Rookie Mistakes in Beekeeping

It's the beginning of bee season in the south and many people are getting their packages and nucs. We are having a discussion at the Atlanta Beekeeping Meetup tomorrow night about rookie mistakes. That made me want to write about them here.

Some rookie mistakes that come to mind:

1. Not knowing what to do about the bees that stay in the nuc box you just installed or the package you just shook into a hive.

My first installation (and others after that) stopped the instructions with shaking the remaining bees into the hive. No matter how much you shake, bees remain in the nuc box or the package that still smells like home to them. So when you are finished with your work of installing, there will still be a large number of bees clinging to the old box or remaining on the package's screen wire. When I installed my first nucs, I called five beekeepers before I found someone who told me to stand the "empty" nuc box on end in front of the entrance and all of the bees would eventually find their way home to Mama.

2. Failing to light the smoker

I often only use the smoker once to puff at the front door to announce my presence to the bees. Then I set it in front of the hive and rarely use it. I get away with it because I use hive drapes. The very day that you, the beginner, go out to the hive without the smoker is the day that the hive is roaring mad and you really get stung. Never open the hive without having lit the smoker.

3. Not having enough equipment ready to use

Beekeeping is not a cheap hobby. But that being said, the worst thing that can happen is to run out of equipment. The bees don't understand that the equipment that they need to be happy (a new box, more frames) is on a UPS truck. They need you to have it when they run out of space. Always be several boxes ahead of your bees.

4. Feeding when the bees don't need it

You'll have to feed a package and you might want to feed a swarm. A nuc comes with its food already being stored in the hive. If a nectar flow is on, the bees don't want/need your sugar syrup. If you keep feed on the hive when there is a nectar flow, the bees may back fill all of the brood cells as well as their honey cells, leaving no room for the queen to lay. Also I am convinced that much of the honey in the US is partially sugar syrup because new beekeepers are so eager to feed their bees.

5. Leaving frames out of a box (not respecting bee space)

When you put a hive box together, you need to fill it with the requisite number of frames. If you don't the bees will make a mess. They only need bee space, and the area left open by the lack of a frame is an invitation for them to fill the space with unsupported comb. Once I fed new hives by putting baggie feeders on top of the hive bars instead of on top of the inner cover. I returned to find that the bees (all eight hives of them) had built beautiful comb from the bottom side of the inner cover. What a mess.

6. Cutting queen cells when you see them

Often nucs are so crowded in their nuc box before they are picked up, that they are eager to swarm and make more room. When they do, they leave queen cells behind. The rookie beekeeper may see these cells and cut them. But guess what? The hive swarmed when you weren't around and by cutting the queen cells, you render your new hive queenless. Besides as you work harder at bee-ing, you'll discover that the best way to deter a swarm is to use checkerboarding and that those queen cells can be used to make splits!

7. Opening hive too frequently

Great way to kill your hive. PN Williams in Atlanta always said to start with two hives: one to kill by over inspecting it and one to survive! Always have a reason for your hive inspection (just to look is not a reason - checking to see if the queen is laying is a reason). That might keep you from opening more than about once a week at most.

8. Going out to hive with no protection, wearing black, having drunk a coke, and at 4:30 in the afternoon.

Many beekeepers cut down on the amount of protective gear they wear as their beekeeping experience expands. However, at first, we are typically awkward and may drop frames, smash bees, or have a hard time handling the bees that fly into your face/veil. Wear your gear. Also bees don't like black (makes them think you are a bear), don't like caffeine (don't drink coffee right before an inspection) and are a little frantic at orientation time (around 3:30 - 4:30 in the afternoon. Avoid all of the above when you are inspecting.

Yes, there is a story here - I was singing in a choir in my early beekeeping years and was so enamored of my bees. We had an all day choir workshop and I had on black, had drunk a coke and we got a break at 4:00 before an evening get together at 6. So I went home and sat down between my hives at about 4:30. I was just peacefully sitting there, but the bees were orienting, I had on black and had drunk caffeine. So one of them zapped me on the side of my face. I was teaching at Emory at the time and had to go to work with one side of my face totally swollen and red. I don't get those large local reactions anymore, but at the time, I was a sight to behold!

