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Bee Rescue

First stage of bee removal done.

Today we removed a hive from between the 2nd story floor and dining room ceiling of a house.  The picture to the left shows the first 9-inch deep cavity after we had removed the comb.  The bottom left corner shows more comb peeking out from under the other section of plywood.

Why two sections of plywood, you may ask!  Well, we're not the first to pull bees out from this floor.  The bees were getting into the soffit by crawling up the mortar joints between the brick siding and then crawling through that big gap between the joists.   The previous beekeeper sprayed foam insulation into the gap to keep the bees out, but the bees ate it!   I guess once wood smells like wax, propolis, and brood, bees will eat just about anything to get back home.

Broken comb sections from first section

That one section contained about 40 pounds of honey.  We ended up (successfully) using the bee vac to get most of the bees out -- and we had to empty the bee vac twice.   We banded what brood there was into empty frames and put those in a NUC with bees.  We dropped the honey into a clean  plastic container to process later.   We put some of the empty comb in with bees in another NUC, just so they'd have the smell of home with them.  Both NUCs are now full of confused bees in our yard awaiting a trip to the farm.

Once we had the bees and the mess they'd made out (it's not a mess in a hive, but I wouldn't want honey dripping onto my sheet-rock dining room ceiling), we secured the gaps with window screen.  We then went outside, removed the fascia, and blocked the entrances from that direction.  By that time, we could remove our suits in the room (it's a toasty 90 degrees today), and continue clean up.  Hubby secured a piece of plywood over the window screen and also added some vertical blocking, just in case.  The bees had been exploring and ending up in the kitchen light fixture on the other side of the house before we were called in, so if they find another way in, we want them to be confined to a small area.

As there's no way for us to eliminate the home-sweet-hive smell from the joists, hubby filled the cavity with insulation and now has the floor put back together.   I came home and got the bees situated in their temporary homes, and the day was a success!

Beautiful comb honey

 Of course, in the middle of all this, I just had to go to my car and get my coffee -- after I'd unzipped my veil a little to cool off.   So, yep, I ended up with a bee in the suit and a bee in the veil -- all for some coffee that I then didn't drink!   The good thing is that I now know that Stops the Sting really works!   I had to scrape the stinger out of my chin and then go find the Stops the Sting in my pocket book.  Once I applied it, the pain stopped and there has only been minimal swelling.  I can see the hole in the middle where the stinger was, so now I just look like a teenager with an acne problem.   That was at least 5 hours ago, and it still doesn't hurt.  I just ordered two more tubes - one for each bee tool box.

It's been a rewarding, exciting, nerve-wracking, satisfying start to the holiday weekend.  We'll go back over to the house tomorrow and Monday just to make sure everything is okay and the foragers realize that their family moved and didn't leave a forwarding address!

All-in-all, I don't regret staying in the city to do this.   I'll head down to the farm next weekend and see what the bees down there are up to.   I'll have to come back to the city periodically as the fig tree has gone insane, but more about that later!

Relaxing at the creek

Relaxing at the creek

We worked so hard getting the water lines to the orchard installed and planting trees, shrubs, and grass seed last week, that we almost forgot to have fun!   Well, we had fun working around the farm, as usual, and hubby really had fun on the backhoe, but we got to Saturday and realized we'd only been down the creek once and that was down by the bridge.   It's pretty there, and the dog was able to cool off and wash off, but the creek area at the back of the property is so much prettier.  Plus, we needed to check on a couple of trees that we'd planted along the trail that way on our last trip.

Once we got down the the creek, we didn't want to leave.  Just like when we were children, we became enthralled with watching the eddies as they swirled around the rock.  We laughed when Maggie stuck her head under the water and blew bubbles out of her nose as she tried (and succeeded) to get a rock.  We watched bees and butterflies land in the sandy bank to get water and minerals.   We sat and dreamed about the future and the live we will life in this beautiful place we own.

Cooling our feet in the creek

We cooled our tired old feet in the cold water and just sat still for a while.  It's so very easy to walk five miles a day just going about our daily business.  Since we've been back, my fitness tracker has been fussing at me because my average steps per day are so much lower and I wish I could just tell it that I'm doing a different kind of work now and walking is less fun in dress shoes!

