Bees are Busy, and so are the Beekeepers

With plenty of bee-related tasks, weekend company, crazy storms (the tornadoes missed us, thankfully), and a full-time job, the bulk of the work has fallen to Mark.  I'll get calls that involve rapid-fire descriptions of whatever he's found in a particular hive or bee yard before he moves onto the next swarm, tear-out (Hi Jason!), or load of laundry.

Nice. ;-)

Mark & Jason Shedd, who needed some bees removed from his attic.

Friday night (5/6) we went to Mrs. Beatty's house to prepare it for moving.  Mark was stunned to find the bees had completely waxed out the entire hive (10 frames) and stored honey -- all without a queen, who was, ostensibly, left behind the tree.  This morning we transferred them to BB2 which continues to have a low population.

This box weighed A LOT.

We added medium supers to the three existing hives at the Barhams' Bee Yard, including BB2, with its new deep from Mrs. Beatty's house.  There was a question if BB3 had a queen captured in the large swarm that was added, and on Friday Mark found evidence that she's there: "she's going like a house afire, there's brood everywhere!" he said.  That's great news.

The big news, however, is that he left home before 6 a.m. on Friday to pick up two queens and 5 nucs from Harry Fulton.  He installed the nucs at Barhams' Bee Yard (see those single deeps on the far end?) and at Harley's. 

For the story of the queens, click here.

Swarms, Trap-Outs, and Combining Hives

Tuesday when I got home from work, Mark told me to hurry and change, and to grab a notebook because we had bee work to do.  We jumped in the truck, Andrew joined us, and off we went to New Hope.

As we drove, I took notes on his day.

1. The porch hive was moved to Harley's place.  Interestingly, we were unable to move them the night before because it was so hot they were bearding on the outside and fanning to keep the temperature down inside the hive.  Early Tuesday morning they were still outside, so Mark smoked them in, put on a vented entrance closer, and drove them out to Steens. He added a deep super, a feeder board with feeder, and oil. Their population is good and we'll check on them this weekend to see if they need more feed.

2. At the Barhams', he added a medium and removed the feeder from BB1, added feed to BB2 and saw the queen and eggs so hopefully their population will soon increase.

3. As for BB3, they got a healthy new dose of bees and hopefully a queen, thanks to a swarm call.  Jeff, "the big friendly guy" in New Hope had some bees move into the soffit on his house that day. Since it was rotten, he allowed Mark to tear it out to get to the bees.  He observed from his truck and was really interested in the entire process.  Thanks, Jeff, for the bees!

Mark took the bees, and had to wrestle newspaper in the wind so he could put the new bees on top of BB3.  "The lesson for the day is that wind + newspaper + being alone = need staple gun."  Fortunately he had one in the truck, but I would have loved to have gotten pictures of that process!

4. Our top bar hive caller from Monday night lives in New Hope, so Mark stopped by to see him.  He gave us the top bar hive he'd built!  Thanks, Mr. McGarity!

5. The other task of the day was a trap-out in a tree. Mrs. Beatty wanted the bees removed as she was afraid her great grandchildren might get stung.  She has a glorious backyard people called "Beatty Park" back in the day, and a feisty wienie dog.  Mark built a platform and funnel, and left.

That brings us up to the time we were all headed to New Hope. A family had bees in the upstairs wall of their house, but there was no good way to get to them either from the outside (siding) or the inside, so we were unable to rescue them.

Since we were out, we decided to visit the Barhams' Bee yard and Mrs. Beatty to check on them and see how everything was going.

At Barhams', the two sets of bees seemed to be flying out of their respective entrances. Their job is to chew through the newspaper, and in the time that takes, get used to one another. We hope the downstairs bees will accept the upstairs queen (if she's there) and we won't have to requeen.

At Mrs. Beatty's the weight of the bees trying to get into their tree home was so heavy it crushed the funnel.  Mrs. Beatty reminds me of my dear granny, who happened to turn 91 on the same day I met Mrs. Beatty!  (As an aside, we're not sure if these bees are going to make it. Mark visited them on Thursday, after the tornado/hail/straight line wind/thunderstorm episode on Wednesday.  They were still hanging on the funnel, soaked and cold.  He moved as many as he could into the hive and added a feeder. We'll see how they are tomorrow, after a day or two of better weather.)

So many bees!

She could be my granny's twin.  So sweet!

This is about the time Mark pointed out I'd stepped in dog poop.

A Day of Calls

Mark has had a busy day of bee work, due in part to yesterday's editorial. We've heard from neighbors who have bees in the wall of their house, an older lady who had bees congregating on the back wall of her house, and one of the county supervisors who had a swarm in a tree in his yard.

When they got there, they saw immediately that there were *a lot* of bees, relatively high up.

The box containing the swarm of bees.

Andrew is not fond of bees. Thus, there aren't any pictures of the process of capturing the swarm. Mark said he tried his best, but wasn't able to get all of the bees.  Even so, he thinks the swarm likely weighed five pounds total, and he got a majority of them.

