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Last we left it, we had installed the new queen, and I had seen the queen released, and – oddly enough – a few full frames of capped brood. That was about 2 weeks ago.
So, what does that mean? At some point I had a good laying queen. Was it my new one, or one that the bees themselves came up with? On top of that, there were no eggs nor larvae in the hive. Thus, while I had a queen, it was pretty obvious that I no longer had a queen, or if I did, she was on vacation or just tired of laying eggs for the hive.
So, I wasn’t too optimistic when I opened up the hive this past weekend. Indeed, I had quite a few bees, but with only really spotty larvae and capped brood left in the hive, my lack of optimism was shown to be correct. Likely the spotty brood/larvae, etc. is due to a worker bee taking over the egg laying duties for the hive.
This is bad news with a capital B. A laying worker has not mated, and thus lays eggs that are not fertilized. That means drones. And, if you’re familiar with drones, they do nothing for the hive, as they lay around eating, and looking for a virgin queen to mate with – that’s about the extent of their life – thus there are no bees coming along that will do the foraging, nursing, and maintenance on the hive.
My next duty is to try and get some insight into whether it’s too late to try and right this ship. Hopefully I can get some expert advice to augment my lack of knowledge on the proper course. Maybe I should’ve taken up knitting?
I checked on the hive today, and the new queen had been released from her cage. As I checked over the hive, and didn’t see the new queen, but did see evidence of another queen in the hive.
This ‘other’ queen was being subjected to a serious amount of attention, and I wanted to know if it was the new queen (noted by the green dot marking her as a 2009 queen) or a supercedure queen (which would have been created by the workers themselves).
When I shook the frame off, so some of the bees were removed, it was obvious that it was not the new queen I introduced, but another queen. So, the plot thickens…
This picture was taken after I shook the frame off, but some of the bees were quick to jump back on or near the queen.
 The Center of Attention There is a phenomenon with bees where the ‘ball’ the queen, creating a tight cluster around the queen and kill her by overheating or suffocating her. So, were my bees in the process of killing off this queen since my v.2.0 queen had been released?
Or were they balling her to protect her from being killed by Queen 2.0? I’ll tell ya what – I know what pi is to 8 decimal places, and can tell you the value of Avagadro’s Constant, but I’ll be darned if I know what the heck is going on with my bees right now!
See – here’s the problem: I’m guessing that my hive has been queenless for at about 2 weeks. It takes about 21 days from the egg being laid until the worker bee emerges from her cell. And, since the average life span of a bee during the summer is only about 4-6 weeks, we’re going to see a serious crash in the bee population at the White House Apiary.
Hopefully, the next time I open the hive, it’ll be loaded with eggs and larvae though – then I’ll pretend I knew what I was doing all along. If not, well, I guess there’s always next year!
A quick trip up to Autumn Morning Farm in Barre, MA after work last night will hopefully right this ship! I picked up a new queen (with a matching green crown like her predecessor), and installed her in the hive today.
 Queen 2009 v. 2.0 There’s still quite a bit of action in the hive, and hopefully they’re happy to see their new boss! Incidentally, you’ll notice there’s no shortage of Japenese Knotweed around the hive – anyone want some cheap??
I love learning about bees. And I get to use all kinds of cool bee-terms like ’spotting’ and ‘queenright’. Your hive is deemed ‘queenright’ if you have a good laying queen. Since I’m operating under the suspicion that I have no queen, I checked in with one of the gurus.
I have been in a holding pattern since the weekend, as I spoke with the Worcester County Apiary Inspector, and he thought I might have ’supercedure’ queen that just hasn’t either A) mated or B) started laying yet..
I was hopeful that the State Apiarist was going to come out to visit my hive, but due to weather and/or schedules, that didn’t happen, so I opened the hive late Wednesday afternoon, and confirmed that there was still no evidence of a laying queen.
Thus operation “Get a Queen Tomorrow” was put into action…
We’re at the start of week 12, and despite a fantastic beginning of our beekeeping career, we’ve hit the wall – big time. Last week was pretty lousy here weather-wise, and I didn’t inspect the hive, as it was rainy, and we had family in for the weekend.
However, upon inspecting the hive today, it was obvious that all was not well in Camelot. I pulled out the first few frames of the first floor, and marveled at how there were no eggs, no larvae, no capped brood. And this was the chamber that was chock full of capped brood two weekends ago!
More frame pulling, more ‘Vacancy’ signs. Ahhh…sure…the queen moved upstairs after I swapped brood chambers. That’s the ticket! So, I moved on to inspecting the 2nd brood chamber. More of the same. You want to see sad? I’ll show you sad…
 All those cells just waiting for new bees... So…now I need to track down a new queen, and pronto. The number of bees in the hive will continue to drop until a new queen can get up to speed and lay her share of eggs to start moving the population in the right direction again.
This new wrinkle probably doesn’t bode well for any hopes of a honey harvest this fall! Now the frantic search for a new queen begins!
Well the good news is that what we saw last weekend was definitely not a swarm, it was simply a mass orienting flight by some lots of the young ladies. The bad news is that this week one of the new bees obviously didn’t get the memo on how to properly treat the guy in the veil, and she decided that my hand looked like a good spot to try out her sting.
The bee stings are a funny thing – I got stung on the hand, and – of course – I had a full frame of bees in both my hands, so just sat there admiring her trying to pull herself off my hand while I put the frame back in the box. As for the sting itself, it doesn’t really hurt that much, but about 3-4 hours laters, it starts to swell up – and it swelled up for about 3 days, and it itched a lot.
Anyway, lots of capped brood in the hive, and I decided to swap the brood boxes around, so the top box gets moved to the bottom, and the bottom gets moved up top. This was because the bottom box didn’t have much in the way of eggs/larvae, as the bees have natural tendency to move upwards in the hive.
