Bee Chronicles July 2013

What a start to a great honey season. We should all be pretty excited. The nectar flow is NORMAL. I was hoping for more but normal is good too. My good hives have collected 3 supers of spring flow. My mediocre hives have one super and the weak hives have 0.

Updates on swarming at the Able Tinker’s green bees is Bees 3 Henderson 2. I bring this up because now is mid year swarming season. It is 15 June tonight. The nectar flow is pretty low. The bee populations are pretty high (hopefully). The hives are packed with honey, even if not completely capped. Your good hives will want to swarm. Go through them and kill (or transplant) queen cells. You don’t want to draw off bees because it will hurt your sourwood collection. You can set the bee’s work load back by placing honey supers that need comb drawn in them or pulling some frames out of the hive body and replacing them with foundation. I would not pull more than 4 frames. Two might be safer? Pull one frame with young brood and eggs, not one from the middle of the brood. Pull one with honey. Keep all the bees on these frames and start a 2 frame nuc. If you pull 4 frames, the second 2 should be mostly food, maybe a little brood. Shake all the bees off the one with the most food. You need those workers to keep the strength up in the loosing hive. In the nuc you only want enough bees to tend to the brood. As the new bees hatch some of the older ones will start foraging and you will have a nice nuc by the time the new queen starts laying eggs in 20+ days. This nuc should grow into a 10 frame hive by September.

The NORMAL nectar flow can be attributed to the mixed up and over lapping blooming periods early in May. When the cool weather broke some flower jumped out ahead of some that were dilly dallying because of the temperature.

I have been working without queen excluders. Some of my hives have gotten robust enough the queen moved up into the first honey super to lay eggs. I would rather have her laying eggs a little more slowly than move up. The queen likes the new clean comb in the honey supers. The worker bees like to keep lots of honey and pollen around the brood area. This combination leads to an expanded brood area. Without going to 2 hive bodies or sacrificing a honey super to brood you must manage diligently. My trick is to bottom super my honey supers. This keeps empty space between the brood area and the stored surplus honey. The queen doesn’t want to cross that are to lay eggs. If she has already laid in the honey super that I move to space 2 above the brood box, I make sure she is down in the bottom. Then raise the honey super, inserting the empty one on top of the brood box. As the bees hatch out in the honey area, the worker bees will back fill that area with honey. You have lost a little surplus honey while this process occurs, but the hive just used the honey to raise more workers so you have a neutral gain. Ideally you would have moved the nearly full honey super up before the queen started laying in it. A good gauge of when to do this is just as the two out side honey frames are filling up. The worker bees will continue to fill those frames while others start on the new empty super. You cannot dissuade the workers from doing whatever they set their little minds to. They will finish filling and capping no matter where it is in the hive.

I am starting to see color on the sourwood buds (15 June) on the trees in full sun along the road ways. Mine in the forest, I am having a hard time seeing the fingers that the buds will develop on. The bad news is: this sourwood season is starting a few weeks early. The good news is: with lots of water at root level there should be plenty of nectar no matter how hot it gets. The other good news is: with the sunny trees opening significantly ahead of the forest trees there should be a nice long sourwood season. The longest I have seen is 7 weeks. The shortest 2 weeks. Four to five would be about normal. What can hurt the sourwood season? Heavy rain and wind, or hail. Sourwood blossoms are fairly fragile so watch the ground under a sourwood tree for early blossom drop caused by the weather. Sourwood blossoms are 5 rows of bells. They bloom starting at the stem and a new bell opens every couple of days until the whole row (10-12 bells) is open. Then after a few days the upper bells are fertilized and stop producing nectar.

If you are near a mountain, or can move your bees somewhere significantly up hill from the starting location of you apiary, you can gain about a week with every vertical 100feet. If you back up to a higher mountain within 1 ½ miles of your apiary the bees will forage up hill without moving the hive. Long foraging flights will slow down the honey collection so this is where lots of bees in the colony helps keep the honey flowing.

If you do not have enough honey supers for sourwood honey, don’t procrastinate on spinning your honey out so you can reuse you honey supers. You want to get the capped spring honey off the hives. This will crowd the worker bees onto the open spring honey and get it filled and capped with the wild flowers that are out there. This will keep from mixing sourwood with spring flow. You can pull the capped frames from you honey supers that have some uncapped frames, and consolidate them in full capped supers. Then consolidate the uncapped honey in your strongest hives to get finished capping. On the hives without honey supers, place empty pulled comb supers or foundation frames (or a mix there of) to keep the hive busy.

Once your honey supers are pulled off the hive and stacked in the garage, remember they start drawing moisture from the air. You will want to control the humidity around the supers unless you are going to sling them out immediately. Remember what you were saying while you where pulling the supers? “Gosh, it sure is hot and humid out here!” or something like that.

NEXT: plan ahead!

Get ready to split you hives as soon as sourwood ends. When you pull off all you honey supers there will be too many bees for the space in the hive. Save these bees and put them to work while there are still flowers blooming. Commonly we call these weeds. You can add a second hive body allowing the colony collect winter stores. Lots of beekeepers that say they are single hive body keepers really stretch out and put an empty honey super on to collect those winter stores. So they really are one and ½ hive body keepers. That is okay, but a full second hive body can provide that little extra storage that may be necessary to get through the winter. Also, if the colony makes it through to next spring it will be real easy to divide and create another colony. You can put a second hive body on a single hive body, alternating filled frames with not filled (or foundation). After a few days the bees will be evenly divided between the two boxes and you can split them. One box will have the queen and the other will draw a queen. If done early enough both hives should be robust enough to make it through the winter. You can use this time to even the population between hives. Just put a wet honey super (one where the honey was extracted) on a strong hive. Tomorrow the super will be full of bees. Move it with the bees to the weak hive. Place a sheet of news paper with 5-6 very small slits in it between the weak hive and the wet super of bees. In three days the group will have eaten holes in the news paper and be partying all over the hive.

Get your mite control program ready to implement. You want to knock the mites down as soon as you can so more healthy bees will be born before winter sets in.

Find time to relax