Spring Season 2013

I lost both of the hives Poppop gave me last September.  About a month ago we picked up two more: another one Poppop gave me and one was a nuc that I bought from Mr. Knox.

About to start another bee driving adventure!  This one went much more smoothly!

A nuc is a 5 frame mini-hive that should include a mix of frames including brood of varying stages of maturity, honey stores, and pollen.  All of the frames should have drawn comb and the queen should be less than a year old.  Mr. Knox is is an 80 year old master beekeeper that I met at the Wake County Beekeepers Association and he has been keeping bees since he was like 13.  Unfortunately, the nuc he sold me was weak as it had only 4 frames of drawn comb, and not enough bees.  I knew that it should have 5 but I figured it wouldn't make much of a difference.  Well, a month later and it's clear that it does make a difference.  The hive is very weak, has hardly grown, has yet to finish drawing that 5th frame of comb, and has so few bees I'm worried I'll lose them again this winter.

The hive Poppop gave me is much stronger and already has 2 supers on it!  Supers are the boxes on top of the larger boxes that are meant for brood and some honey stores for the bees.  The supers are slightly smaller boxes and frames that the bees fill only with honey and no brood.  We ensure that there is no brood in these boxes by excluding the queen from getting to them using what's called a queen excluder.  This way, when we go to extract honey we are sure that we are not disturbing the queen or her brood.

This is a frame from the honey super.  The cells are filled with delicious smelling honey.  The white area are cells that have a sufficiently reduced moisture content and have been capped with wax by the bees to best preserve the honey.

The nuc is on the left and the hive from Poppop on the right.  You can certainly tell which one is healthier!

That wire rack beneath this set of frames is the excluder as it is too narrow for the queen's larger body but is just right for worker bees to be able to slip through.

Both hives are weak really, but the one Poppop gave me is much happier than the other and hopefully will survive this winter for me!  I have identified two major problems and only one is really solvable.  The first problem is that the hives really need to be in a sunnier spot.  I suspect that the reason these hives are under-active is because they are not getting enough direct sunlight.  My book tells me that bees become "listless" in the shade which I do believe describes my poor bees but there's not much I can do about that living in the City of Oaks in an old neighborhood.  The second problem I see is that I really need a mentor to come check my hives with me about once a month.  I have asked the association for a mentor and also asked around at the club but so far have not had a lot of luck other than people willing to offer verbal advice.  I will continue to pursue finding a mentor though!  Also, I can lean on the support of a forum in the meantime.

Over the past month I also had the opportunity to learn a valuable lesson.  Poppop told us when we started our adventure of becoming beekeepers that we need to keep all of our unused boxes enclosed with moth crystals.

We were mostly diligent about that until the week we picked up the new hives.  See, you're supposed to air out the moth crystals for 24 hours before putting a new box on the hive.  We figured the nuc would need a new box in a few days and set one out in the basement.  Within the week we had wax moths.  A little infestation is, according to Poppop, not the end of the world as the bees can clean and repair any damage.  The wax moths eat through the comb and also make a disgusting webbing all over it.  I noticed the problem but wasn't really sure what to do about it at the time because I wasn't sure when we'd need the box for the nuc.  Well, I should have figured something out because now it's been down there for a month, is covered in webbing and moth larva and is dripping and crumbling wax to the point that it was too gross for me to get near.  The frames were no longer salvageable and we had to throw them away.  While the frames themselves are not expensive, the drawn comb is a big advantage to the bees so that they do not have to waste energy pulling new comb and can focus on making honey!  So that you can also be repulsed, I took a picture of the frame covered in larva.  I almost vomited just taking the picture.  But I'm looking at it as a good thing because now I won't ever let our shed of unused boxes be without those crystals!

You can see where the moths have eaten through the comb

I'm really not sure why it is dripping wet like it's melting but it has left a puddle of wax on the basement floor.  The larva is there in the middle but perhaps not close enough for you to get the willies.  Take my word for it, it was nasty.

My next blog post will be a lot more fun as we help Poppop extract his honey.  I may even get a jar or two of my own from my good hive!  Now that would be awesome!  I can't wait to taste it.  And as one of my 12 valued readers perhaps you could join me!