 BJ Sherriff's bee jackets

9. Dropping a frame.

My second to the worst sting occurred when I dropped a deep foundationless frame of brood in my second year. I forgot that I couldn't hold the frame at a slant to look at it (you can't with foundationless because they are often not attached at the bottom of the frame). The honeycomb and brood dropped off and all the angry nurse bees came after me, crawling up the legs of my pants and getting me everywhere they could find purchase for their stingers.

10. Harvesting too much honey in first year.

The idea is for your first year bees to survive the following winter and be alive for a second year. In Atlanta, I always leave at least a box and a half of honey on each of my hives. Find out what your bees need in your area and leave at least that amount for your bees. If you just really want to taste your honey (and of course, you do), then take one frame out of your heaviest box and crush and strain it so you can have something to show for your labors. Leave the rest for the bees and your reward will be great the next year.

Beekeeping is a constant learning activity. I learn new things with each talk I hear, each website I visit, and each book or article that I read. The more you learn, the less likely you are to make rookie mistakes.

What rookie mistakes can you add to this list?

Good luck with your bees!

Feeding Frenzy Two

Today I finished cleaning up from our first harvest.  I put out the wax - still sticky with honey in a pan and in two filters.  Here's the amazing progression over the course of a short time as the bee foraging scouts got the word out:

11:23 AM

11:50 AM

11:51AM

12:14 PM

I didn't go back down until 4:30 and it's all over now but the shouting.  Here's what it looks like now:

Amazing, what quick work they made of cleaning up the comb.  There are still bees in the filter with the dark comb in it.  It's stacked pretty deep because it is the wax from one 8 frame super.  So the bees burrow down to get the drips of honey.  

We have NO nectar at all right now, so they were thrilled for this opportunity.  I'm sure bees came from all around.  I could see their flight paths as they flew from the back to the front of my house, so clearly they were not in any way all from my hives.

Good Use for the Boardman Feeder

At this time of year, feeding the bees is not something anyone needs to do.  The bees in Atlanta are at the end of the nectar flow, but there is still some nectar to be had.  I haven't fed any bees this year in 2014.  All of my new hives were either nucs and were installed while we were having a nectar flow or the hives had overwintered and were just fine and not starving.

The Boardman feeder is particularly dangerous to use because it is like a billboard on the front of the hive screaming, "EAT HERE.  FREE FOOD!"

It's an invitation to robbing and that is a disheartening thing to happen to a beehive.

Last year at the Morningside Community Garden, we got complaints that my bees were showing up to take a swim at the neighbors' swimming pool.  They have a pool just over the fence from the beehives.  It's like Mr. McGregor's Garden - the bees feel tempted by the chlorinated water and are determined to visit the pool for a treat.  Only instead of going through a hole in the fence like Peter Rabbit, they fly right over it!

So to solve the problem last year, I put Boardman feeders on the front of both hives.  I filled the feeders with water, each with a drop of Clorox in it.  The bees got their water happily from the Boardman's and the neighbor complaints disappeared.

Since that worked so well last year, I've done it again on the Morningside hives.

So far, we haven't heard from the neighbors.  I was away a couple of weeks ago and as I drove home I noticed that the top was off of the hive with the blue markings.  I walked up to check and found the top on the ground at the bottom of the hill.  The hives look in this photo as if they are on flat ground, but actually they are at the top of a hill, the dropoff for which is right by the blackberry bushes on the back left.  

The top was lying face down at the foot of the hill about 15 feet below.  The hive was intact with the inner cover still tightly propolized.  I expect a storm blew the top off, but it seemed weird that it was located where the wheelbarrow and other equipment is kept and not directly below the hive on the ground.  

