Strengthening a Weak Colony Part 3

I am still babying this colony. The queen is laying better and is laying a larger patch of brood than before. However the colony only has about three frames of bees and I feel it is near impossible for them to keep a double deep at the proper temperature to efficiently raise the amount of brood that they should be. So I am busting the two deeps down into a two story four frame nuc.

First I need to the nuc box into the position of where the full size double deep is. I begin by removing the upper deep which is still heavy and full of last year's honey. I like to place these heavy boxes on an empty super on the ground. It is easier on my than putting one of them atop an adjacent colony.



After removing the upper deep I got a good look to determine approximately how many bees were in the hive.



After seeing how few bees were in the hive I decided that they absolutely needed a smaller box. I had been wanting to put them into a nuc box for a while but finally had enough time last Sunday. I removed the lower brood chamber with the bottom board from the hive stand and placed the bottom board for the nuc in its place.



Then the deep nuc box went onto the nuc bottom board so I could begin transferring frames.



The first frames that I needed to locate were the ones which contained brood so the could be placed near the center of the nuc box.



The picture above is of brood from the small colony. You can see near the center of the brood patch where bees have been emerging. The queen is continuing to lay back into those empty cells to keep the brood concentrated together so the limited amount of nurse bees can take care of the brood more efficiently in a smaller area. Click on the picture to gen an enlarged picture to see the larvae in the center cells.

After locating two frames with brood they were put into the nuc box.



Next I found a frame with freshly gathered pollen which was located next to the brood frames.



This frame was put back into position in the nuc box as was a similar frame with pollen and nectar on the other side of the two brood frames.



I then added the second nuc box atop the first. I also placed the remnants of the pollen patty onto the top bars of the brood frames.



With the top nuc box in place I picked through the old upper deep to locate some nice frames with honey to put into the nuc. Since the bees will be able to maintain the cluster on the brood at the proper temperature more easily they will be able to raise more brood than they have. This means that they will need more food to feed the brood. I made sure to do my best to put four frames entirely filled with capped honey above the small cluster for easy access.





After filling the top nuc box with frames of honey I placed a migratory cover for a lid.



I have neglected putting this weak colony into a smaller box since I first began trying to save it. I do have more bees in it now. I also have the queen laying decently. She wasn't laying yet back when I first started working on the colony to save it about a month ago. I am sure the smaller area will help them out. They had way too much space in the full size equipment. Hopefully in another month from now that nuc will be packed with brood and bees. I gave the comb and honey I took from this weak colony to a couple of my fastest growing colonies. Hopefully I won't have to worry about the big colonies until I make some nucs from them. I also hope that I won't have to turn them into a nuc like I did this weak colony. As soon as I can requeen this colony it will be done.

Bait Hive

During this time of year your colonies may be making preparations to swarm. A lot of beekeepers implement certain management techniques to discourage their bees from swarming. One of these techniques is checkerboarding. Another method of swarm prevention is reversing the brood chambers. Both are methods used to expand the broodnest. Some people let their bees have an unlimited brood nest. This means they do not confine the queen to lay in certain boxes, usually with the help of a queen excluder, and gives her free reign to lay her eggs wherever she wants within the hive.
Bees swarm for different reasons. It is in the honeybees' nature to reproduce as it is the inborn instinct of any other living being. Honeybees reproduce by swarming to make new colonies. In reality, a colony of honeybees is a superorganism. Since so many individual organisms are required for the superorganism to live bees must swarm in mass to reproduce. If a colony of bees is not given enough space and outgrow their hive they will swarm due to overcrowding. A colony may also abscond from the hive but this should not be confused with swarming.
The problem with bees is that you may implement every known swarm control management technique known to man and still have a colony swarm. One of the easiest things to do is to make a nucleus colony from the one which is going to swarm or to split it. The easiest way to see that a colony is going to swarm is if the colony has capped swarm cells. These are typlically located near the bottom of the frames. I have also noticed in the past that a few days before a swarm emerges that some bees will mass on the outside of the hive facing down toward the entrance as if watching for the queen to come out and take flight with the exodus of bees which will make up the swarm.
Let's face it. We all lead such busy lives that it is impossible for some of us to check our colonies every week for capped swarm cells, sit and watch for a colony to swarm, or to even implement any swarm management. This is where a bait hive comes in really handy.
Though I am planning on making nucs from my colonies and continue to do so as they are strong enough up until mid July, it is quite possible that I may have a colony swarm and not be available to retrieve it before it disappears into the surrounding mountains. Therefore I am preparing a bait hive to use in case one of my colonies should swarm when I'm away.
For the bait hive I'm using an old nuc box I built a few years ago and only used to start out a few new colonies. If I should catch a swarm there is a rear chamber for holding an inverted jar of syrup for feeding until the population is large enough to move to a full sized deep. I am also using some drawn comb from a deadout I had this January.



