The "Hived" Swarm: Update + My First Real Test As A Beekeeper

There's some good news, and some bad news about the Dothraki/patio hive. I've also run into my first real "challenge" as a beekeeper. The good news, is that I'm confident that this hive is going to be strong. The bad news is that they've taken one step forward and two steps back. More on that later on in the entry though. Going to walk through this in a chronological fashion.

Friday the 26th of April, 2013

Happy bees! The captured swarm has chugged almost a full cup of sugar syrup and I was advised not to disturb them very much. I figured the best way to let them bee was to just keep an eye on them while monitoring sugar syrup consumption, since syrup consumption = wax production. They had zero comb to start with so the girls were provided with three frames of wax coated black plastic foundation to build off of. According to the syrup chugging they were getting pretty hungry and were building like mad. At this point, the queen was also still in the clip, suspended between two frames. So far so good I hoped!

That night I headed straight up to Kissimmee to stay with my good friends, Osy & Brian, for the weekend's Nihon Ken Forum meetup. The NKF is a place where Japanese dog enthusiasts aggregate to talk about their dogs (five spitz breeds: Japanese Akita, Kishu Ken, Shikoku Ken, Kai Ken, Hokkaido Inu, and Shiba Inu) and there just so happens to be 6-7 of us in Florida. We usually try to meet up every 3 months and we're all 24-32'ish if I remember correctly. Here's the gallery if anyone is a dog person. I didn't get back until late late on Saturday night. So there wasn't a chance to check out the bees or release the queen from her clip.

Saturday: Away in Kissimmee/Lakeland, FL.

Sunday the 28th of April, 2013

 

Sunday morning I slept in a bit and woke up at 10am. As soon as I woke up though, it was straight outside in full gear. No smoke was used, these bees are really gentle. I had been observing them before the trip by sitting in a chair with my knees about 2ft or 2/3 of a meter away from the entrance, wearing nothing but a swimsuit. They didn't mind at all as long as there was no large, sudden movements. I could stand up and walk around without them coming by to inspect me at all, but if I stood up quickly or ran over there would be a guard bee coming up to see what the commotion was. Even then, just standing still or sitting calmly would make the guard be go back to it's regular post.

I did get fully kitted up for opening the hive though, since their temperament for inspections was still untested. Gloves, jacket/veil, and a hive tool was the equipment used. I didn't use any smoke, wore shorts, and no shoes. Partly because I'm forcing myself to get more comfortable with the bees. I still can't go in and move frame with my bare hands with 100% full confidence yet. The battle with my subconscious reaction to want to pull my hands away is still being fought haha. It's pretty funny to reflect on actually. My subconscious thoughts are so strong as to practically be manifested in actual though. It's really weird, and reading this probably sounds all sorts of crazy. But for any readers that aren't beekeepers, it's only something that you'll gain any understanding by actually putting your bare hands on a frame full of bees. I've never been skydiving or bungee jumping, but I would imagine it'd be the same feeling at the moment of exiting the plane or jumping off of a bridge for the first time. Everything in the primitive section of your mind is screaming "NO DON'T DO IT!".

Anyhow, back to the bees! Nothing seemed all that new upon first lifting the lid. There was some smatterings of white wax along the first, outermost frame that I lifted out, a good sign. Then I went ahead and lifted the queen clip out, those bees sure had been building wax... they practically built a whole 1/8 frame of comb on the queen clip itself! The wax was an incredible pearly white, almost fluorescent in the sun. Unfortunately that wax wasn't going to be very useable whatsoever. It couldn't be rubber banded or squished into the foundation. That would result in some crazy comb that was way too far off the foundation, ruining the ratio of "bee space" between the frames. In hindsight I probably should have just rubber banded the clip directly onto the side of a frame. That way they would have built directly around the clip and on the foundation itself. I brushed the bees off the clip and removed the wax, putting it into a sandwich bag for future melting.

I gently squeezed open the clip and the queen slipped out immediately, scurrying down into the frames. Another observation in hindsight, I was definitely too rough with the frames after releasing the queen. I was nervous that she might fly away and also a bit excited to be releasing my first queen. So one or two bees got squished between the frames and the box while inspecting the remaining two frames. Dead center in the above picture is the queen. A solid gold abdomen with no stripes, no fur on the top of her thorax, and larger "delta" shaped wings. Very pretty!