So far it hasn't happened again, so I feel sure it was the wind.  Maybe someone saw the top and just moved it with the rest of the equipment????

Unnecessary Feeding of Bees in the Spring and the Backyard Beekeeper

At the February meeting of the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers, at the end of the meeting the president said as an announcement:  "If you aren't feeding your bees, you should.   Go home and feed, feed, feed."  I wasn't there for the end of the March meeting (I left a little early), but was told that again she emphasized, "Go home and FEED YOUR BEES."

At the short course in January, Jennifer Berry told the new beekeepers attending the course that at UGA they feed their bees every single day - over 500 hives.  She said, "We don't have the time to check each hives for stores so we just feed constantly all year long."

The key point that she mentioned is that they don't have time to check each hive.

When I opened my hives for the first time this year, every single one of them was bringing in nectar and storing it up.  They even had some newly capped honey.

Why would I feed those bees?

Feeding at the spring time has impact on the hive - sometimes it means the bees build up population when there may not be a nectar flow to support the build up.  The commercial beekeeper may need to do that to assure their bees are highly populated for their pollination business or the research apiarist may need to assure that their research study can have the hives available.

But the backyard beekeeper can let the bees do what they know instinctively to do - which it is to adapt to their current environment.

What if a tremendous amount of brood laying has been stimulated artificially by feeding sugar syrup and suddenly (as we are known to do in March in Atlanta) we have a cold spell?  The bees aren't able to keep that amount of brood warm and they die.

Another effect of feeding is that the bees backfill the cells available to the queen for laying and it creates the illusion that the bees don't have enough space.  So they swarm when really there was room for the queen to lay, but the beekeeper confused things by providing unnecessary sugar syrup.

At this time of year, all of the push in the beehive is for the bees to put away supplies for the winter ahead (in this case the upcoming winter eight or nine months from now).  We harvest the honey they are creating now in the early summer in Atlanta.  That honey, if the beekeeper does spring feeding when the nectar is being stored, will be in part sugar syrup.

We criticize beekeepers in China for contaminating the honey they sell with sugar syrup, among other noxious things.  How can we?  Almost every beekeeper I know in Atlanta is being told to feed their bees (and thus add sugar syrup to their honey).

Dean Stiglitz has suggested that if you want to make sure you are not harvesting honey diluted with sugar syrup, then put blue food coloring in the sugar syrup you feed your bees and if your "honey" is blue, you'll know your sugar syrup is in your "honey."

The university beekeepers are not raising their bees for honey - they are researching genetics, the varroa mite, and other things of interest to the commercial beekeeper.  They don't see a need to be careful about feeding.

The backyard beekeeper has the luxury of being able to look into every hive and determine, hive by hive, when feeding is or is not needed.

We are told that the bees use the sugar syrup for building wax and that the syrup won't show up in the honey that is stored "later."  My bees are storing honey NOW.   I would challenge our club president to put bright blue food coloring in the sugar syrup she is feeding to her bees and see if her honey is tinted blue at harvest.

I will not follow the admonition of the club president to FEED, FEED, FEED.  I do not see the point when my hives are not hungry.

Mothering the Bees

This has been a bad bee year for me.  In my eight years of beekeeping, I've had two awful years - that's 25% - not too great.  In one of the years - I think it was 2010 - I got honey but all my hives died (five of them) going into or during the winter.  This is the worst year yet.  This year in 2013, I have lost count (or refused to count) the number of hives that have absconded.

When I tell other beekeepers my hives have absconded, they all say, it must have been the small hive beetle.  But I didn't have a big SHB population this year.  The hive with the worst hive beetles is still alive in Sebastian's yard.

Most of the discovery of empty hives came in late July.  I think it was about no stores.  The bees couldn't collect enough honey during the honey flow because it literally rained every day.  Then in July they were still hopeful that there was honey somewhere - just not in their area, so they left.  Every hive I opened had NO DEAD BEES - just emptiness.  There was absolutely no honey and very little brood and the bees were totally gone.