We returned home to find healthy, humming, hives with lots of nectar.   The hive with the second swarm we caught this spring had two queens in it, so we had an extra to put into one of the new splits that had an open queen cell, but no queen.  The other split has a queen, but we didn't see any larva on Monday.  It's supposed to storm this afternoon, so we'll probably check again tomorrow after work.  

Jumping the creek

Maggie clearly still wishes she had 22 acres and a creek to play in.   There's only so much energy she can burn off in the fenced in portion of our 1/3 acre lot and our resident mockingbird appears to be making her life a misery, much like it has done for all our pets for the past 15 years.  I know it is probably not the same bird, but the mockingbirds and bluejays love to dive-bomb the dogs, cats, and occasionally us.

So now Maggie gets to sit on the couch and watch me grade another batch of essays.   IB and AP exams start in just over a week, so this is my second-to-last batch of the year other than optional revisions that students will turn in over the next couple of weeks.  I see both daylight at the end of the tunnel and the fruits of my labors as some of my weakest students are now writing good, analytical essays.   Just like raking clay back into a 600 foot long trench becomes tedious after the first hour or so, it, and these final essays, leave me feeling that every bit of effort I put in is well worth it.     

Water for the orchard

Trench for irrigation

One of my fig cuttings from last year is hanging on for dear life and I believe the other one just gave up.   We need irrigation down at the old loading deck, so hubby rented a Ditch Witch from Taylor-Foster on Saturday and started trenching the 400 feet to the orchard.   By the end of the day that Ditch Witch almost got stuck because it ran low on hydraulic fluid somewhere (when it comes to mechanical stuff, nothing makes sense to me).  Taylor-Foster brought another one out to the farm Sunday morning, so the trench is dug and hubby is over half way glueing pipe.  

We needed some parts that weren't available at Foster-Taylor, so we made two trips to Lowe's.   Our new Lowe's is the one in Griffin, Georgia.  Shopping there was such a pleasure today -- great atmosphere, friendly and helpful staff, organized displays -- I just wandered around looking at stuff while waiting for hubby to find all the right widgets and I felt totally relaxed.  Our trip to the other Lowe's was the exact opposite, which is enough said about that!

I planted more cleome, sunflowers, poppies, and phlox for us and the bees to enjoy.   I get my cleome and bee tattoo next week, so that should tell you how much I like those particular flowers.  I also weed-eated to clear space around the red cedars I planted a couple of months ago and to clear the area around our memory bench. 

We have one hive left to check, but all the others are doing great.   Well, one is looking a little iffy, but the rest are fantastic!   The iffy one has (had) and old queen that is no longer laying as much as she should be.  I still struggle with the concept of killing a failing queen, so we put her in a NUC to live out her life and made sure the other hive still had plenty of young brood with which to create a new queen.   It's a compromise that I hope will go well.   The big hive we brought from the city has a fat and active queen now and the bees are no longer bad-tempered.   Hopefully hive 47 will go the same way. 

I'm sitting in the sun blogging at the end of a very busy day and wondering why I have so much more energy here.  Is it the vitamin D or just the peace and quiet?  I think I need to sit outside during lunch at work to see if I can avoid the 3:00 p.m. slump that I get in the city.   It's good to come to the farm and figure out that it's not old age that makes us both want to fall asleep right after supper.   Hmmmm -- maybe the absence of a TV is helping us stay awake!  After all, how many times can we watch the same epidsodes of "Last Man Standing?"   Here's hoping I figure it out while sitting here waiting for the sun to set and the moon to rise. 

Happy People: Happy Bees

Last night, as we were deciding which trees were ready to fend for themselves at the farm, hubby spotted another swarm of bees in our yard.  Once again, they were behind the trealis and a fence post. The poor honeysuckle is still recovering from the last swarm extraction, and this time the two grapevines got to share the pain!   (I should know in a couple of weeks whether or not grapevines can be rooted from "cuttings"!)

Swarm - April 7

These bees were quite cooperative.  Hubby scooped a couple of handfuls into a NUC, I squirted some Honey B Healthy onto the inner cover, we gave them a stick to use as a bridge and they pagenented right on in.  By the time we'd checked the other hives, only two lost bees were still wandering around on the fence.