After quickly inspecting the two remaining frames and photographing the queen, the nuc box got closed up. Then that was it for the day.

Tuesday the 1st of May, 2013

I woke up and went outside to watch the bees as usual. It's turned into my morning "ritual" while waking up. I'll let Ren outside to do her business while I brew up some cafe cubano, then head outside to watch the bees as my brain brings itself online.

After a few minutes I noticed one of the bees was on the edge and just hanging there. It was definitely still alive, but just sort of... hanging there. It was lengthwise along the front edge of the landing board, with it's left legs splayed straight out, gripping onto the top edge. The right set of legs were arranged in a normal upside down V shape, bracing itself against the flat wood. "That's strange..." I thought. Looking down I noticed a dead bee under the landing, and as I looked away from the hive there were even more dead bees. There were about 5-10 dead bees that were arranged in a scattered pattern away from the hive entrance. 

The first lesson at the Palm Beach Beach Beekeeper's Association workshop was don't pick up bees on the ground and help them back into the hive. It's a nice sentiment, but sick bees will exile themselves from the hive. By sacrificing themselves they keep sickness out of the hive. I may be wrong with the first assumption, but I assumed it was one of two things. Either they were bees that were of the same age and had reached the end of their lifecycle in the same 6 hours, or there was a sickness that killed them. 

The first thing I did was check the hive externally for signs of sickness. That would be brown/black streaks across the exterior of the hive where bees are unable to hold their waste and excrete on the hive. Observing these streaks means that dysentery is going on in the hive, which could mean several severe situations. Thankfully, there were no signs of disentery. BUT I did notice immediately that there was some sort of mold/algae growing in the feeder jar (as can be seen in the above picture). Just like any sort of controlled situation, whether medical or experimental, I decided to change the most obvious variable. That being the infected sugar syrup. I took the entire feeder off, went inside, and put some water to boil.

I boiled 3/4 of a pot of water, with the jar sitting in the water for the entire time. This way the jar wouldn't get heated too quickly and shatter (boiling water hitting cold glass). After it was all boiling I removed the jar, put it in the sink, put the wood feeder + jar lid in the boiling water for two minutes, and then filled the jar with boiling water. This way every piece of the feeding system was sterilized as thoroughly as possible. I then filled the pot up with fresh water and made another jar sized batch of sugar syrup. Feeder and jar went back on the hive, and I let them be for the day.

Thursday the 2nd of May, 2013

The next day was supposed to be nothing but thunderstorms and rain past noon, so I figured it'd be a good day to just quickly check on how the Dothraki hive was doing. Afterwards I'd go check on the new feral hive I got from doing a water meter cut-out the day before (Wildling hive, the next post) and do a regular full hive check on Winterfell (Italian-Carniolans). I went back to the hive and double checked the feeder. No algae and no dead bees, good stuff! If the bees hadn't died from mutual old age then it looks like it was definitely some bad mold/algae that messed them up. 

I tossed on gloves and that's it, no smoker or jacket. I cracked open the hive and upon pulling out the second frame I saw these queen cells... crap! Right away this was bad news. Something was wrong with the queen or she was dead/gone. 

Queen cells that are built into the comb like this are supercedure cells. Cells built for new queens to supercede the old one are built when the hive isn't happy with the current queen (infertile, not laying in healthy patterns, etc) or there isn't a queen at all. If the queen cells are built along the bottom of the frame that means they are queens being raised for swarming. Meaning the current queen is getting ready to take off with half the hive in order to establish a new hive, leaving the new queen to continue on the current hive with the remaining half-hive of bees.

I quickly combed through the other frames in search of eggs, a sign that the queen had been active in the last 72 hours. No eggs and no visual on the queen. This wasn't good, and it was going to be all thunderstorms starting in the next hour or so! It was already overcast!