• The hive at the Morningside garden had a pesticide kill and never recovered.  It was a tragedy because that was an amazing hive.  The split beside it never took off and simply dwindled away.
• Both hives at Chastain absconded.  No dead bee bodies were in either hive and no stores.  
• The hives at Stonehurst Inn are both there and doing fine.  One is a hive that moved into a dead hive in early August.
• At Sebastian's one hive left - no bodies, no stores left behind - and the other hive is there - it's going OK, but there are SHB in that hive.  I have two different traps on that hive - at the entrance and in between the frames, but the beetles are still there.
• At Ron's the splits never became thriving hives.  One colony hived there absconded.  I replaced it with a Wilbanks hive and they left too.  Ron's theory was that the pesticides Emory uses on its campus and in the neighborhood where Ron's house is made the location one that was bad for bees.  Whatever it was, they left lock, stock, and barrel with no bodies left behind.
• At my own house, my best swarm hive absconded when the electricians used jack hammers about five feet away from them.  I had a queen excluder on that hive below the bottom box, and found the queen still in the box.  I made a split and put them in a nuc, but the queen is not in the nuc and the bees are almost dwindled away.  A swarm hive in my yard also absconded as well as the only hive other than Morningside that I had left as the year started.
• I do have one solitary hive in my backyard.  It's the swarm I collected near Northlake and is going gangbusters.  I put a feeder on this hive although it was heavy with honey and the bees only just began to take the bee tea.  They totally ignored it for about two weeks.

I've had a terrible bee year.  And I got no honey.  I harvested one box from the Morningside hive but the honey is too thin - 19.2% water.  And if I had left that box on the hive maybe those bees would still be alive.

So I'm going into winter with six hives and I've been feeding them bee tea like there's no tomorrow.

Here are the two hives at Stonehurst.  I have put almost three gallons of bee tea on these hives.  I feel disheartened, though, because there are roaches under the cover of the hive on the left and every hive I've had with roaches eventually dies during the winter.

Here's the bee tea.  The leaves floating in it are thyme.  You can see the bees crawling up the inner tube to get the welcomed food.

This is the hive at Sebastian's that I fed the same day.  You'd love to see me visit that hive.  Sebastian's new house has a tall gate with the latch on the inside.  To get to the bees, I have to take a Rubbermaid stool and stand on it, reach over the gate and feel for the lock, slide it open and open the gate.  I repeat the action on the stool when I leave!

In this hive there were these little black things that I thought were mouse droppings, but at close look on my computer screen, they are dead small hive beetles.

This hive appears to be doing well going in to winter, but I have two different versions of SHB trap on the hive and still there are these random dead beetles littering the inner cover.

It's going down to the 20s tonight.  I hope the feeding I've been doing of all of these hives will keep the hives alive as winter descends.

New Hive Bees Doing Well

The bees that Jeff and I installed at Tom's house are doing well.  We have been feeding them bee tea (wish I had honey but I don't) and have now given each hive 2 gallons of syrup.  Bob Binnie says if you feed bees going into winter, you should try to get them to take 5 gallons of syrup.  So we'll keep on feeding them.

In essence these are five frames of bees in a ten frame hive.  The five frames are nuc-like because they are full of bees, well-built out, stores of honey, lots of brood.  The other five frames are undrawn foundation.  I think both of these hives will be like taking a nuc through the winter.  I think even with our feeding them 5 gallons of syrup, they'll still just fill the deep box, if that, before winter comes.

In one of the hives - the back one - the five frames were put in the center of the box with the empty frames on either side.

In the front hive the five frames of bees were put in on the side of the box with the empty frames on the other side:

The bees in this box may do fine the way they are and may do better if we move them more to the center and put the empty frames on either side.

Both hives are putting up our syrup and it looks like they already were storing some honey.

Jeff is really excited about these bees for several reasons - they are about a long block from his office so they feel personal to him.  He has been their main caretaker so far, and he REALLY wants these hives to succeed after our year of ongoing bee loss....(I've been scared to list all the losses because I don't want to see them all lined up.)

