Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

The bee's didn't get angry with you shaking them? All I could think was Oh-chit he's shaking the bees :lv

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Nope -- in fact, I wasn't shaking hard enough. They really just want to get into the hive and start doing bee stuff. Honey bees are pretty docile. It usually takes quite a bit for them to get aggressive.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Evidently being thirsty does the trick. Across the road from my house, the guy leases space on his land for beekeepers to stage the bees there awaiting transport to different locations. Last summer it was very dry, and the bees would come to my house to the water container for my outside dog. My wife got stung twice while going to check the mail.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

to be(e) tested in July no doubt....

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Just like me! :noon

Water them goddammed bees, Vin! :eek:

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

This is becoming a great thread to read.

Even with Grace getting stung she is still supporting this hobby. She is a tough cookie. :tu

Now I would like to see Tom in the hat and gloves.

And by the way isn't it jizz not gizz??

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Yea I'm trying to figure out why I'm so invested in Vin's beehive success. This is great and such a cool hobby. I'm learning a lot.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

You live! How is Tom's son doing, anyway? Start another thread. :noon

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Time for an update.

The plan, when installing a package of bees, is

1 - Install the queen cage in the hive
2 - Dump the bees into the hive
3 - Wait three days then inspect to be be sure the queen has both successfully eaten her way out of her cage & has been accepted by the hive (ie. they didn't kill her on exit)
4 - Wait another week (Day 10) and inspect for bee eggs

Originally, I was supposed to take delivery of the bees on April 10. Due to weather in the South (tornadoes and what not), that got pushed to April 17 as I had discussed previously. The April 10 date would have been damn near perfect for me from a New England weather standpoint, a work schedule standpoint and a personal time standpoint. I could have followed the schedule above pretty precisely.

Having instead received the bees and installed them on Monday, I was unable to do a queen cage inspection until today because Grace & I went on a mini vacation. We were both very excited to see what had been going on with the hive while we were away, and we didn't even bring our luggage into the house when we got home. Instead, we donned our bee gear, fired up the smoker, and went off to inspect the hive hoping to find a live & productive queen.


Have your speakers on to hear my panic in this video:

Queen Cage Inspection

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

What will you do about the space? Is that a huge comb or what?

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Bees, when given a width of more than about 3/8" of an inch to work with (called bee space) start to fill in that space with honey comb. The whole point of the hive frames is to give the bees a manageable area for them to build out comb in an orderly fashion. What happened in the case of my hive is that the queen cage took up a slot where a frame would normally sit. The bees did what bees do, and instead of limiting their building to the frames, they also started hanging comb from the inner cover down into the empty space where a frame would normally reside.

So while it looks cool, it's unworkable because I can't have random comb hanging down into to the hive since I'll be doing periodic inspections, and the comb is eventually going to break and make a mess of things both in the hive & for me.

So here's what I'm dealing with:

https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2841/3...56a731fa50.jpg


I had to make a decision, and after some gnashing of teeth and a few soothing words from Grace, we broke the comb away from the inner cover and brushed the bees back into the hive as best we could. With the comb gone, I easily inserted the frame where it would have been had the queen cage not been there.

The stress inducing part in all of this is that I couldn't find the queen. She comes marked with a dot -- literally a yellow sharpie dot on her back for ease of identification. But she could be anywhere within the hive, and it's pretty easy for a 5-thumbed bull in a china closet fat guy to inadvertently squash her.

As you saw in the video, I knew she had made it out of her cage. Here's a shot of the empty cage:

https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2948/3...2139f814a1.jpg
The hole at the bottom was once filled with candy and capped with a bit of cork. The queen eats the candy from the inside of the cage while the worker bees eat from the outside (after I had removed the cork), and she walks through that hole after a few days.

But I still didn't know if she was alive or where she was in the hive.

I need to digress for a moment. I believe in karma. Call it God, Allah, Jesus, Mother Earth, Eywah - whatever, but I believe there is some force out there greater than all of us, and that if you do the right thing often enough, you are rewarded with the right thing being done back.

Sometimes this manifests itself in small ways. I spent a good couple hours on a plane ride today playing peekaboo and making funny faces with a kid who was probably 9 or 10 months old. If I stopped, the kid cried -- and I mean screamed -- so I kept it up all though the flight. It was actually a fun way to pass the time since JetBlue's internet service doesn't work over open ocean; plus I'm a goofy basterd at heart.