The frames that I selected for the bait hive have drawn comb which brood has been raised in. The honey and pollen is not important to put into a bait hive as it will most likely be robbed out before any swarm moves in. However, the honey and pollen will definatley get the attention of any possible scout bees in the area.



All I did was to fill the five frame nuc with frames of brood comb. If you don't have much drawn comb on hand you can take a frame from the outer edge of the brood chamber from one of your colonies to use, Just replace it with a frame of foundation, a frame with a starter strip, or an empty frame. You can also put this frame between frames of of brood which can help to relieve congestion and overcrowding by opening up the brood area. This is a form of swarm prevention that some beekeepers use. If you just use one frame of brood comb for the bait hive you can use frames of foundation, frames with starter strips, or empty frames to fill the nuc.



Aside from the brood combs, there are other attractants used to lure the scout bees to the bait hive. Once scout bees find a new home for the swarm and agree on the location they will lead the swarm there. A good attractant to use is lemongrass oil.



It only takes a small amount of the lemongrass oil to use as a lure in your bait hive. A drop or two on each frame and a few drops at the entrance will last quite a while. A honeybee's olfactory senses are far superior to ours. They can smell the aroma of the oil long after we can't. Some people will use the oil evry week, some will every month, some will once a year. I perefer to use just a few drops every couple of weeks after the intial dose at the beginning of spring.

Ease of handling of your bait should be taken into consideration if you make your own. Some outer handles make it easy to carry. The entrance should also be somewhat smaller than on a regular full size hive.



A prime location for your bait hive is somewhere between ten to twelve feet off of the ground about fifty yards away from you colonies. You could even set up a perimeter of bait hives around your apiary. It is not of utmost importance to place your bait hive in such a manner. You could place it on the railing of your deck, on some masonry block a few yards from your hives, or almost anywhere you wish within reason.
If you don't have any brood comb or nuc boxes to use for a bait hive you can always use a swarm trap. Almost every beekeeping equipment supplier has these available for purchase. They also have swarm lure available as well.
I hope this helps you catch any swarms that you may have otherwise missed. I can't remember how many times I've came home in the vening to hear someone tell me I had a swarm and just point in the direction that they think it went. Sometimes I got lucky and had the swarm move into an old dead out or stay put on tree limb nearby. This year I am going to try to increase my odds of keeping any swarms that hopefully will not happen by using a few bait hives.

Building Up an Overwintered Nuc, Part 2

It had been a month since I last vivited the nuc that I am building up into a nice production unit for my daughter. I figured that after a month the queen would bee on the bigger frames in the deep nuc box and laying brood. After taking the outer and inner cover off of the nuc I then removed the empty deep nuc box which surrounded the feeders. The feeders were then taken off for my first look between the top bars to see if the bees had moved up as I had hoped.



Here's a good look down into the nuc. Please keep in mind that you can click on these pictures if you wish to enlarge them for a better view.



I know that just because there are bees near the top bars that it does not indicate that the cluster has mooved near there. So it was time to pull out a frame to inspect it for bees and brood. As I moved my hand over the nuc I could feel the heat rising from the small colony. The smaller sized small nuc boxes greatly benefit a colony's ability to thermoregulate itself. The first frame I pulled out was on the outer edge of the box.



