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.

Little Beekeeper Audrey

I've been my Poppop's little beekeeper-helper for as long as I can remember.  He started beekeeping while living in Connecticut and continued after he moved to North Carolina in about 1989 or so.  I'd spend weeks with my grandparents over the summer and we'd do all sorts of fun activities such as pottery, painting, craft projects like making a paper-mache clown, gardening, learning new musical instruments, and obviously, beekeeping.  

Poppop and Little Audrey keeping bees 1989

Grandma, the paper-mache clown, and me maybe 1991

Last year my husband joined the process to help Poppop extract 600 pounds of what my grandma calls liquid gold.  This year we extracted another 500 pounds.  Poppop had at least 9 hives, 3 of which he had at a friend's blueberry farm for pollination.  This year he's decided to reduce his efforts to 3 hives by selling most of them and giving me 2.  And thus begins my adventures of becoming a beekeeper!  We'll be transporting 2 hives to our house on September 23rd.  

Anson joining the beekeeping activities 2011

The purpose of this blog will be to take you along with me through the learning process of beekeeping and to possibly teach non-beekeepers a bit more about the hobby.  So far my knowledge all comes from what Poppop has taught me.  When he proposed the idea to me of keeping bees myself just a few months ago I immediately joined Reddit's r/beekeeping (an online community), began reading the book Storey's Guide to Keeping Honey Bees and I'm looking forward to joining the local Beekeeper's Association to learn more and extend my mentoring network after the kickball season ends. 

So, I'd say I'm well-informed but certainly a novice.  This excites me mostly, but I'm also somewhat nervous about a few things.  The most concerning aspect being swarms.  It's not that I fear the swarm itself, it's that I don't feel I have the necessary experience to know how to make my hive appealing to the swarm after it's captured.  Thankfully, Poppop has requeened both hives for me, so hopefully this will reduce that possibility.  

Another aspect that concerns me, but much less so, is friends, family or neighbors fearing our bees.  I wouldn't want anyone to be worried about spending time with us in our backyard.  So far, everyone has been something like indifferent, interested or supportive.  Our sweet neighbors to the right even thought to offer to cancel their mosquito spray service.  The neighbors down the corner were pleased to have pollination for their garden and the neighbor's across the street joked they didn't have anything agricultural to offer the street and said they were going to get an alpaca.  That joke is because there are about 3 houses on our street with chickens.  We're a very eco group I'd say!  

Anyway, I informed most everyone nearby besides the house behind us.  This is probably the house I should inform the most as we intend to actually face the hives directly towards them.  Our backyard is fairly small and we do all sorts of activities in it such as yard games, brewing beer, lawn maintenance, friends' dogs play, our cat plays, our cousin's baby runs around the yard, etc so it really wasn't a good idea to have the hives facing inward in that small space.  With Poppop's consulting, we decided the best location would be behind our shed giving the bees 3 feet to fly up and out and little room for babies and dogs to get in the front.  The shed has a nice wooden platform already built to the side of it which we will keep the 2 hives on. 

Shed location for the hives facing the back fence

We've purchased a couple items but the majority of our equipment Poppop is giving us.  He had duplicates of almost everything we need to get started.  This saves us a lot of money and also helps encourage us to pursue this endeavor.  Even still, we're keeping a log of expenses, inventory and eventually other metrics.  What kind of metrics, I don't know yet, but if you have ideas let me know!  Yield would be a good one when the time comes.  

So, this is the beginning!  We're on our way to becoming beekeepers!