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.

Building Up an Overwintered Nuc, Part 1

I had a colony last summer which had a single deep and a shallow super for the brood nest. I wanted to take the shallow away from the colony ans replace it with the deep that was over the shallow. Since the shallow had brood in it, the top deep was full of honey, and I had a few queens on hand the time was right for making a nuc. I took eight frames from the shallow and made a two story four frame nucleus colony. I did not do anything else for this nuc for the rest of the year and it has overwintered just fine and now is the time to start giving it extra room for the spring build up.
I put a double inside feeder on the nuc a week before I went back to give it extra room.
Last Sunday, 2/17/08, I went back to add a pollen patty, a deep nuc box with four frames of honey and pollen, and to refill the feeders. Pictured below is my daughter, Mindi, who was brave enough to remove the outer lid and inner cover for me.



When she took of the lid she told me that one of the inverted jars were empty. So she reached in pulled it out.



She then took the other jar, empty deep nuc box, and the double inside feeder off of the nuc.



After we got down to the brood area I went over to take a look while Flower came over to paw around on Mindi's leg and seemed jealous that the bees were getting her attention.



After looking at a few frames I found some eggs and some larvae so I put the frames back into the nuc box and added a pollen patty. Putting the syrup on the nuc a week earlier got the queen to start laying.



After adding the patty I added the deep nuc box with four frames of honey and pollen. The frame below is a good example of a honey dome. At the lower center the cells are empty, around that is some pollen, or bee bread, then a band of honey. This little nuc got lucky I had a dead out or it would not have gotten drawn comb with honey and bee bread. For a closer look at the frame click on the picture.



Then we put the inside double feeder on the top bars of the deep frames.



With the double inside feeder in place, Mindi put the inverted feeder jars into it. I'd like to see the queen move up to the deep frames to lay her brood. Since the bees were never given any additional space last summer they built a lot burr comb. If the queen moves up and lays in the deep frames I won't have to worry about damaging the brood in the shallow frames when I move the nuc into full sized boxes. With the feeders on top of the frames the bees will probably move up closer to the syrup.



Then she put the empty deep nuc, inner cover, and outer cover back onto the nuc. She's quite brave around bees being only ten years old.



I'll continue to give this nuc more room as it needs it. Hopefully in the next few months we will see this nuc become a nice productive colony as it grows in population and size. Thanks for reading this post and be sure to follow this small overwintered nuc during its journey through the upcoming year.

Are Your Bees Alive, Do You Need to Feed Them? Part 2

Do you remember the colonies that I fed back in January? I put granulated sugar atop one colony and icing in the drawn comb of another. The bees in the colony with the icing really took to it. Here is a picture of one of the frames that had the icing in it.



This is what one of the frames looked like before I put it into the colony when it had icing in it.



The other colony I fed with granulated sugar.



They didn't use hardly any of it. However that is a good thing about Carniolan bees. They are extremely frugal with winter stores and have a smaller winter cluster than other races of bees and will thereby also use less stores.



Both colonies were approximately the same strength when I gave them the feed. They also had about the same amount of stores available. It is quite clear to me that they prefer the icing over the granulated sugar although feeding granulated sugar can be a great way to keep your bees alive and should not be discounted.

The left over sugar has been removed and will be made into syrup shortly. Both of these colonies will be set up with some inverted jars with 1:1 to help with brood rearing.

The colony that had the sugar on it now has a pollen patty and an empty shallow of drawn comb. Hopefully when the shallow is full of brood around the first of April it can be taken off the deep hive body to start another colony with.

Feeding Pollen Patties To Your Colonies

After you have decided to feed your colonies pollen patties, whether they are premade patties or you make your own, you need to put them on your hives. The first thing to do is to prepare your hive by smoking them in order to calm the bees before you open them. I like to puff some smoke into the entrance and wait a few minutes before opening the hive.





After smoking the entrances and staying ahead to give the bees time to become sedated, I take off the lid to make it easier to lift the upper hive body of the brood chamber from the lower one. Once the lid is off I separate the two hive bodies and puff some more smoke between them before lifting the upper hive body off. I find the bees remain more calm this way and I rarely use smoke under the outer or inner lid like I have seen some people do. I might use a little smoke when adding a honey super but I mainly do it to sedate the bees between the inner and outer covers before removing the outer cover.



After removing the upper hive body of the brood chamber I could see the remnants of a sugar cake that added to the colony a while back. A really friendly beekeeper in Washington state gave me a recipe for the cakes. The colony didn't really need the cake but I needed an excuse to open the hive.

After opening the hive down to the cluster area I decided to examine the the frames for brood. It had been a weeks (maybe three?) since I looked for any brood or eggs and this time I found some! The bees are not bringing in pollen yet so they are using last years reserves to begin brood rearing. It looks as if I intervened at the opportune moment. If you click on the picture to enlarge it you can see eggs in the cells adjacent to the capped brood. The frames beside this frame have a similar brood area. The bees are rearing brood closest to the center of where they cluster in order to keep the pupae at the proper incubation temperature and to avoid chilled brood.



The next picture has the queen in the midst of the workers. She is on some natural comb from a colony which I extracted last May. I can easily tell that the comb was from the cut-out because it is in a swarm catch frame.



After looking at the frames it was time to place the pollen patty. When placing the pollen patty be sure that all bee are off of the top bars. You can do this by gently smoking the bees or by lightly brushing them. After the top bars are clear of bees scrape off any comb that may be on the top bars before placing the pollen patty.





After the pollen patty is in position the upper hive body must be put back into place. Be sure to look at the bottom bars of the frames to ensure that there is no bees that will be squashed into the pollen patty. If there are bees there smoke them off and scrape away any burr comb that may be on the bottom bars.



Here's a picture of the top hive body back atop the lower hive body. This hive body is still full of honey and heavy. I doubt if I will need to feed this colony syrup. The only syrup this colony will most likely be getting is from stimulative communal syrup feeders.



Here's another colony with a pollen patty added.



Here I am clearing a seat for another patty.



Once the way is clear the patty is put into place.



Around an hour after placing the patties within the colonies I could see a big difference in the behavior of the hives. All the colonies were abuzz with action. Pollen patties encourages the foraging of honeybees as well as brood rearing.



It was really neat to see the increase in activity outside of the hives. It has been warmer here today in the past few weeks than it was today and the colonies exhibited much less activity. Though I monitored the entrances for bees returning to their homes I never did see one bee return with pollen. I believe it is a good thing that I gave them each a pollen patty since they are raising brood and do not have a source for pollen as of yet.

I surely hope that you enjoyed this post to my blog. This time of year it seems that there is always a lot of chatter about feeding pollen patties as everyone wants their colonies to start raising a lot of brood. Now instead of talking a big game I just go ahead and do what I want or need to do. I didn't need to add the patties but I wanted to help ensure healthy populations in a few months so I can start making nucs and raising queens. Thanks for reading the post and stay tuned because there is more to come.