Here's a slightly closer view of the same frame. Around the patch of capped brood is all stages of larvae, and eggs are on the very outer rings of the brood patch.



Since this was the first frame I pulled out I knew the next few frames would have brood as well. This is the next frame I took out of the nuc for inspection. If you look closely enough you can see the queen. You can see here near the open cells surrounded by capped brood on the left center of the frame. She was in the process of laying eggs back in the cells from which some new bees had just emerged.



Here are two more pictures of the queen, if you can find her.





After pulling a few of the frames I looked down into the nucs that the colony overwintered in that I put the pollen patty on when I added the first deep nuc box with frames. The small colony had eaten all of their pollen patty excepet a piece that was about one fourth of the original quantity I gave them. I didn't feel the need to pry into the lower two boxes to look for additional brood but I am confident there is some there. The pollen patties and syrup has really helped to build up this little nuc so far. You can see a piece of what was left of the pollen patty below.



After putting the frames back into place it was time to do what I had planned to do to this colony a month ago, and that was to add some more space. First I put the empty deep nuc box into place.



Then I began to insert deep frames of drawn comb into the empty box.



Then I inserted the rest of the frames. The deep frames of comb contain potions of honey, pollen, and some empty cells. I put the frames which were most empty to the center and the frames which had more honey and pollen to the outside. I believe the queen will be moving up to lay some eggs in those empty cells as it looked as if she was almost running out of space below.



Then the inner lid was put into place.



Finally, the outer cover was put into place.



The next time I go to this nuc it will be to put it into some full size equipment. I'm almost positive that I will be using eight frame equipment for this colony. The inside feeders are now at the entrance in an entrance feeder and the next time I visit the colony another pollen patty will be added. With as much early growth as this small nuc has already shown it is likely that I will be able to harvest a few supers of honey from it. I'll be sure to keep you posted.Thanks.

Communal Feeding

About two weeks ago I set up a feeder for my bees so they could have an easily accessible source of artificial nectar before the honey flow. This time of year the sugar syrup can trick the bees into thinking that they are having a honey flow and they will begin to raise more brood than they normally in order to catch up and have a large enough population to benefit from the nectar flow. This is a great way to get your bees to increase their population before the honey flow so you can benefit from it with a larger than normal honey harvest. This is also a great way to make the colonies strong enough to split or make nucs from a little earlier than you could otherwise. This is why I am feeding them stimulatively. Feeding pollen patties with the proper nutrients along with feeding sugar syrup for artificial nectar will increase the strength of your colonies and may cause some early swarms if you don't implement proper swarm prevention techniques. Another drawback is that putting the syrup out in the open can attract other insects or other people's bees. Your neighbor's bees may benefit more from the syrup if his colonies are stronger and have more foragers. I don't have any other beekeepers near me and if other bees feed here they are probably from a swarm which has escaped me in the past.

For communal feeding you can use High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) or choose to make some invert sugar syrup. I made up 10 gallons of invert syrup and need to make more. The bees can go through a lot of syrup when they are raising brood. I decided to use five gallon buckets for feeders this year in an effort to avoid having to continually fill smaller inverted jars. However I will also be using jars to give an extra place for the bees to feed.



I added some spearmint oil, lemongrass oil, and some mineral salt to the syrup. These essential oils are reported to beneficial to the health of the honey bee. The salt is also something that is beneficial to the bees. I have read that the calcium helps the bees grow a stronger exoskeleton during the pupal stage of development. Mineral salt can easily bee found at hardware or feed stores in the form of a salt lick for cattle. I added about one pound of salt to the five gallon mixture and about 30 drops of each types of oil mentioned above. The mixture tasted good to me and the bees seem to enjoy it too.

After making the syrup I had to drill some holes in the lid. If you drill too many holes the bucket can not hold its vacuum to keep the syrup from leaking out. Through some trial and error I found that a lid with 24 holes worked rather well.



