Andrew’s Bee Blog

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http://helpthehoneybees.com/

So yesterday, I was up at my parents for a family party and Will, Emmy and I went down to look a the swarm hive. We were just peeking at it and I decided to peek into it to see if I they had been working on the third super. When I opened the top just an inch or so, a bee came flying out right at my sleeve. Of course, I wasn’t to smart doing this in a t-shirt and shorts with no veil on either. I thought the bee had just flown off, but a minute or so later I felt it crawling on my arm. I waved my frantically to get it off and it took off at Will. Will spun around and the bee then went after Emmy. Emmy started shaking her hair, as if she were headbanging and ran for the garage. The bee buzzed her most of the way up to the garage. Will and I were laughing our heads off. It was pretty funny.

The bees were all they way to the top of the third hive body…time to add another one!!!

I got into both hives on Friday. They are both looking great. The Package Hive is just starting on the third box. They have filled up the empty frames on the lower two supers. I could see lots of eggs and larva. I think the queen is doing good. It would be good to leave them alone for 2-3 weeks while they work on that 3 super.
The Swarm hive is doing great also. They have completely filled all the frames in the second super. We added the third super to the hive. At this rate, they will have the third filled in another two weeks. I am impressed how fast they are moving. I guess because they started with so many more bees than the package, they have been able to catch up and will pass them. I have to comment on the black foundation…I love it. I was showing my dad the eggs and it was so easy to pick out the eggs against the black background. The bees don’t seem to mind the plastic at all. Its plastic from now on for me!

On Monday, I made an attempt to fix one of the super hive bodies on the swarm hive. One of the corners was coming apart. It had split far enough that the bees had started using it as an entrance. I took some wood glue and wiped it into the joint and then took some bar clamps to push it back together. The bar clamps were to short, so I had to use both of them on one side. This seemed to work, and then I used a tie down strap around the box to get the other direction.
I came back Tuesday night to check on it. It seemed to have took. I took off the clamps and straps. I will check it next time I get into the box.

I got into the swarm hive yesterday. Everything looked great. The Bees have completely filled the lower super and have pulled out comb on 5 of the 9 frames in the upper super. I still have the in hive feeder in the upper supper, but they have hardly used any of the syrup. I used the black plastic foundation in the wood frames in the upper super and the girls have not minded them over the wax foundation. I think I will have to put another super on next week. That will be awesome to already have a honey super that I will be able to extract. The swarm seems to be doing great. They are super productive, even more so than the bee package. At this rate, they will surpass the package hive at Emmy’s house.
I did notice that they are more aggressive than the package bees. They could be a different breed, or it could just be the shear number of bees. The bees react to me much more so than the package hive, in that I notice when I am holding a frame the bees are very sensitive to my breath. I just found this interesting.

Towing the trailer with the bees inside to my parents house was a piece of cake. I had stopped by my house to clean up for work. I peeked into the trailer and the bees had started to come up on top of the box. I had to drop the trailer off at my parents and then head to work. It was a cool day, so I wasn’t worried about leaving the bees in the trailer. If anything, it would be good to let them calm down from the capture and ride home.

I got done with work early and drove back to my parents to hive the bees. I had read in the book about putting the box next to the hive and letting the bees make their way into the hive. There were a bunch of frames that we had put into the box to attract the bees into the box. I was surprised to see how many bees had massed on top of the box. The box was slightly heavy with all of the bees inside and on top and all the frames inside of it. I quickly carried it down to the hive in the back yard. I moved all of the frames into the hive body and propped the box next to it. The bees, according to the book, would quickly make their way into the have and settle down. They Didn’t! I waited awhile and very little happened, so I got anxious and dumped the bees out of the box into the hive. They still didn’t do much and what they did do is come out and cover the front of the hive. Something wasn’t right. It was getting late and I had to head home, so I ended working on it that night. What a day…
The next day, I ran to the bee store at lunch and picked up a feeder and a top and bottom. Jones Bees was out of tops and bottoms so they let me borrow a set of theirs. Talking over the behavior with the lady at Jones was helpful. She suggested that I may not have the queen. I was intrigued because there were some bees left on the tree that I couldn’t capture. They would fly away and come back to the tree every time I brushed them into the box. So she thought that I should buy a queen and try and introduce her into the hive. A queen cost $20. If I didn’t get the queen, the new queen would be accepted and the bees would be happy. If I did get the queen, the bees would kill the one I just bought, wasting the $20. I didn’t know what else to do, but I liked the queen experiment, and it was only $20 to risk. So I did it.
I called Becky (my wife) and talked her into coming up to my parents with the kids. We would order pizza and it would give me time to work on the bees. I called ahead and had my dad work up a batch of syrup to put in the feeder. When I arrived, we were ready to put the queen and the feeder into the hive. Putting in the feeder was a snap. I filled it up with syrup and it was ready. Spraying down the frames with syrup was another suggestion the Jones Bee Girl gave me. It would attract the bees to the frames and encourage them to start building comb. So while we had the hive open we sprayed down the frames. We had prepared the queen by replacing the cork plug with a candy plug. I took one of the frames out and put her in. I put the top back on and we were done.
We walked back inside and then looked down from the deck. I was happy to see almost every bee on the front of the hive had gone right into the hive. I think the new queen did it. The only problem now is there was a ball of bees hanging from the hive stand that didn’t go in with the rest of the bees. I watched them for awhile. It was interesting to see the bees in the hive had come out on the entrance , turned to face the hive, and fanned their wings. According to the book, was the “We’re home, come on in” dance to get the other bees to enter the hive. I also saw other bees going down to the ball of bees and shaking their tail, nudging the other bees to come in. They still wouldn’t move.
I am a little impatient and so I had to do something. I decided to place a second hive body on a bed sheet. Jones Bee Girl thought there was a slim chance, that we had two swarms. I though the ball of bees may have been the second. Carefully, I placed the hive stand on the sheet in front of the second hive. The bees fell off the stand. This woke them up and they actually flew back to the first hive and entered on in. What a relief. I put everything back together. The hive finally look satisfactory to me!