I had no game plan, but knew something had to be done... and quickly! My full collection of gear may have grown wings and flown into the car with how fast I collected everything to get moving. While loading gear I came up with a plan. The clock was ticking and with the loss of 15 or so bees already I didn't think there was enough time to buy a queen. I also didn't really want a second "domestic" hive, since the whole purpose of collecting these feral swarms is to eventually interbreed them with the Italian-Carniolans.

The saying in the military is that we don't rise to the occasion, we sink to our highest level of training. In this case, I'd been absorbing everything I could on beekeeping and attended a very solid workshop which covered a huge range of topics. Including a free class on queen raising, courtesy of D&J Apiary in Central Florida. After running through a few possible solutions, I reasoned that if moving in frames with eggs worked for queen rearing on a production level, then the same could be applied to this situation. But only if I could find a frame with late stage capped brood. It's only the newly hatched, baby bees that attend to the queen and it had been almost a week since capturing this swarm. A margin of error of only a week or two wasn't very comforting when it came to the age of the Dothraki bees. Without having done solid research on backbone techniques of beekeeping, both internet and workshops/meetings, then I don't think I'd have known what to do in this situation. So if you are new to beekeeping or are about to get into it, I highly suggest that you do your homework! Granted, I don't know if this is going to work or not, but if it does then that's $25 + in the event that I have to combine the Dothraki & Wildling hives, several months avoided of hive strengthening in order to split the hive back into two hives.

I rushed over to the bee yard with the newly painted full size, 10-frame Langstroth hive to transfer the Wildlings into. They were a rather large, strong cutout of 5 "super" frames (half the size of "deep" frames). So it wouldn't be a major blow to them to take a frame from them while moving them into a full size hive body. Although, they might just build wax straight downwards from the half sized frames in order to reach the "floor" of the hive boxy. That was definitely lower on the priority list than getting the Dothraki re-queen'd (or re-Khaleesi'd). 

As soon as I got to the bee yard it started drizzling. Not realizing my smoker wasn't assembled right didn't help. It took another 15mins to get the smoker lit. It was definitely time to hurry. I didn't bother putting on the jacket. It's too limited in vision and slows me down. If I wanted to get done with everything before the big, penny sized rain drops fell then I had to be fast! The only items/clothing used was smoker, gloves, shorts, "dairy boot" galoshes, a baseball hat, t-shirt, and hive tool.

I got the new hive body over to the hive table, where the Winterfell full size hive and Widlling nuc box were set up. After setting down the new hive on some plastic painting floor liner I smoked the Widling hive and moved their nuc box onto the plastic, then I put the new hive on the table and transferred all the frames from the nuc box into the new hive body. The perfect frame was there! The center of the pictured frame is all hatched out, empty cells surrounded by capped brood, then larvae, then eggs, then bee bread, and finally, honey. I smoked out all the remaining bees in the nuc, put this frame + attached nurse bees into the nuc box, taped it up, and loaded everything back into the car. 

The skies had opened up not even ten minutes into all of this, and overall it took about 30 minutes. So by the end I was completely soaked and had been stung once in the back. It felt like a straight jolt of electricity and made me instantly stand straight up. I think that made my shirt pull the stinger out though, so there wasn't much poison injected. No after effects, no throbbing ache, and no swelling. Can't complain with having an easy first sting!

So afterwards I got home and transferred the frame straight into the Dothraki hive (now with 3 deep frames + the new super frame). As far as I could tell, the only issue ended up being a single fight at the entrance of the hive. From my reading, the commercial guys just slap both hive bodies together or dump the bees straight in when they combine hives. Apparently they work it out just fine with no stacks of dead bees, so I skipped the newspaper. I'm going to do a hive check on them once I wake up, followed by driving out to the bee yard to hive check Winterfell. So there will be another update shortly.

I think I handled it pretty well for a very panic-worthy situation. I'm just hoping that the solution I came up with works. Both feral hives have been exceptional bees and I'd hate to lose either one of them. Even if it's to combine them.

Also, sorry for the uber long post! This last week was pretty busy, but it was all one issue. I figured it'd be easier to just put it all in at once vs splitting one issue up into several posts. That way anyone else who comes across this issue could just read about it in one post. If you think it would be easier to read in split posts then I'll be more than happy to split future issues into "episodes". Just comment and let me know!