Here is a picture of a lid which had about twice as many holes. It acted more like a sieve than a feeder when the bucket was turned upside down. Something to consider when making your own bucket feeder is that you want to start with an airtight container. You can see the rubber gasket around the inside rim if the lid. It's a good thing I have a limitless supply of these old pickle buckets because I did go through a few lids until I made one that worked well.



After finally making a lid that worked well I need a way to suspend the bucket to allow a passage for the bees to access the feeder. I used 3/8" thick pieces of scrap wood and a piece of plywood roughly cut to the same shape of the lid. The plywood is 5/8" thick and gives the bees a space of about 3/8" to feed within.



When you flip the bucket some of the syrup will leak out until there is enough pressure to create the vacuum. The bees don't mind and will clean up what they can. Just be sure that the feeder does not leak or you could drown some of your bees.





I also used some entrance feeders to give the bees a few additional places to feed from. It wasn't the warmest of days when I put these feeders out but when it does get warm enough for some nice flying weather the bees really convene at the feeding station.



Having a close source of fresh water for your bees is also important. Your bees can become stressed and agitated easily when they don't have enough water or if they have to fly too far to obtain it. I have a creek that is constantly flowing nearby. Last summer it got really dry here during the drought so I used one of those plastic swimming pools for small children as a watering station. It's important to place some kind of object in the water that the bees can rest on while retrieving water for the colony. Here is a small scale example of bees collecting water from atop a bucket.



Communal feeding of dry pollen substitute or supplement is also easily done. Dry feeding pollen sub will stimulate your bees to forage for pollen. I dry feed pollen sub simply by placing a few pounds on the underside of a telescoping outer cover. It's like a big serving tray for the bees and makes it easy for you to take the tray indoors during inclement weather. I had some pictures of dry feeding pollen sub but I can not seem to locate them at this moment. When I find them I'll be sure to add them so you can get the full visual effect.

Strengthening a Weak Colony Part 2

I checked the weak colony today which was featured in the first part of this series. The queen is fat and she is laying eggs!!! This is definitely a good thing. The old bees just were not able to raise any brood on their own and needed the help of a new generation. The two main reasons I feel that was causing this colony to fail was underpopulation and and not enough bee bread from last year. The bees have to have the bee bread to eat so they can produce the royal jelly for their young. Without it the older wintered bees can not raise their replacements and begin to die out. After the population gets small enough the queen along with her remaining subjects will freeze to death when it is cold enough outside. They can't stay warm enough to survive within the cluster when there are not enough bees. If I would not have intervened this colony would have been doomed. I might put this colony into a two story nuc box. It might fare better from being in the smaller space and then I can put it back into the full sized equipment when it is strong enough.

The picture below is looking down into the lower hive body of the weak colony which now is not so weak.



Here is a picture of the queen. She has fattened up once again and is laying eggs. She is laying eggs in the empty cells between the capped brood. This was one of the frames that were donated to the colony. Almost every empty cell represents a new bee which has emerged and joined the colony in the past week. I suppose that since the bees cluster on the capped brood to keep it warm that this was the most reasonable place for her to lay the eggs to keep them warm. If you click on the picture you can see the eggs in the cells, they are left of her. It looks like she just made it over this side of the frame as there were eggs on the other side and another frame.



I must say that I feel much better now than I would have when I discovered this colony had died out. If you can take about fifteen or twenty minutes to devote to a weak colony you can save it. I don't know how much money you make but I'd rather spend about fifteen minutes to save a colony than up to one hundred dollars or more to replace it because I let it die out. It's so easy to do a first year beekeeper could do it if the read the first post, Strengthening a Weak Colony."

I took some pictures but they were not very good. Hopefully these two pictures here will suffice for now. I'll be sure to keep you updated on this weak colony as it gains in strength and population.

Waggle Dance

The waggle dance is how bees communicate with one another to share information to the location of a foraging source. The food source could be pollen, nectar, water and even place trees from which to make propolis. The dance is an effort to recruit other foragers so when they leave the hive they can make a beeline to the source without having to waste time searching themselves for some forage. The waggle dance is very complex for a human to understand but bees can comprehend the directions from it easily. The length of the dance, the speed, and movement of the returning forager on the comb all give the foragers being recruited information to the location of the resource. The "map" that is given by a dancing bee comprises of the distance and direction from the hive. The angle to the sun is used for direction and the bees change their dance through the day to compensate for the sun's movement thought the sky. To learn more about the waggle dance visit NOVA Online to view "Dances With Bees".

