Bee Chronicles June 2013

Spring has come. It may be going.

The beekeepers’ dilemma is upon us. The bees have built up slowly. The flowers have been abundant.

The nectar flow is plentiful. The last day of frost missed most of us. 13 May according to the almanac. We had near frost the 11, 12, and 13^th.

Some of the hives are bumper full of bees. Some we hope will fill out before sourwood. What could go wrong now? HAIL! Last evening (21^st) I got hit with just a little hail. All the bases have been covered this spring. I saw on the news some beekeepers in down town Atlanta rowing a boat over to save their beehives in the flash flooding of the past week end. I live on a hill.

I have noticed large amounts of open tulip poplar blossoms on the ground. There are so many you would think there had been a heavy wind or hail. For all the beekeepers that think squirrels are cute… they eat tulip poplar blossoms. Or more correctly they pick the blossom and take one or two bites before they drop them. Currently there are way too many squirrels. Those in the know say there should be 2-3 squirrels per acre. We are at about 8 right now. I think there will be enough blossoms to share, but it is still a concern.

The weather pattern is just messed up enough that lots of blossoms are happening simultaneously when they should be happening sequentially. Here in the North Georgia Mountain I expect the black raspberry to start the honey nectar flow. 10 days later the blackberries start. 10-14 days later the tulip poplar. They are all bursting forth right now. If the weather stays a little bit unseasonably cool the flowers will last longer and provide a good full nectar flow. I still see tulip poplar buds the length of my last knuckle on my pinky finger (1 ½” long and ½ “ around). That is good news for a longer nectar flow.

Only hail (shred the blossoms), high wind (knock the nectar out of the blossoms), rain (wash the nectar out of the blossoms), or drought (dry the nectar out of the blossoms) can interrupt the nectar flow.

You should not have to worry about swarming unless you forget to add honey supers and the bees fill all their space. The trigger for swarming is a hive full of brood, full of food, crowded with bees, and nothing to do. If there is no additional honey space the foragers can’t work and the hive starts getting nervous. So, keep the honey supers coming. This may be a 7-9 super per hive year. Plan ahead and be ready to spin out honey if you are running low on honey supers.

If you have two really weak hives right now, neither one will collect much nectar. You might want to consider combining the two hives making one fairly good hive that might collect honey. Sometimes a queen needs more nurse bees before she starts laying eggs abundantly. Pull the frame with one of the queens brood and nurse bees) and place it in a nuc box. Pull one frame of honey and pollen (with the bees on it) and place it in the nuc box. Now you have a 2 frame nuc. You can place some foundation frames or frames with comb but no honey or bees (you could steel it out of any hive but leave the bees behind) into the nuc also. This nuc will grow very slowly but will keep the queen alive. You only need 1-2 cups of bees to keep a queen.

Once the nectar flow is over and you rob the honey you will have lots of extra bees from your strong hives. You can combine the queen and her little nuc with frames and bees from a strong hive to create a new hive. This hive will expand fairly quickly because of the warm summer weather. You now have a strong hive going into the winter for next year.

There are several ways to combine the nuc and strange frames. I like the idea of a “shook swarm”. This smokes and disrupts the pheromone of the loosing queen while masking the gaining queen. Also smoke the gaining nuc to calm the nuc bees and deaden all pheromone smells. The new bees will be quite disoriented when they are shaken into the new hive and they are engorged with honey making them more docile (hopefully). They should quickly go to work on the unfinished frames in the newly expanded nuc.

You could make the nuc into a full size brood box (8 or 10 frame), and move the new bees in a hive body. Neither hive body need be completely full of frames. You only need the total number that one hive body can hold (8 or 10). Place a single sheet of news paper between the 2 hive bodies and put the new bees on top of the nuc. Before placing the upper hive body, cut 3-5 small slits in the newspaper to allow pheromones to mingle back and forth. In a few days the bees will eat their way through the paper and join up. Now shake all the bees down into the bottom hive body, and place all the frames from the upper box in the lower creating one full hive body.

The month of June is about honey collection. But, there are many management tricks that you can implement while collecting honey. Most all these tricks require moving frames around. When you start disturbing the queen and the brood area during a nectar flow you will decrease the amount of honey you collect. Your decision might be to “manage” a mediocre hive and let the strong ones collect your honey surpluses. Things to think about are queen rearing for fall replacements. Having the bees draw comb in brood frames or honey frames. You can use this comb to rotate out old comb in other hives. You can encourage this hive to draw queen cells and then create splits into nucs to create fall hives. What ever you are doing make sure this hive collects and retains enough honey stores to get it through the next winter.