Dad called me on a Tuesday night from Camp Zarahemla, which is near Morgan, Utah. He said that he had found a swarm and wondered if I wanted to capture it. I was apprehensive at first because I had never captured a swarm before. He went on to describe the swarm, “its on a tree about 5 feet off the ground, there are a lot of bees and it is surrounding the trunk.”

We arranged that I would be there around 7 AM with all of the bee stuff. He had to take my mom home and would pick up our white enclosed trailer. We thought this would be a good way to transport the bees.
Wednesday morning came very early. I got up at 6 AM to get things ready and head up to the camp. I had sent a text to Jeff (a friend of mine), to see if he wanted to come with. He had text me back late, after I had gone to bed, asking what time. I text him back about 6:15, “Now!”.
He text back,”Now?”. So I called him and then picked him up about 6:45 AM. He was tired, since he had been out with his fiance until 12:30 AM. We headed up to the camp.
When we got there I was amazed at how many bees there really was. They were incredibly calm, of course it was very cool that morning and they had clustered tightly around the queen to keep her warm.
Most of the books describe the swarm hanging on a branch and you simply cut the branch and place it in a box. This swarm had attached to the trunk of the tree. We didn’t want to kill the tree so we proceeded sweep off the bees. After knocking off and upsetting many bees, we found a smaller box that we held up to the tree and brushed them into it. This worked much better. during all of the action, a bee had snuck under my hat and was poking my neck. I thought I had bee stung, but after walking away from the bees, pulling off the hat, and having Jeff brush the bee off, she had only been poking me and I didn’t get stung. However, my dad was wearing regular gloves and a bee had got into his sleeve and stung him on his wrist. All in all, only one sting was not bad for really ticking off all of the bees.
We were able to get the majority of the bees, but there were a hundred or so bees that we couldn’t get. Every time I swept them into the box, they would fly off and come back to the tree. We finally gave up on them. I closed the box and strapped it to the trailer. We were on our way home to hive the swarm!

Here are some photos taken of Emmy’s Hive (the bee package) on June 12. We did a quick inspection and refilled the syrup and added a third Super.

A week had passed since we had put the package bees into their hive.  We were all pretty excited to see how they had done.  I got everything ready to get into the hive.  I had made up a fresh batch of syrup for the feeder, put on my gloves and hat, and got the smoker going.  I took the top cover off and then proceeded to take off the inner top cover.  As i lifted it off I noticed something attached to it.  The bees had created an entire sheet of wax comb in the space where the queen excluder cage was.  I took it out and scraped it off of the lid.  It was way cool to look at.  Emmy thought it was cool also and wanted to show it to her Second grade class.

The bees were doing great.  I put another frame in where the queen cage was and refilled the feeder.  Surprisingly the bees were very docile and I hardly had to smoke them.  They were busy on the other frames and paid very little attention to me.  I think there are a lot of preconceptions that 10,000 bees come out of the hive and attack the beekeeper, at least that Is what I thought.  I had been told by Michael that they are for the most part gentle and leave you alone.  It the book it says they get aggressive around there food and brood.

long story short the package bee hive at Emmy’s house is doing great.  We added a second super about three weeks ago and they have already filled most of it.  I am getting ready to add the third super to the hive.

The day finally arrived to pick up the bees. It was a Saturday, which was nice not to have to work around my job. I arrived at Jones Bee Company at 8:30 AM and found a few other people waiting to also pick up their bees. There was a large flat bed truck with about 500 bee packages parked next to the store. They had already started separating out the packages to distribute. One of the packages had been dropped and broken and there were a few hundred bees flying around. I was wearing shorts and a tee shirt, probably not the right attire for the occasion. I only had to wait in line for a few minutes to get my bees. I handed the Jones Bee Guy my receipt and he handed me a package of bees.

The package consisted of 2 1/2 lbs of bees (which I guess is about 2000 bees), 1 queen bee in a queen excluder cage and a can full of sugar water for the bees to eat during the journey. According to Beekeeping for Dummies, my favorite bee book, I was to take them home, spray them down with sugar water and put them somewhere dark to calm them down. I did just that. I drove over to Emmy’s house and sprayed them down with some homemade sugar water syrup. I then put them in a dark corner next to her shed. Carson, my son, had a soccer game, so I left to go to the game.

I returned a few hours later and proceeded to put the bees into the hive. according to the book, your supposed to jar the package and dump them into the hive. Jones Bees told me not to do that, but to instead, take the queen cage out, replace the cork plug with some powdered sugar frosting, and hang it in the hive. Then take the package of bees, remove the feed can and turn it over on top of the queen cage. I placed a empty super on top of the package and put the two upper covers on the hive.

Then I had to wait…