Winter Prep & Mentor Visit

In our continued effort to figure out how to best prepare the hives for winter, we brought over resident bee expert and design ninja Boon.  We went through hive #1 and things are looking pretty good, aside from the mold on the outside of the supers which will be painted over the winter. Numbers are dwindling in preparation for the winter and the honey stores are looking great, so we’re feeling pretty good about things there. There’s still loose talk about harvesting one of the supers to reduce the space the bees need to keep warm. Hive #2 is also continuing along. Still limited to one super, we’re crossing our fingers that they’ll storm the winter months without any issues! A few pics below of the visit.

Check out all the dead bees in front of the hive!

Fat Hand

No – Mr. Combover is not auditioning for a part in Tyler Perry’s new movie – he got a bee sting on his ring finger and has had an extreme reaction resulting in a gigantic club hand as well as hives all over his body (spared you those pics!)

Bees Bees Bees

Bees Can’t Swim

I saved this girl from the pool, but with only one wing this is a sad sad death march.

Queen Gawking

If you look closely at the last 2 photos you can see the queen (long torso and slightly different color).

1:1

Oh to be a fly on the wall for this conversation…

Hive #2 – Update

You may have noticed that we haven’t been talking much about hive #2 lately. The reason being that it has been a less than ideal spring summer for that hive.

We believe we may have had a weak Queen to begin with, and about half way through May we realized that the hive population was not growing, and in fact, had totally plateaued. And what is more, upon further inspection we noticed there wasn’t even a Queen in Hive #2!

Long story short we spent the summer nursing Hive #1 back to health after the swarm, and we pretty much wrote off hive #2 as lost…

After consulting with our bee mentor Bryon from Her Majesty’s Bees in the Mission, we decided on a course of action that would have us undertake a walk-away split. We felt this would give us the best chance of trying to have two strong hives going into winter.

For those that don’t know – which included us until a few weeks ago – a walk away split is exactly what it sounds like. You split your healthy hive in half and simply walk away. You don’t care which hive has the queen, you just split them and trust nature will take care of the rest – ie. the hive without a Queen will make one, etc…

Well, back to our story, so last week we had resolved to do the walk-away split with it already being late summer it was important we not wait too long so the new Queen could have a better chance of mating.

So Cam and Mr. Combover get all psyched up to do it and when we went into Hive #2 for a quick peak before performing the split, we noticed the strangest thing – there seemed to be more bees in the hive than on previous visits. Intrigued we inspected the frames and much to our surprise found a Queen! In fact we saw a semi-decent brood laying pattern as well.

Surprised and relieved and confused, we closed the hive up, decided not to perform the walk away split and instead settled on a course of action to let the Queen in hive #2 have a few weeks to show if she has the strength to get the hive off the ground.

So that’s where we’re at. More to come in a few weeks.

In the meantime here are some pics from inside hive #2. Any real pro beekeepers will notice in this first picture that the Queen is in the upper left corner, slightly covered, but you can see her elongated body all the same…

Bees

Never Seen This Before!

This is what the hive looked like after we finished putting it back together. Having inspected 4 Supers and a Top Feeder, you can see that the bees were not simply hanging out inside, but rather, all over the hive, trying to find their way back in, figure out what was going on, and also be ready to protect against further invasion!

Bees. Lots and Lots of Bees.

Check out the top edge of the super. I love how they are all lined up vertically. Nature is so organized and amazing!