One of our other splits now has the fattest queen I have ever seen, so that NUC made the trip to the farm and the bees are already bringing in loads of white pollen.  We moved them up to an 8-frame so that they could get over all of their confusion about the new location at once and they seem to be as happy as clams.    The queen cells in the sister NUC have hatched, but we didn't see a queen.  Hopefully she will find her way home in a couple of days.

The other hives at the farm are all active, but we didn't check them today.   Hubby is digging more tenches for water lines and I planted some tomatoes and thyme.   We are really curious to see whether the diatomaceous-earth we sprinkled on the ground two weeks ago has had any impact on the small hive beetles.  It's supposed to kill them when they go back onto the ground to pupate.   Now that the hives are stronger, we aren't seeing as much of a problem as when we came out of that really cold snap, but we'd love to see no beetles at all.   It still seems like having the hive in a sunny spot works wonders, but that is going to make hive checks challenging in July.  

The dog is chewing on a pine-cone, hubby is working hard, and I'm enjoying sitting out in the 72 degree sunshine.  It's amazing to sit here at this time of day and see just how many insects are flying around at any given time and at how many spider webs are catching the sunlight.   Even with the sound of the Ditch Witch, the farm is so peaceful and just a good place to be.   We are just so very lucky and happy to be here.

Arbor Day aids my procratination

Trees and shrubs - protected from the dog with milk crates!

As it was already 97 degrees in the greenhouse by 9:00 a.m. this morning, I decided to move our trees that are awaiting planting to their outside spot under the sprinklers.  All too often, I forget to open the greenhouse windows in the morning, so the poor plants end up baking -- now that we're back to dark mornings, that's been more of a problem this past week. 

So, I managed to put off grading for an hour or so while I played with plants, potted the blue-berry bush I bought yesterday, and started some trays of tomatoes and peppers.  I honestly planned to get comfortable and grade after that, but when I took the trash out I found a box of trees from Arbor Day on the front step.    We didn't receive our entire order, but there was enough planting to do for me to postpone grading another hour.   Then I ate lunch.  Now I'm blogging!

Yes, it's that time of the year when it's hard to stay indoors.   It's neither too hot nor too cold outside.  It seems that every day another variety of daffodil blooms in my garden.   The bees are buzzing contentedly and the grumpy ones are 270 miles away at the farm!   I do love teaching, but it's also the time of year when I am just tired of reading essays!   Spring break is late this year, and most of our spring days-off became inclement weather make-up days for the third year in a row.  Students are ready for spring break.  Teachers are ready for spring break.  We are knee-deep in state mandated standardized testing, and I just want to take the dog for a long walk.

But enough complaining.   The trees and shrubs we received so far this year from Arbor Day have really good root systems, unlike some of what was shipped last year.    The Catalpa and Red Maple trees are a good height and I actually had enough potting soil at home to plant them all.   The arrival of this box is a reminder to grab another bag of potting soil next time we're at Lowe's, and my Lemon Grass and Mandevilla  both survived winter in the greenhouse.  The Mandevilla is even blooming already.  The two varieties of Chocolate Vine on the arbor are filling the yard with a jasmine-like scent, and spring break is only three weeks away.  As always, life is good.

Spring is back - maybe?

Farm hive, March 2017

We were so happy to see that our farm hives are winning the battle against small hive beetles when we were down there last weekend.  The Beetle Blaster traps are working well, although I still struggle to remove them without spilling at least a few drops of oil in the hive.   Our bees are propolizing like crazy right now, so the traps end up firmly glued in.  If I don't loosen them up enough, they get stuck and then spill.  If I slide my hive tool along the sides too deeply, I tear a hole in the side.  Maybe I just need more practice.  

All of the hives at the farm have gained strength now that the bees are not spending all their time chasing beetles and there is a plethora of nectar available to them.  We took one of our older hives from the city down there to see if the bees are any happier there.  The hive has served us well and the old queen laid many eggs when food was available to the hive.  The problem is, they have become increasingly mean.  Inspecting them was no fun at all and once in a while one would "get a bee in its bonnet" (bad use of an idiom, I know) and chase us into the house.  I don't know if they feel threatened by my long hair, but angry bees often became tangled up in it, which made both them and me more angry!  We decided they could no longer live in the city.   The hive replaced the queen a couple of weeks ago, so bees from the new queen could well be more friendly.  If not, we'll replace her with a queen from one of our gentle hives.   If hubby had had his way, the old queen would have been replaced in January, if not last fall.  I am becoming more practical and believe I will eventually be able to see an aging queen as disposable, but I'm wasn't there in January.  After being chased across the yard a few times over the last few weeks, I may be there now!