Today we saw the queen in both hives.

Here's the first one:

And here's the second one:

Both were on the side edge of the frame so Jeff was very careful returning the frame to the box because we know if we kill the queen, this hive is done for.  There are no more drones and no way to make a new queen until spring.

Both rapid feeders were completely empty.  We had to pour v.e.r.y. s.l.o.w.l.y because the bees were so eager and we had to give them time to move out of the cone.

Although we brought a new box with drawn frames in it, it looks so unlikely that these bees will need another box before the cold weather sets in.  I'm going to email Bill Owens and ask him about advice for over-wintering in just one deep box.

Nuc to Replace Drone Layer Hive at Chastain

On Thursday morning I checked on my backyard hives and was particularly interested in the nuc we are thinking of moving to Chastain as a teaching hive.  Julia gave me a queen cell on a frame for this nuc back on March 18.

As Billy Davis would say, the queen cell looked "medium biscuit" in color which means it was about midway through its development.  So I expected the queen to emerge within a week.  But I left the hive alone, except for giving it honey to eat in a Boardman feeder inside the hive.

On Thursday I opened the nuc to look at the work of the queen for the first time.  Notice the make-shift entrance reducer!  Jeff is making us some better ones.  I have had no confidence in my ability to make a nuc - have never done it successfully - but this year every one I have made is a success.

The queen was laying and so eager, that she was laying in barely drawn comb.  If you click to enlarge either photo below, you'll see an egg in every cell:

The nuc had eaten all of the honey I had provided in the Boardman Feeder, so when I was confident that the queen was there and doing well, I went inside to fill a jar from some honey I had crushed from a deadout.

I filled the jar and then, to my horror, dropped the jar and broke it to smithereens on the rug in my basement honey harvest area.  I took the broken jar and honey out to put it where the bees in my apiary could clean it up:

How I left it was how it looked above.  This afternoon (one day later) when I arrived home, this is what the rug looked like:

All the bees left was the glass!

Since on Thursday when the jar broke, I was leaving for Rabun County before I could crush any more of last year's honey, I gave the bees a jar of local, but commercial honey.  

I'm embarrassed to be feeding them commercial honey, but I wanted you to see what it looks like to use the Boardman as an interior feeder in a nuc.

Depending on the weather, I'll either take this hive to Chastain on Monday or Tuesday morning.  I'll also take a frame of brood and eggs to put into the drone layer hive now over there to help the bees begin to address their ineffective queen problem.  

Bees as Pets vs. Survivor Bees

I've now heard two talks at bee meetings in which the speakers say something to the effect of this:  "The bees are our pets.  Would you let your dog or cat starve to death?  Of course not, so why would you let your bees starve?"  Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture, said this last year at the GBA annual meeting.  Then last month Jennifer Berry said pretty much the same thing at the Metro Atlanta short course.

It's an effort to encourage new beekeepers to establish the practice of feeding their bees.

I don't know how to think about this.  My inclination is to go with leaving honey on your hives so that the bees go into winter with enough to make it through until the nectar flow starts.  Of course if we keep have earlier springs and nectar flows that happen out of sync with the bees buildup, then the bees won't have enough to go through the winter, regardless of whether you leave honey on the hive - there won't be honey to leave.

That's the way it was this fall.  The nectar flow last spring (2012) was early and concentrated so that the bees only had about three weeks to collect their entire supply.

In the Complete Idiot's Guide to Beekeeping, Dean and Laurie say (p.85) about feeding sugar syrup, "these are not acceptable substitutes for honey as bee food.  Their nutritional values are not equivalent.  They also do not have the same pH as honey and so alter the microbial culture of the hive.  Many bee pathogens grow more readily at the pH of sugar syrup than at the pH of honey."

The previous winter I fed all of my hives bee tea going into winter.  I still lost about half of my hives.