A Ridiculously Busy Day Part 2: The Swarm

So after doing that roof cutout it was off to work. Around 6:45 I noticed my phone vibrating, followed by a single buzz that means the caller left a voicemail. I work in a restaurant right now while going to school, so that means no personal calls. Things finally slowed down around 7:30 and I went to the bathroom to check the voicemail. Turns out that it was the Broward association's president giving me a call to let me know that a lady in my local area had called to see about having a swarm removed! I was excited to give her a call, but wasn't sure if I'd make it in time since I still had another hour and a half on my shift. Fortunately things were extremely slow and I was told to clock out early around 7:45.

I quickly gave the homeowner a call from the parking lot. No one had called her back about it, other than professionals who wanted to charge $400 for the job. Pretty expensive for a simple retrieval. She confirmed that it wasn't a cutout, and they were still there! I wrote down her address and rushed home! Only stopping to pick up a headlamp from the store.

Upon arriving home I ran up to the garage, rolled the door up, and quickly tossed everything I could think of into the car. I'd never done a swarm retrieval before, and definitely had never done a cutout or retrieval on my own! Jacket, smoker, matches, nuc box, hive tool, gloves, and ryoba saw.

A bit about the ryoba saw. It's a Japanese style saw, bought at Home Depot, which works on the "pull" stroke of the sawing motion. American style saws generally work on the "push" stroke. This made a huge difference when I got to the property. One side is fine toothed for cutting across the grain, and the other side has larger teeth for "ripping" with the grain.

Back to the story! I arrived at the home, which ended up being only two major streets away (1 mile maybe). I pulled into the drive way and met the homeowner. I asked, "Where are they bees?", and she told me to look up. Sure enough, almost right above my head was a large, softball sized bundle of bees!

The only thing was that they were higher up than the homeowner's ladder, doh! She called her son out and he pulled his pickup truck into position under the tree. We then set the ladder up in the bed of the truck. It was a bit risky due to the plastic liner in the bed of the truck, but we used some bungee chord to secure the legs to the bed. After that I told the homeowner (who was allergic) that she should probably go inside, at least until I got the tree limb taken down. That way she'd be safe if the branch fell for any reason, resulting in a cloud of bees.

Getting up to the top of the ladder it was pretty obvious that this was going to be an awkward branch removal. I had to twist at the waist and lean forward to get a good grip on the branch, resulting in practically no leverage. However, the ryoku saw was exactly what this situation required. With just the weight of the saw and a few fingers on the handle, it quickly sawed through the branch... but it was longer than I could initially see! The whole branch swung down like a pendulum from my hand!

I couldn't see right away where the bees had went, but I also didn't see any flying around in the air... so that was a good sign at least. By then the homeowner had come outside to check out the progress. I asked if she saw where the bees went, and she pointed to my elbow and said look down. Sure enough, there they were, still clustered upon the branch with the nearest bees just inches from my elbow! Phew! I quickly trimmed the twigs off the branch and came down off the ladder. Next step was to trim the limb even further so that only the 3 foot section with the bees remained. That would make it quite a bit easier to manipulate while searching for the queen.

I rotated the limb and brought the top half of the branch (where the bees were) down to the ground. This left the other end resting on the tire. That was a quick five minutes of sawing, leaving the bees sitting comfy on a few feet of branch with no leaves or twigs.

For the next thirty minutes I combed through the swarm, parting the bees with my gloved fingers. The mass of bees was at least seven bees thick from exterior to the bee holding on to the bark itself. It was slow going. But the key with bees is to work slowly, methodically, and with only gentle pressure. Finally after twenty five minutes there was a flash of solid orange in the mass of bees! I tried to clip her, but she slipped out escaped back into the swarm cluster. It took five minutes to find her again, but finally I was able to clip her! Here is her abdomen in the above picture (left side of the bottom "window" of the clip.

After that, it was merely a matter of putting the clip in the nuc box and shaking the bees off the branch into the box. Immediately they could detect the queen was in the box and they all stayed put, even without having sprayed them with sugar syrup to inhibit flight (forgot to bring that, oops). I gave them 15mins to fan out the smell of the queen, and for strays to rejoin the swarm in the box.

