and remove her.  Then there is a process to introduce the new queen.  For our hive without a queen he said that he was never able to actually locate the old queen and that obviously the bees must have rejected the new queen.

A hive cannot survive without a queen.  So, what we had to do was combine the hives.  The upside to this is that the one hive will be more populous, stronger, and get an earlier start in the spring.  We can then divide the hives back into two.  My bee mentor said he'd come help me do that.  We'll have to buy or make a queen. I have no idea how to do any of this so it will be fun to learn.

The hives we started with each had 2 boxes.  To combine them we had to break down the weak hive into just one box and introduce it to the strong hive.  Each box has ten frames.   We chose the ten choicest frames that were the heaviest with honey to leave with the bees and were supposed to remove the other ten and store for the winter.  Before storing, however, Poppop recommended we leave the frames in the freezer overnight to sort of sanitize them.  We have a very small fridge and we had plans so we decided, stupidly, to leave the box of frames on the porch to deal with when we got home later.  Well, oh my god, was that a mistake.  We came home to a cloud of bees.  It was insane.  It was actually very alarming.  Our awesome neighbors said they could hear the roar of bees buzzing from their porch.  I took a 15 second video of the feeding frenzy that was ensuing on our porch to share with you:

Luckily the bees all go home at night so we let the chaos continue and went to have dinner and see Batman with friends.  We came home later and the box was free of bees.  We put it in a trash bag, took a couple out for the freezer and put the rest in the shed.  Everything is much calmer now.  And still no stings for either of us.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of dead bees out by the hive.  It makes us sad.  I'm not sure why there are so many dead but there's enough I probably need to sweep them all away.  Hopefully everything is going OK and there will bee no more problems.

Are you going to make honey?

Telling people we are going to be beekeepers prompts some interesting questions.  My favorites so far are, "Are you going to make honey?"  (alternative includes "Did you make honey?"), "Does wearing yellow make them want to attack you?", and "Are you going to name them?".  I'm 90% sure the last one was a joke, especially considering that one came from a very fun friend.  So, if these are the types of questions you might have, don't feel bad, you're not alone.  I also am learning.  And Anson learned the hard way that the color of your clothing does matter but that it's dark colors, not yellow, that seems to anger bees.  Also, polarized lenses in sunglasses or scented deodorant or shampoo are no-nos in beekeeping.  We did name our hives: we have the White one and the Green one.

The question "Are you going to make honey?" seems the most common of the questions and I've been asked it several times.  It's similar to asking someone with chickens if they are going to make eggs.  Bees make the honey and essentially we take some once (in some cases twice) in the summer in exchange for a well-kept place to live.  This also gives the bees more opportunity to work and pollinate more plants instead of ending the season early with enough honey reserves to last the winter season.

While I am learning, these things I already knew.  This weekend was filled with new learnings though as my Poppop gave us some hands-on training.  He showed us how to check for a queen, which seems to be a beekeepers main task throughout the year.  One way is of course to find her.  She is longer and has a different shaped body than the rest of the bees.  Another way is to spot her eggs or larva.  If you can spot eggs or larva you know that she is laying and therefore exists.  Our hives both have queens, however the laying pattern of the green hive is scattered and weak so we will have to feed them in an effort to increase the strength of the hive.  I'll do this tomorrow.  The food will be a sugar water solution 1:1.  Or was it 2:1?...  I'm still learning!

Poppop teaching us about the laying pattern

Anson and I are having a lot of fun already!  We've gone outside just to look at the hives about 6 times in the last 24 hours.  This has also increased the cat's interest in the area.  She may have to learn the hard way not to sniff around there!