Our city hives came through the most recent cold snap well.  Only a few were using the feeder buckets last weekend, but the buckets were crowded yesterday.  Once it warms up, I'll put hive top feeders back on our new NUCs so that they can rebuild their stores.  The first swarm capture was a little low on bees last weekend, and we had queenless and broodless bees in one of the queen castle sections.   We combined them by stacking a second NUC body on top of the first and adding the lonely bees so that they could keep the beautiful new brood warm and have a queen to worship (or boss around.)  The NUC with the bees from the second swarm capture had 3 full frames of bees last weekend and the queen was busy searching cells.  There wasn't any capped brood last weekend, and I have a hard time seeing eggs with my bi-focals and the veil, but she's healthy and active so we expect to see something when we do our next check. 

We also have three batches of bees in the queen castle that had hatched queen cells last weekend, but we didn't see the queens.  It was a beautiful day, so they may have been out mating.  I so much want to go look, but it's not warm enough yet. 

Hubby will check the farm hives tomorrow, weather permitting.  He's helping his brother with some projects today while I'm stuck here with a crate full of essays to grade!   So much of what I planted in fall is coming up right now that I really want to go to the farm every weekend, but sometimes we just have to stay home and get chores done! 

A Sweet Reward

Swarm

Today was one of those awful days that ended a rather stressful work week followed by a text from hubby to remind me to get the oil changed in my car on the way home.   Geeeesh ... didn't he know I wasn't in the mood to do that.  Or maybe he knew I was even less in the mood to have to ask him to take the car in for me.  Either way, surprise number one was that I do indeed have a cabin air filter in my car.  We've been told multiple times that I don't, and the dust keeps piling up on the dash and the air conditioner blows warm air at the rate of a soft summer breeze.   Now the air from the vents almost blows my hair back out of my face!

Surprise number two was even better.  I made my usual evening walk around the yard and said hello to all my bee-buddies.  On the way back to the house, I noticed that the Major Wheeler Honeysuckle had new blooms on it.  That thing hasn't stopped flowering all winter, but it is now adding buds like crazy -- or was before we chopped a whole lot of it off about an hour ago.  While I was walking toward the fence to admire the flowers, I noticed something odd.  That something odd turned out to be a swarm of bees.

Swarm in the lattice

Swarms can be really good because they add genetic lines to the exiting apiary.   They are also good simply because they make me happy!  There were as many, if not more, bees behind the lattice as in front of it and almost all are now tucked away safe and warm in their new home.   We have not yet found the queen, but the bees did start to pageant into the NUC after a while, which is normally a good sign.  Temperatures are supposed to drop to the low 30s tonight, so we're glad we caught them when we did.

We bent the lattice back and cut many of the vines to get the bees out of there.  Some that started flying around settled in another clump in the middle of the next sheet of lattice while others hid behind the fence post.   We got what we could with a bee brush and smoke and then tried a bee-vac on the remaining couple of handfuls.   We're still not sure about the bee-vac -- some bees got tangled up in the felt that they are supposed to bounce against and some appeared stunned, cold, or dead.  While we hate to lose any bees, trying to get a handful out of a tight corner was a better experiment than trying to suck up a full swarm.   We'll have to find some non-living things to test levels of air-flow with.
 
Still, a day full of annoyances turned out to be an incredibly wonderful day after all.  This is the second swarm we have caught in two weeks -- one just moved into the queen castle while we weren't looking and started setting up house.   Our bees at the farm were bouncing back after their fight with the hive beetles last weekend, and we'll soon have some more hives to take down there.  

Spring is Here - sorta

We checked our city hives 10 days ago, and one queen is laying like crazy while the other one still appears to be on winter vacation!   Both hives have lots of bee bread, so brood is imminent.  So, is it that much cooler in the corner where the "lazy" queen is or is she just running out of eggs?  We'll take a peek in the hives again on Sunday if it's warm enough.