All in all, minus the awkwardly positioned ladder for cutting down the branch, things couldn't have gone any better! These bees were also extremely docile. So I'm very glad to have them and will be keeping them in my backyard, on the patio, for a bit. That will let them build up strength, and get their brood comb constructed since I don't have any established wax comb for them to use. That way they don't have to worry about hive beetles maturing in the dirt and then flying up to the hive. They're a small swarm so they need ever advantage I can give them to begin with. They'll be on poured concrete with partial shade as well, which is the best environment they can have for starting absolutely fresh.

Here's the nuc box all set up with the feeder I picked up at South Florida Bee Supplies. It took another hour to get them situated and to put all my equipment away. I was so beat after a very busy 16 hour day. It wasn't until midnight that I actually got in bed. However, there's nothing like going to bed feeling accomplished and productive!

Coming next: Update on the captured swarm

A Ridiculously Busy Day Part 1: The Cut Out

There's been so much going on the last few days that I'm going to have to do this in two parts. I don't think anyone wants to read a book in one sitting haha. Thursday started at 8:30 with an hour drive to Loxahatchee (near Palm Beach Gardens) to help with a cut-out and possibly take home a feral swarm of bees. Followed by that was another hour drive back to go straight to work at 5pm. Then while at work I received an unexpected phone call about a local lady who called the Broward Association to report a swarm of bees in her tree. That was from 8pm until 11pm. What a day!

The Cut Out

The location for the cutout was West Loxahatchee, a very rural area by South Florida standards. The property had been foreclosed on a while back and was being attended by a management company. A few days prior, one of the lawn men had been riding a mower and come across a football sized clump of bees on the lawn. He called it in to the property management company and they called it in to Brendan, a fellow Palm Beach Beek Assoc. member and redditor (/u/brendhan), who in turn called Mike to assign to the job to. That clump on the lawn was a swarm, which we will soon find out happened to be very significant to these bees.

I woke up at 8am, took Ren (my Japanese Kai Ken pup) out to do her business, packed my stuff in the car, and set off for the hour drive to Loxahatchee. I was all set to go with my jacket, smoker, queen clip + nuc box, and giant thermos of ice water! Mike sounded like a real experienced, relaxed, fast-is-slow-and-slow-is-steady kind of guy, and had me looking forward to a very educational experience.

The traffic was a bit more than expected, so Mike had already found the entrance to the hive and set up the ladders by the time I arrived. After doing a once-through of the house, listening to the walls for buzzing, feeling the walls for hotspots, we concluded that the bees were concentrated in the eaves of the house. So back outside we went. We suited up, smoked the entrance a bit, and started working the board on the edge of the house/roof. This single board ran the entire length of the house so we ended up having to dig out the nails with hammer and mini-crowbar, eventually cutting the board down at about 10ft in length. There were a LOT of bees, which ended up being another strange thing. The hive itself was split up into three parts as well due to wooden support boards for the roof. If you look at the picture right above this you'll see the yellow comb, preceded by a bunch of bees. The area with bees is one section, then there's a board, then there's the honeycomb. Before the bees is another section of honey/brood comb (it was weird).

We began by cutting out honeycomb with a small paring knife, and got our first sign that something was wrong with these bees. Now normally beetles don't give me that skin crawling reaction like when there's a ton of scavenger insects (ants, bunches of roaches, etc). In this case however... there were just soooo many beetles it was truly disgusting. In this picture you can actually see a dead one that has drowned in the unfinished honey. They're small, scurry quickly to get away from the light, and have a parasitic relationship with honeybees. In short, they're pests. In a healthy hive, especially a feral one, the guard bees will corral beetles into cracks in the hive walls. Once corralled, the bees will actually imprison them by sealing over the cracks with propolis. Or, in the case of screened bottom boards for human-kept hives, the bees will shove the beetles out through the screening. These bees were not managing the beetles whatsoever, and on every comb we took out there were dozens of these little fiends. I truly felt bad for these poor bees.