While looking in one of my colonies today I noticed a bee doing a waggle dance. After closer inspection of the dancing bee I noticed her pollen baskets had some pollen in them. This is the first sign of pollen that I have seen this year. Pictured below is a frame that has the dancing bee on it. It is the blurry bee. The camera wasn't fast enough for the movement of the waggle dance so the bee appears a little blurred. You really need to click on the picture to enlarge it to get a better view.



What I like about the picture is the five bees crowded together directly behind the dancing bee as in they are there in an effort to observe the waggle dance to get the directions. You can also see the yellow pollen on the dancing bee's hind legs if you look close enough.

In this next picture you can see by the blur that the dancing be is really getting with it. It looks like she is swinging her abdomen out farther in this picture. The other bees had to move out her way and are watching her from the side now too.



I put out some syrup feeders in the yard yesterday for some communal feeding. I also put out some dry pollen substitute. I have read that dry feeding pollen substitute will encourage or stimulate bees to gather pollen. From what I observed yesterday I can say this is true. While I was walking around the yard there were little powdered bees everywhere that were hovering low to the ground. I believe they were looking for flowers to gather pollen from because they looked just like they do in the summer when working the clover. They have not acted this way before I put the dry pollen sub out for them, or at least since last fall. It seems that one of the bees were stimulated enough to go out and bring in some natural pollen.

Thanks to the waggle dance I now know I have some pollen in the area for my bees. And thanks to you all of you who read my posts and click on the advertisements, I am a little bit closer to being able to get the new camera I need so I can take higher quality pictures to put on here for you to see. So thank you and give me a click so we can have some better pictures sooner.

Strengthening a Weak Colony

This time of year it is critical that your colonies are strong enough to raise brood. A colony with a low population can not keep the center of their cluster warm enough to raise brood. The only way to get the queen to start laying again is to add more bees to have a larger and tighter cluster with adequate core temperature for incubating brood. If bees become protein deficient, from not having an incoming source of pollen or bee bread in the comb, they lose their ability to produce royal jelly, which all larvae is fed during the early stages of development. Since the larvae can not be fed and dies, the protein deficient bees will eat them from the cells in order to clean the cell and for a source of protein. In a case like this you may think that your queen has failed when the old worker bees with protein deficiency are to blame. The addition of young nurse bees is vital at this point to ensure colony survival.

I had two colonies which ended up being really weak over the course of the winter. I discovered that these two colonies were not doing as good as they should be when I put pollen patties on them two weeks ago. At that time, I also seen which colonies would be strong enough to take some frames of brood and young bees to add to the weaker colonies. I finally got the chance to strengthen the two weak colonies yesterday.

Pictured below is one of the weak colonies. This colony performed well over the season last year as I made two nucs from it and gathered three shallow supers of honey. The queen looks as yet she has to be fed in order for her to start raising brood. Adding more bees which are already in build up mode, they will definitely begin feeding the queen and get her to start laying. The upper deep is packed with capped honey and has plenty of stores available for when the colony kicks into high gear raising brood in a few weeks from the addition of brood and young bees which will only help to raise more brood and feed the queen.



The next picture is of the donor colony that was selected to donate some bees and brood. The bees had been eating the pollen patty that I placed in it two weeks ago. This colony had six frames of bees in the lower deep and about six frames of bees about half way up the upper deep so I'm sure that it can spare two frames of bees and brood.



The absolute most important thing to do when taking frames of brood with bees to add to another queenright colony is to locate the queen so that she is not transferred to the other colony. If this would happen the two queens would fight to the death. The colony from which the queen was taken would become queenless. There is larvae of appropriate age from which a new queen could be raised, but this time of year it is likely that the new queen could not become mated any time soon due to the shortage of drones. It takes a queen approximately 23 days from day one as an egg to become fertile and ready to mate. From day one as an egg it takes about 38 days for a drone to become fertile and ready to mate with the queen. It would take up to five and a half weeks for the queen to become mated if drones eggs have been laid.