I hate the idea of replacing a queen we have raised from an egg and who has served us so well for over two years, but it's a fact of life that we may have to dethrone her and find a replacement.  We have three queen cells on frames in the queen castle, but we won't know if they are viable for a few weeks so the old queen still has time to prove she's worth her keep.  She has been a fantastic queen -- lots of eggs and friendly bees.  I'm hoping she starts filling up those frames by Sunday!

I checked my hive at the farm, and the bees have barely started making bee bread.   It's odd, because some plants around the farm like Forsythia are ahead of the ones here, but other plants still look dead.  Why can't spring give clear signals?   It was a little too cool to go into the hives that were not in the full sun, so I guess we'll check those next trip.

Hubby bought pollen to try to jump-start the hives, but the bees don't seem to like it.  At least, they don't like it at this minute!  We know that bees want what they want when they want it and select the flowers that provide the micro-nutrients they need at any given time.   They might want our pollen next week, or they'll crave something that's blooming.

After buying the pollen, we read about the downside of trying to create queens early in the season -- it doesn't matter how many queens we produce if there are no drones with whom they can mate.  Bees kill drones when going into winter as their only job is to mate with queens.   So, no drones, no fertile queen -- and the bees will kill a queen, or at least kick her out, if she doesn't start laying eggs as quickly they think appropriate.   Our strongest hive had many drone cells 10 days ago, but are there enough from other hives for a successful mating flight?

As I've found out with seedlings over the decades, you can't rush nature.   It helps to get a little jump-start with the greenhouse, but trying to move nature's time-table up by a month isn't in the cards.  Once again it all comes down to patience, which I may learn eventually!

Candy Boards - Feeding Bees

Candy boards are a great way to feed the bees in your hives without feeding all of the bees in the neighborhood.    The above video from Brush Mountain uses cooked fondant, which is what we have been doing successfully for two years now -- we just poured the fondant into paper plates and placed those on top of the frames.  We had pollen patties in the fridge, not pollen substitute in powder form, and experimented with putting pieces of that in with the fondant, but the bees never seemed interested in eating that.   We were hesitant to leave the remaining pollen in the hive as pollen patties have a reputation for attracting small hive beetles.   While we don't have much of a problem with SHB in the city, but we do in our out-yards.   Some of the blogs I've read about them attracting SHB state that they simply provide another place for the critters to hide.  

Fondant is all well and good when cooking for a small number of hives, but when I don't have time to cook for us, I certainly don't have time to cook for our winged friends.   Hubby cut down some of the shallow hive bodies that we had and has started making candy boards as described in the video below.

 

The thing we like about this kind of candy board is, of course, not having to spend 30 minutes boiling syrup followed by another 30 minutes cleaning the kitchen.   The wire bottom also allows more bees to feed at one time.  We also know that every batch of fondant turns out differently -- see previous blogs -- and I've had one batch turn to rock while my back was turned and another batch turn into a gooey mess while sitting in the fridge.   Softer fondants are easier for the bees to digest but are also hygroscopic -- hence the mess in the fridge.  With the humidity we have here in the south, we are concerned about sticky goo damaging the wood and trapping bees if we use the method in the first video.   We'll let you know how these wire-bottom boards work out.  

We'll add some pollen to the candy board to get some brood started in our bee engines - our city hives.   The bees in the city and out-yards bring pollen in throughout winter, but they may need a little more to start producing brood.   With our crazy weather, it's hard to know when to do this.  We don't want to start too early as brood gives the bees one more thing to keep warm when temperatures drop, but we don't want to wait too long either.   We really want to build up our numbers this spring and maybe have some queens to sell to offset some of the costs of starting up our apiary.   We're going to use a Nicot System to get some queen cells started and hopefully save some time on getting new Nucs started as well as adding a revenue stream.  

It's still winter, but it feels like spring, and this is always a time of year that I find it almost impossible to be patient.   The daffodils are pushing up in the city and even some day lilies are sprouting new leaves.  It was below 20 degrees two weekends ago, over 70 degrees last weekend, and stormy this weekend.  Planting seeds this early is usually pointless, but I'll probably do it anyway.  I usually do.  When the sun is shining like it is right now, I just want to hurry spring along and get those home-grown tomatoes started!   I'll try, once again, to temper enthusiasm with some common sense and not bring more harm than help to the bees and trees in our care!