A quick detour from the play-by-play... I was scanning bees for mites with every panel of comb that we took out. However, there was only a single varroa mite that was apparent with at least five thousand bees scanned over the entirety of the wax taken out. Mike and I talked about what options there were for the hive, and decided that even if the comb wasn't salvageable that he would take the bees to combine with another recovered feral hive that was low in numbers. The bees were incredibly good natured. Even with the sawing of the boards covering the hive, cutting out the comb, scooping up bees in a large Taco Bell cup, and all the chaos we were causing, neither of us were stung. The only stings received were on my gloves when manually scooping them up and being too rough. There were a few workers hatching out while taking out the comb so we gave them some time before dumping the comb in bins. The above picture is a baby bee who is covered in downy white baby bee fur, even on their head!

Like I said, very gentle bees!

Anyhow, back to the action. After cutting out the far right sections of honeycomb, we moved on to the central panels. These panels were very dark brown in color,  meaning it was very old brood comb which had birthed many a bee. But... there was honey throughout all of the brood comb. A normal comb of brood should have an outer "band" of honey, with a band of "bee bread" next, followed by a central area of brood (eggs + larvae + capped brood, or at least larvae + capped brood) with a solid laying pattern. These panels looked like someone had a shotgun loaded with shells of capped brood and loaded the brood on with it. The terminology used is a shotgun pattern of brood. Maybe 10% of the panel was brood, the rest was unfinished honey crawling with beetles. Gross.

We set up a single frame of recovered brood cell, rubber banding it in place on the frame, but then decided at that point it was a lost cause. There were no eggs whatsoever, no larvae anywhere, and a huge Charlie Foxtrot of Small Hive Beetles on every single piece of comb. The swarm of bees found by the landscaper filled out the rest of the story. There was something wrong with this hive. The queen was either sick, injured, reaching the end of her fertility, or something along those lines, and for some reason had decided to swarm. She must not have been laying in the time leading up to the swarming. The remaining bees were left without any eggs that were able to be raised into queens except for one. We found a single queen cell that was their sole hope for survival. If that queen failed to develop then the hive would die.

Even if the queen did hatch, there was such an infestation of hive beetles that the comb would be reduced to a slimy, writhing mass of hive beetle larvae. Since bees only live for a few weeks and the current workers were mostly older bees with barely any new workers on the way, there wouldn't have been time for the queen to go on her maiden flight, abscond to find a new location, build new comb, and then finally lay eggs to start getting new workers on the way. This hive was a total loss. Time to rescue as many bees as possible!

 I don't know if I already mentioned this, but these bees were incredibly nice! I almost can't get over how nice these bees were. I know that if I did as much damage to my Italian-Carniolans as I did to this feral hive that I would absolutely be getting stung. This was the equivalent of putting an old generator on top of a Langstroth box, turning it on, and then roughly pulling out frames. I wanted to do whatever we could to help the girls. These bees buzzed my veil a bit, but nowhere near what I was expecting. They were also desperate for a queen. Mike had housed a queen in his queen clip two days prior (now empty), and the second we started scooping bees into the nuc box (with clip at the bottom) they decided that it was home. Mike handed a large Taco Bell cup up to me and I literally just scooped up cups worth of bees, then handed them down to him to shake into the nuc box. The picture above is the nuc box entrance with the bees fanning their chemical signal into the air to notify airborne bees that the swarm was located at the signal's origin. They knew they were without a queen, low in numbers, and just wanted to get by.

Mike pulled out the bee vacuum after about four cups of bees. This is basically a shop vac connected to a sealed wooden chamber, that contains a smaller "package" box within it to hold the bees, with another length of vacuum tubing extending from the box. We sucked up the rest of the bees and gave them another 15mins. That way the airborne stragglers could find their way to the nuc box.

With that taken care of, the job was pretty much complete. I had to get to work in an hour and a half, so it was time to hit the road. I helped Mike pack up and moved gear back to his truck. Unfortunately there would be no feral colony to bring home, but I learned an incredible amount from doing this cut-out. Mike put all my uncertainties at ease, was very thorough, explaining everything he was doing along the way, and being patient with my mistakes while telling stories or cracking jokes the entire time. There was just one thing left to do...

Eat some honey! There was only a 3"x 2" strip of capped honey, but it split perfectly into a bite for each of us. Maybe it's just fanciful thinking, but it felt like a "thank you" from the bees.