In the picture below you can see the queen as well as some capped drone brood. Drone cells are capped at ten days, so if I would of removed the queen it would still take a month to have a mated queen in this colony. Four weeks of no brood rearing would set this hive back dramatically. This is why it is important to isolate the frame which contains the queen so that she stays where she belongs.

The queen is on the lower left hand corner of the frame and the capped drone brood is to her right. It looks as if the colony has already hatched out some drones but I did not waste any time trying to locate any in the colony as I was pressed for time. You can click on the picture to enlarge it to get a better view of the queen, drone brood, and worker brood which is closer to the center of the frame. You can also see some of the newly emerged bees as they appear fuzzier than the old bees.



After locating the frame with the queen and setting it aside I needed to chose two frames of capped brood with young bees to add to the weak colony. I made space in the weak colony by removing two drawn frames with some honey and some empty space to add back to the donor colony. The frame pictured below was chosen due to the amount of capped brood and young bees on it.



Before placing the donor frame into the weak colony I sprayed each side of the frame to lightly coat the bees with a Essential Oil Scent Masking Syrup. I made a gallon of 1:1 inverted syrup and added somewhere between twenty-five to thirty drops of spearmint essential oil to act as the masking agent. You can click on the picture to enlarge it to see the bees being sprayed.



The bees in the recipient colony also got sprayed with the masking syrup. The weak colony only had a small cluster of bees on three frames. Pictured below is the weak colony after adding one frame of brood and bees. The first frame on the left is a honey frame. The second frame is one which was originally in the colony and contained only a small number of bees. The third frame from the left is a donor frame with brood and bees. The fourth frame contains the queen and some bees from the weak colony.



After adding another donor frame and the last frame from the weak colony to complete the process, the lower deep of the weak colony looks a lot better and the chance of survival has exceedingly increased.



The donor colony still looks good though its frames of bees and brood in the lower brood chamber have been lowered by 33%. All that was left to do was to put the upper hive body back onto the lower one and to lay the lids in place.



I had been wanting to strengthen this colony for going on two weeks and finally caught a chance to do so. The weather was borderline flying weather and the bees were a little temperamental from being disturbed while in the cluster. I'm glad I finally got the chance to strengthen colony as I have been worrying about it every time I think about the bees. I really could not have picked a better time to have done it. After I finished with both colonies it began to rain which confined the bees to the colony. The young bees would of stayed with the brood anyway but some of the older bees could have returned to their original hive and recruited other bees to help rob out the weaker colony. This has happened to me before. I was prepared to screen the entrance if I needed to but the rain made a better screen than I could have. Also with using the masking syrup the bees did not fight with one another and began grooming each other to clean the syrup off of their bodies. If I could not have accomplished this task when I did the two weak colonies could have died out before the weather would have been cooperative again. Below is a picture of what the colonies look like today. Snow and lower temperatures make good screen too. Once it warms up the bees will have become accustomed to their new home and I should see some orientation flights taking place as the young bees take to the air for their first time.



When I added the frames to the weak colonies I made sure that at least one donor frame contained some eggs. I did this just in case the queens had failed and needed to be superseded. Also if something would happen to the queens, like being balled by the new bees which were added, the workers would have some young larvae of the appropriate age to raise a new emergency queen from. I will be raising some queens this spring and the queens in these two colonies will be replaced from my feral stock.

Hopefully by reading this you will take the initiative to strengthen your weak colonies so that they can survive through the winter. I know some of you may think that this may be a little drastic but I feel it is much better than to simply sit back and watch my bees dwindle away to nothing or to go out to a dead out just to look in and say that they starved (like I have in the past). By inspecting your colonies and strengthening your weak ones until they can be requeened your percentage of successfully overwintered colonies will increase. Thanks.