I also added a honey super on top of the brood chambers to let the bees start to draw out the comb in hopes that I get a couple drops of honey this year. The weather has been really wet and cool here, so I’m not holding my breath, however.
Today, I was doing yardwork, passing in front of the hive several times. I like to stop and watch the bees a lot, and noticed that the hive was very loud, compared to a usual day.
A bit later, just after the full sun hit the hive, I was going to go by again, when I looked in front of the hive, and saw a crazy amount of bees flying around. Usually, I just walk right by the hive, without a second thought, as there are only a handful of bees in the air – but this time, there were hundreds and hundreds of bees flying around in front. A gathering that was about 10 feet wide by 20 feet high – just going crazy.
Did my bees just swarm? Everyone was suitably impressed with the show, but until I find out if half my bees just took off for nicer digs, I’m going to be a little uneasy!
I did see some spotting (that’d be feces – the bees don’t like to ‘go’ in the hive), and a fair amount of young bees walking around outside the hive after the 5-10 minute frenzy, so it also might have been a whole lot of new bees out for a joy ride. I’m going to ‘ask the experts’ and see if I can get some input!
Here’s a video I uploaded – it doesn’t show the excitement like being here, but you can see some bees flying about!
Did my bees just swarm?
The bees just finished up their 8th week at the White House, and things are looking great. I was a little suprised to find lots of empty cells on the frames in the lower cells – where brood had once been, but once I inspected the upper chamber, it was obvious that the queen had been busy on floor two.
I had wired up the honey supers so that I could add one today, but after seeing that there were still 3.5 frames or so to draw out in the upper chamber, I decided to hold off another week before adding the first honey super to the mix.
I pulled out one of the frames, and was looking around for the queen, when I saw a head poking up through one of the cappings – a new bee was chewing his way out of his cell – really cool. I attempted to take a picture of it, but either the nurse bees would get in the way, or the lousy point & shoot camera I had wouldn’t focus on the cell properly. This was the best I could do:
 A new bee chewing his way out of the cell After a little more inspection, Will, Alexa & Mom all came back from their ice cream run, and Will wanted to see the queen -so I pulled the frame and showed off the ladies to the crowd. The queen was happy to oblige with a royal showing, and boy does the frame look sweet – loaded with capped honey on the top in white – the queen is on the bottom right – she’s wearing her green cap again.
 Lots of honey on top, a pollen ring, and tons of capped brood! So, I buttoned up the hive, as all was good, and headed off to the Pawsox game!
It’s the end of week 7 with the bees, and I’m antsy to take a look, as we were in Vermont last weekend, so it’s been two weeks since I was able to take a peek at the bees. Earlier in the week, I removed the entrance reducer so they have full run of the bottom entrance to the hive.
Things are moving along well for the bees, as there are lots of them! I had started to inspect the frames on the upper brood chamber, when I remembered reading that the proper way to inspect a two story bee apartment was to remove the upper chamber, and inspect the first floor residents’ work first.
So, I replaced the frame I was looking at, and picked up the upper brood chamber – that’s when I felt some of the frames from the first floor drop back into the first brood chamber. Huh – who would’ve thought that in two weeks the ladies would’ve built burr comb between the boxes? And who would’ve thought that the bottom frames might just tag along when I picked up the upper hive box?
Not me, I’ll tell ya that. So, as the frames dropped back in, I figured I’d probably squished a few bees, and also figured that a few more might not be happy about what I’d just done. What to do? Hmmm…choose one: Option A: smoke the bees to mask any alarm pheremone, or Option B: run really fast! Option A might be the best choice, but unfortunately, when you’re holding a 25-30 lb box of bees already, neither option is in the cards. Option C, my choice, was to talk nicely to the bees and hope for the best.
I was only dressed in shorts and sandals, but just one slightly miffed bee landed on my hand an stung me. I set the box down, and smoked the bees, and got back to business.
Unfortunately, there was quite a bit of comb to remove at the top of the bottom box, and there were LOTS of bees. In the past, I could simply grab a frame and pull it out, but now the entire box is covered with bees, so I have to smoke the bees to force them back down into the box so I can pull frames for inspection. The other problem was that there were already lots of nearly full size larvae in the burr comb – which the nurse bees were very interested in staying with even as I removed them from the hive.
 One of the many pieces of burr comb removed from the hive I finished cleaning up the first floor, and moved onto the second – the bees have drawn out about 6 of the frames, and I found the queen in the upper hive box on the 5th frame. On top of that, I actually spotted eggs for the first time! That’s, right, baby! Finally after 7 weeks, I spotted them. I took a few shots of the eggs, which look like a miniature piece of rice at the bottom of each cell – see if you can spot them!
 Not as large as your average chicken eggs! I have to get moving on wiring up the honey super frames, as it’s going to be time to add them to the hive very shortly. This week marks the first time I’ve seen any propolis – the resin-like spackle the bees use to stick everything together.
One funny thing I noticed this evening when watching the bees was that there were lots of gnats flying around and landing on the outside of the hive. However, the guard bees are outside the hive chasing them away and shooing them off of their house – they like ‘em about as much as we do.
It’s been 7 weeks now, and I’m pretty happy that I decided to start from a package (as opposed to getting pre-populated frames) and that I’m learning first hand, week by week, and not getting all of these things tossed in my lap in one fell swoop!
It was pretty warm – up near 90 today – so I thought the bees might be pretty busy – even at 8pm, they were still going strong, so I grabbed my camera and took a few pictures of the bees waiting for their turn to enter the hive.
 Tower, this is Ghostrider, requesting a flyby...
 Negative, Ghostrider, the pattern is full
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