In 2012 I only harvested from two hives.  I left all the honey on the other hives.  I still lost hives.  I lost the second biggest hive in my backyard to fierce robbing (see video on this blog).  And we lost a hive at Stonehurst and at Sebastian's house each to robbing.  I think the terrible robbing this year was due to the climate change-induced early spring and crazy short nectar flow, so many bees were short on stores.

I lost a couple of hives who absconded because they knew they didn't have enough honey to go into winter.  I fed honey to the hives who remained.

I fed honey to the hive at Chastain, but even though I could see bee activity and the hive felt light, they didn't take the honey.  I fed honey to Sebastian's remaining hive but they also didn't take the honey.  When I say that, I mean that the rapid feeder still was full of honey the next time I looked under the telescoping cover.  I haven't checked on Sebastian's bees to see if they are still alive.

In my own backyard, I lost a hive that I didn't feed with honey still in the hive but not by the cluster.  The cluster was so small that I think it's more accurate to say I lost that hive to queenlessness going into winter than to say it starved, although that was the immediate cause of death.

At the Morningside community garden, one of my hives is alive and active (I didn't feed it) and the other is dead .  I haven't opened it to see what the cause of death was.  The Boardman on the front of this hive was for water in the heat of summer and I just never took it off.

In my own backyard I have two vigorous hives.  At Jeff and Valerie's house where I kept the bees on the deck, I have at least two live, strong hives and possibly one other.  I lifted the top cover of Five Alive and saw a live bee walking around although no bees were flying out of it.  The fourth hive appears dead.  Those bees (all four hives) were full of honey going into winter.

At Rabun County, the last time I looked up there, the one hive was still going strong.  I fed them but they didn't take the honey.  You'll remember the other hive was knocked over and destroyed.

I would rather take these hives that made it through the winter and split them to make two strong survivor hives.  These are hives that stored enough and fought off the varroa vectored diseases.  Jennifer Berry said to me at the short course that while that was fine, I wouldn't know WHY the hives survived.  She's right about that.  But I'd still prefer to try this and go for bees that don't need me to feed them.

I'm about to leave for a week of vacation and I'm worried about the bees with no honey.  The bees at Jeff and Valerie's all have plentiful supplies.  My bees are OK at my house, but the bees at Sebastian's and at Chastain are without stores.

Today I ran by Sebastian's and fed those bees by refilling the rapid feeder with honey.  Jennifer Berry says she's never seen a feeder in which bees didn't die.  So far I've never found a dead bee in these rapid feeders, but there's always a first time.

I had given the bees old honey from last year that had crystallized.  Today I had more of the same.  When I opened the top of the hive, the feeder was pretty much down to the crystals.  I poured in more crystallized honey from two jars:

Because it was crystallized, I left the jars for a while upside down to drain.  Also because it was sort of crystallized, the honey didn't climb up on the inside of the cone to the level where it was on the outside of the cone.

I took my spoon and scraped around a little at the base of the cone to move any blocking crystals.













The bees were thrilled and eagerly began transporting their new supplies.

One great advantage of the rapid feeder is that because it is closed and the only entry is from within the hive through the hole in the inner cover, the smell of open honey is not permeating the area inviting robbers.  I hope these bees live well and prosper.

I'll let you know when I'm back home from vacation!

Why We Feed Package Bees

When my daughter Valerie was about 12, we had a reverse surprise party for her birthday.  Early on a Saturday morning, we drove a van to each of her friends' houses, woke the friends up and took them to our house for a surprise breakfast and birthday party.  The friends (their mothers were all forewarned) were totally caught off guard and came in their pajamas without any preparation.  It was a great party and they were glad to be together, but nobody was prepared because that is what defines a surprise.

Package bees are totally unprepared to be dumped into the packages.  They don't know it's coming - just one day their beekeeper takes them and puts them in a 2 or 3 pound package with a bunch of other bees who are equally surprised.  Shut up with strangers plus an unknown queen, they are taken on a journey with no preparation.  They probably don't have any fun unlike Valerie's friends did at her party.