Anyway, Grace is watching me come unglued over the situation with the honey comb in the hive and the status of the queen when she looks down and right in front of her feet is the queen! As near I can tell, she must have been in the mass of bees on the comb and fallen to the ground. Grace happened to notice a few bees on the ground, and one of them also happened to be the queen! Karma? Coincidence? No matter - I very gingerly picked her up by having her walk on to my bee brush & transported her back into the hive.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Very cool, Vin.
Bees, and stinging insects, make me very nervous. But I can certainly enjoy the experience through your efforts.

They are fascinating creatures.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

:tu Good On You, Brother!:D

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

The Queen Bee found the queen bee. Karma.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

One final photo.

I was able to closely inspect the honey comb we separated from the top board, and I found bee eggs!! This is HUGE because it confirms that the queen is doing her job.

The eggs are the little tiny rice-like protrusions jutting up from the bottom of the comb.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2949/3...67bc516427.jpg

The worker bees will tend to the eggs, and they'll go through a larval and pupa stage after which they will metamorphasis into a honey bee. The whole process takes about 21 days, and I hope to have some additional photos of the various brood stages in future updates.

For now, I need to leave them "bee" and let them do their thing. I'll check them again in about a week & top off the feeder frame. Once the spring flowers start to bloom in earnest here, there won't be any further need for that as the bees will forage for nectar and pollen in the wild.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Ah Vin, they look just like you. You must be so proud ;)

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Very cool I actually was like "what .. there has to be more!!" when the video ended. :tu Riveting stuff to say the least, as we all live vicariously though you and Grace.

I was wondering, what are you using in the smoker? When I was younger we went to visit a guy that had dozens of hives and he was using pine needles and the the smoke was everywhere he flooded them with it, in the video you couldn't see that much smoke, why I asked.

Also are you going to get a spinner to spin out the honey or is that only for larger operations? so many questions :lr

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

I use some punk wood for the smoker -- it produces a very light smoke. You can over-smoke the bees. They get used to the smoke, and start to ignore it. I figure I can always get it smokier if I need it.

As for extracting honey, my plan is to take it to a professional to have it done. I don't want to invest in one, even a hand cranked model at this point. Down the road, I could see it though.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Very cool, Vin!

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Thanks for keeping us updated Vin.

What happens to the queen if you didn't find her? Would she not find her way back into the hive?

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

This is so cool to read. Not a big honey fan but it is an amazing process.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Kinda' unknown -- she wasn't buzzing around. She was literally walking across the ground in front of the hive. She can fly, so maybe she would have just flown back in the hive.

Under different circumstances, it the hive was more established, it wouldn't be a big deal. Queens die; life happens. When she goes, the worker bees simply create a new queen. But they need an egg that the previous queen laid, and the egg has to be a certain age. With my hive, I don't know if there would have been proper eggs from which to choose.

All eggs start with the potential to be queens:

* If the queen doesn't fertilize an egg, it will develop into a drone (male) bee. All queens are female.

* In the beginning all eggs are fed this goop called royal jelly -- it's produced by the bees from special glands in their head. After 3 days, the workers switch to feeding the eggs a honey mixture EXCEPT if they're making a queen. Fertilized eggs destined for the throne are fed ONLY royal jelly. Eggs weened off the royal jelly develop into regular female worker bees.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Vin said "royal jelly"

:r

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Interesting Article About "Royal Jelly".
https://www.wired.com/2015/09/royal-...bee-queen-bee/

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Bees, Gurkhas, is there anything you're not afraid of??

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

any pics?

Cool article - thanks for the info

More pics early next week. I have to check the feeder frame and possibly remove it now that flowers have started to bloom. Also need to check on how much comb has been built out in the frames. That will determine if I need to add another box.
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Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

The Dutch? :D

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Opened up the hive today to check on two key things:

#1 - Did the girls have enough sugar syrup in the feeder frame?

#2 - How much progress had they made on building out frames of honey comb?

Flowers are just starting to bloom in this area, and while I "think" there's enough natural nectar and pollen to be had, the feeder frame was just about dry. We refilled it just to be sure the bees had an ample supply of carbs. Pollen patty is getting worked through as well. My thinking is we can eliminate both in the next week to ten days.

Cool to see how much progress they're making on drawing out frames of comb. Of the 9 frames that are in the hive currently, it looks like they've made significant progress on filling the front & back of about 3.5 of them. The number would be higher if they had been working on frames instead of free-form building the comb in the space where the queen cage had previously been. But from what I can see, they are right on schedule.

