working the bees
‘Work the bees’ is the terminology for tending to your hive. What follows is just an example of working with bees. After dressing up for an hour in my beekeeping gear, I feel like the one being ‘worked on’!
Cooler days mean bees move in slow motion. This is helpful. I need to keep a close eye on my bees as I check their hive box for hygiene issues or pests that need hive management. The continuation of mild fall has given bees a head start as they prepare to aggregate for the winter months. During December, January and February, or as long as the outside temperature remains below 40 degrees, the bees will remain inside the hive keeping the hive at 94 degrees, warm enough to hatch new brood.
The life cycle of the honey bee is three weeks, so there is a continuous birth of new bees every twenty-odd days, but it is unknown how many bees are born per day or per week. That’s why I look for the queen and brood covered, a sure sign that the queen is laying eggs. In winter, the egg-laying process slows down, and as food reserves become a problem in late fall, drone bees disappear from the colony and worker bees are also fewer in number.
Interestingly, last week I noticed a lone queen cup on the bottom edge of the far right, outermost basebar in my topbar hive. A bar top hive looks like a cross between a xylophone and a small wooden coffin. Bees covered one side of this foundation bar. The open side of this base, where much more work would be needed to keep the colony at the proper temperature, was empty, all empty cells neat and tidy.
A queen cup is a specially designed and substantially larger cell constructed from the comb. Fed on a diet of royal jelly by nurse bees, the larva in a royal cell is destined to become a queen.
Why would the colony build a queen cup in the fall? This queen cup was empty and the top edge of it looked a bit ragged, possibly bitten when a new queen came out of her birthing cell. Are there now two queens in this hive of bees?
This is where the craft of beekeeping comes into play. As a new beekeeper, this is also where knowledge and intuition meet. The bees know what is best for the colony. It’s too late in the season for bees to swarm, which is the natural and desired division of a thriving hive and usually an early spring event, but what about the breakout? Was the colony preparing to leave the hive because they no longer found it suitable? I had to take a quick but considered course of action.
In the first two weeks after installing the bees in the hive box, the girls very quickly built two foundation bars on the outermost left side of the hive box. During a previous inspection, due to my inexperience in handling the top bars, the first comb base bar built had collapsed, separating from its top bar. This is a constant risk in managing a top bar hive. Not wanting to disturb a new colony (Italian worker bees accepting a Russian queen), it seemed prudent to leave the collapsed hive full of brood alone for now. But seeing the empty queen’s cup made me curious about the conditions at that end of the hive now that cold weather was approaching.
My informed and intuitive decision was to do a full inspection, taking a look at each base wax stick. Making my way through the hive box from right to left, at the end of the hive where the bees first built their brood comb, I discovered two beautifully constructed sections of comb – the collapsed comb seen in the spring. This comb was now empty, dry and starting to get moldy. These two sections of abandoned comb were also closer to the hive entrance. True, the empty sections of comb could serve as winter insulation, but the risk of being an opening for pests like wax moths, let alone becoming a small hive beetle hotel, was potentially more damaging, and was able to find other ways to insulate the colder winter weather.
After careful observation, thinking things through, and deciding on a reasonable course of action, my smoker ran out of fuel! Up to this point, on a 70 degree day, the girls were quiet and all had been dusted with powdered sugar as a non-chemical treatment for Varroa mites, although I have not observed deformed wings on any of the bees which is a marker of the presence of Varroa mites. My hive mate and I locked the hive to prevent theft or unwanted quests like hornets and yellow jackets attracted to the powdered sugar, and headed back to the tool shed.
After turning the smoker back on, he went back down to the hive, ready to remove the shaping comb. My reasoning is: one, the comb was a health hazard; and, two, the bees may have been fuller than they’d like. Following my intuition, if the queen cup I had discovered indicated that the hive did not have enough space to build a comb to store brood and honey, I was prepared with three empty bars covered with lines of wax beads to place in the hive.
For the second time in an hour, I opened the hive on its far left and quickly inserted a follower board so the bees no longer had access to the molding comb. I placed the comb in a disposable foil kitchen pan and then in a paper bag as a precaution against the spread of disease. There were no signs of wax moths or filthy hatchlings. Even the small hive beetle problem had apparently been handled between the bees fighting off the few remaining beetles and a stroke of good luck finding their larvae under the sugar feeder. I killed all the hive beetle larvae, cleaned up that hive mess and crushed any remaining stragglers with my hive tool while little vegetable oil filled hive beetle traps did the trick. The number of small hive beetles observed in this inspection was less than a dozen beetles. I left the board at the far left end of the hive, thinking that in the spring the bees would completely clear this end of the hive, assuming they survived this winter.
I didn’t see the queen. She has a white dot on her back. He’d seen her alive and lying a week ago, so he wasn’t too worried about seeing her on a day when there was other, more important work to do. Worried about stirring up the bees too much who might be ready to abscond, I made quick work of rearranging the new empty hive that was being built, adding new top bars for the girls to expand the hive if they wanted, and loading the sugar feeder with a new hive beetle trap placed below.
My last task was to cork the entrance that led to the now empty section of the hive box. There are now two entrances in the center of the hive. Not as close to the sugar feeder, these entrances will make it easier for the bees to defend the hive against other insect theft. These new entrances also offer space for the disposal of dead bees, as well as air circulation to handle cold weather condensation within the hive.
It is not yet clear whether or not my intuition is correct about the bees’ reasoning for raising a new queen. I decided to leave the girls alone for a week to get used to their newly imposed entrances. The young worker bees were festooned at the bottom of an old comb, so it seemed wise to give them a new area to practice their wax-making skills. Once again it was heartwarming to see the field bees return to the hive with pollen in their bags the first week of November!
Honey bees do not reach the level of being “pets”. far from there However, I think I take quite a bit of pride in having enough basic knowledge to make hive management decisions without bothering a more experienced beekeeper. Although luck and good timing were the main factors in controlling the small hive beetle problem without chemicals, I had no qualms about aggressively killing all hive beetle larvae. My favorite tool? A grill cleaning tool! The scraper edge of this tool is sharp and wide enough to dispatch small beetle larvae and scrape any mess out of the hive box.
Tip: Here’s another tip for top bar hive users. Using a spatula and a small can of Crisco shortening, spread Crisco on the legs of the hive base. Then spray boric acid on the Crisco. Crisco does not melt in the high temperatures of summer, making it an excellent supply system for boric acid. You will find very few ants in your hive and the bees will come out unscathed because they are not using the legs of the hive box as any sort of landing area.
Now, do the best you can! http://www.beegreenphilly.com/