Bees who swarm are ready for the journey.  Ahead of going, they run the queen back and forth through the hive to exercise her and to get her a little thinner for her swarm flight.  The bees who are leaving gorge themselves on honey and hold it in their honey stomachs so they are ready to make wax the minute they find a new place to live.  Like good scouts, they practice the "be prepared" motto to a "t."

So when you install a package of bees, you have to feed them.  Ordinarily I don't feed bees frequently but I do feed packages when I install them.  In essence a package of bees is a totally unprepared artificial swarm.

The packages I installed on Sunday had completely emptied their 2 quart Rapid Feeders when I looked into the hives on Thursday.  I refilled the feeders and probably that will be the end of it.  I only want them to have enough syrup to draw the wax they need to fill the brood box.

After that, the nectar flow is going strong in Atlanta and they will manage well without my help.

Bill Owens Speaks to the Metro Bee Club

Last Wednesday, Bill Owens, Georgia's only Master Craftsman Beekeeper (the highest rank you can attain) spoke to our club about his bee removal business. Bill is a great communicator and an entertaining speaker. I enjoyed his talk a lot, although I will not, being constructionally challenged to the max, be doing bee removals from structures.

Bill talked about the importance of customer relations - a job at which I am sure he is spectacular - and the importance of educating the public about the difference between bees and hornets. One thing he said that surprised me is that it is an easier removal if the cutting into the structure takes place inside the house rather than outside. He said bees in the house are much more easily moved into a container than those outside who seem much more upset by the process.

He shared a list of the tools and equipment he carries to a hive removal. He doesn't list it but he also has in his kit a cookie sheet with a long handle attached. He uses that to slide under a mass of bees in narrow spaces!

Bill stayed afterward to answer questions about what's going on in the bee yard. Interestingly he spoke about feeding the bees. Bill doesn't use any chemicals in his 60 or so hives, and he rarely feeds the bees. He said spring feeding is stimulative feeding and who are we to determine when the hive needs to be at its peak. So he sees no point in taking the risk of stimulating the hive to grow rapidly and then finding out that it was wrong timing.

If he feeds a hive going into winter, then something is wrong or the hive would have enough stores. So he works for healthy hives and not for hives that need his assistance through sugar syrup.

Blue Heron Bee Report

Over last weekend, Julia called me from the Blue Heron with the sad news that she opened her hive and found it dead. The terrible vandal left it open to inclement weather, the bees had probably lost or balled their queen after that, and the hive had dwindled down to nothing. Very, very few bees were left in her hive and there was brood that needed to be capped and had died since the larvae was never capped. Very sad situation.

Julia had taken honey to feed her hive. My hive did not need food, so she left the honey on a cinder block with slits in the baggie for any takers. When I arrived to check my hive, there were bees enjoying the honey.


Here are Julia's hive boxes, now empty. We will scorch the insides for safety but the cause of death for this hive was mistreatment and exposure.


You can see bees on the landing of my nuc hive. The bees were flying in and out. I did see a few with pollen in their pollen baskets which was hopeful for the hive as a whole.



When I opened the hive, they had not emptied the jars of bee tea - when you have honey available why would you want bee tea? In addition the asters are still blooming profusely in the fields around the apiary.



I left them with the half empty jars and will check on them again this coming week.

Silence in Rabun County

It was gorgeous in Rabun County this weekend, but very cold.  The leaves were past their peak but still really lovely and a great depiction of fall.

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Lark (my granddaughter) , my two dogs and I went to visit the bees and feed them.  They were still and silent - not a bee to be seen.

We put food in the empty rapid feeders on both hives and left them.  The temperature all weekend never went above 53.  I checked again on Saturday afternoon and not a drop had been touched.

I hope they are cold and OK instead of dead inside the hive.   This was the first time Lark has been into bee hives with me.  I took a veil for her but she wouldn't put it on.  It was a good first visit because there were no bees present!