I had posted pics of bee eggs previously. As the days have gone by, those eggs are now further developing in the larval stage. You can see bee larva in the comb in this photo. It's the curled up grub-like white mass at the bottom of the comb. The different size larva, I assume, indicates different ages with the larger larva having developed from eggs laid earlier in the process than the smaller ones. Educated guess on that.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2852/3...fa9feb05e4.jpg

Another interesting thing in the photo above is the relative size of a drone (male) bee to his chiquita worker bee counterparts. The drone is the big, burly fellow in the top quarter of the photo with the massive girth and huge eyes.

At some point in the larval stage -- around day 7 or 8 after being laid as an egg -- the bees will ensconce or "cap" the comb. It's kinda' like a caterpillar going into it's cocoon. The rest of the development process takes place over the next two weeks within the capped comb where the larva will pupate and metamorphosize into an adult bee.

You can see the capped comb in this photo.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2941/3...3c92a4bed6.jpg

The capping is made of the same bees wax as the comb itself, and while it appears very light & yellowish here, as the queen re-uses the comb for subsequent bees it will darken over time until it becomes almost black.

Super happy to see the bees are raising a lot of new siblings. The population of the hive has been slowly decreasing since the bees arrived. That's because it takes about three weeks for a new bee to form, but it looks like we're maybe 10-12 days from reversing that as new bees should start emerging around then. Really hoping I can grab some video of a bee eating it's way out of its cell.

And while this has been going on, the bees have also been making honey. They have to -- it's what they eat. The process is pretty complex and involves mixing nectar and pollen and water in the right amounts, then fanning it with their wings until it achieves a ratio of about 80% sugar and 18% water. Remaining 2% is made up of minerals, proteins, and some bee parts. :)

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4168/3...de26a57884.jpg

The honey is capped just like the brood is capped. Capping the honey allows the bees to safely store it until they need it for food down the line.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

You'll recall I panicked not being able to locate the queen bee during my initial hive inspection. No such problem today! Ms. Thing was right where she should be: in the middle of the hive at the center of activity.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4182/3...c94676f5_z.jpg

The apiary that sold me the bees marks their queens with a colored dot. The marking helps me to more easily pick out the queen in a vibrating mass of bees on a frame, but also it references her year of birth. I just have the one hive, but if I had several, I'd want to keep track of the age of my queen because as they get older, they begin to slow down the rate of egg laying, and it might be time to introduce a new queen to that colony. The colored dot system is supposed to be consistent among apiaries, so all yellow dot queens should be from 2017. Queens hatched in 2018 will be coded with a red dot. 2019 will be green.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4189/3...bece7be6_z.jpg

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

So cool.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

:tu

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Very cool, Vin.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

We have bees that are placed all over the woods here by beekeepers. A friend of mine had his own a few years ago, not sure if he still has them or not.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Awesome!:D:tu

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Wicked pissa stuff.

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Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Truth
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Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Damn son, you're "all in" on this...Nice...

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

we are a pretty peaceful people, so there is no need to be.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Very cool Vin.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Great stuff, Vin. Very interesting.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Very cool, Vin!

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Glad you answered my question about knowing which one was the queen. I am so into this now.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

So when you introduce a new queen to the hive, what happens to the current queen, Vin?

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

A colony will often introduce a new queen to the hive themselves if they sense the old queen is slowing down because her egg laying production drops or pheromones aren't as strong. They literally raise a new queen. Since the new queen comes from an egg laid by the old queen, they are often allowed to co-exist in the hive as genetically they are mother/daughter. If the hive doesn't WANT two queens, they kill the older one once the younger one is established.

The above is wholly based on what I learned in the classes I took, and doesn't represent any firsthand experiences. However, many of the blogs I follow seem to confirm it.

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Too and this doesn't work with ex wives and new wives .. would make things o much simpler.... and cheaper too.

Thanks for the posts and pictures, a lot of very cool stuff here. :tu

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Vin, this thread is awesome. I'm sure that if you bring the same passion you have for cigars to this you'll have great success.

I was wondering what your dog thinks of this. I forgot that sweeties name:confused:. I'm so looking forward to seeing the hive. Hope there will be a lecture (in full bee uniform)!:tu

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Jayda's been outside and near the hive, but hasn't really shown any interest in it. My guess is the bees will let her know if she's becoming a nuisance. :)

Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping
 

Beat me to it. :r