Mark called me to talk through what to do, and we decided to try to combine this vast new swarm with Hive 4, which has struggled for a while. We've been unable to locate a queen close enough to the route Mark plans to take to pick up equipment, so this will -- if he was able to capture the queen -- get Hive 4 up and going again. To learn about combining hives using the newspaper method and bees' ability to shape wood, visit The Peace Bee Farmer.

Don't let this small number of bees fool you.

The box is full of them.

Mark sprayed them with sugar water to prevent them from flying off and ease their transition into the hive body. Obviously a few escaped!

Here is the final shot of the super.  "There were bees filling up half of the cavity where the frames go, they were so deep," Mark said.

As for the other calls, Mark said he and Andrew arrived in time to hear such loud buzzing he figured the entire backyard was filled with bees. When they got around the house, the air was full of bees in flight, swirling around a fruit tree. Then they began flying toward the woods. "The scout bees had decided on the colony's new home. We saw bees in a stream a quarter of a mile long, across the pasture. If we'd been there thirty minutes earlier we would have had a second swarm," Mark said.

He also looked at the hives at Barhams' Bee Yard.  The Kudoz bees (BB2) are doing well, though their population is small.  He saw the queen and eggs, so they'll be fine.  BB3, from the white oak tree, is queenless. No eggs. BB1 has filled the medium we added, and we need to add another super.

Tonight we're going to move the bees who have been on the porch.  Bees have to be moved at night when they've all come home, so that you have the entire colony. They came from a peach tree in Brooksville and have done very well. They'll be the first bees in our third bee yard, at the home of the Barhams' friend Mr. Harley.

Mark mixed up some bee tea, and soon we'll hit the road. Interestingly, he's on the phone with a gentleman who has built a top-bar hive he's interested in showing us. I've wanted to try a top-bar hive out by the garden, so we'll see if we try this free-form comb approach.

Third Time is the Charm!

Tonight as we finished supper, Mark got a phone call.  Birney Imes again. This time the bees were in Columbus, at a local coffee shop.  He said the bees were hanging off a sign, two feet from the ground.

Good-bye, quiet Friday night at home. Hello, bees! Because it was getting darker by the minute, we threw our gear into the truck and sped toward town.  At a stoplight, we saw our friends Jay & Gay, who seemed highly amused by our excitement about our "date."

We arrived at Kudos (which was closed) and couldn't find the bees anywhere.  Mark asked an employee at the gym next door, and he hadn't seen any bees.  I began walking toward a far corner of the parking area to investigate a small metal sign by the driveway.  Mark was in his truck, prepared to drive around the neighborhood looking for the swarm.

Then I saw them, covering the corner of the sign, facing away from the building and the parking lot.  Right next to the road!

Mark set up the bee box in record time.  He sprayed them with sugar water, and I held his atlas underneath them to serve as a slide.  With one strong WHAP on the back of the sign, he knocked the bees into the box. The put the extra frames in, put on a moving screen and top, and loaded the hive in the back of the truck.  It took less than 10 minutes.

We drove out to Barhams' Bee yard, and called Frances en route so they knew to expect a truck driving around in the dark.

This is BB1 (white) and BB2 (yellow), the latter of which arrived just yesterday. The lack of numerical order is going to bug  me.

BB1 had to give up their feeder when the new hive arrived yesterday, but we think there's plenty of nectar and pollen to be found, and they were going like gangbusters on Sunday. They should be fine!

The newest hive, BB3, is in the center.  We had to take this jar feeder from the hive at our house because we don't have any feeder boards available, and our order won't be ready until Friday (we'd hoped for tomorrow since we'll be in Alabama for a wedding anyway).

Tomorrow we plan to work our yard on Bee Hill, remove the feeders from 2, 3, & 4, add supers to those three, check to see if we need to add supers to the rest, and then take the feeder boards and feeders to Barhams' Bees on Sunday.  We'll likely take a few Back Saver 1000 hive stands too, to expand that yard.

We have just 2 more hive covers at this point, so if we get more than 2 swarm calls next week, we'll have to get creative!

We were alerted to another swarm earlier today, but it was on campus at the chapel, and the bees were about 35 feet up on the carillon tower.  Since it's Super Bulldog Weekend and the location was nearly impossible to access, we had to let them go.  I hope they found a better home on their own!

Another Swarm Call!

On Monday, Mark caught a swarm in Brooksville.  He was able to back up his pickup underneath the peach tree they were in, spray them with sugar water (so they couldn't fly away), and gently scoop them into a hive box.

He set them up on the second set of steps in our car port. The boards on top were insurance against the big storm that blew through Monday night.  The weather didn't bother the bees, as they have steadily drained the bee tea jar daily.

This hive was intended to be BB2, but today Mark received a phone call from local beekeeper Birney Imes. He'd gotten a call about a swarm in Columbus and had all the bees he wanted. So Mark went to town, found he could once again back up to the swarm hanging in a white oak tree, and relocate them to a hive box. He drove it straight to the Barhams', moved the feeder from BB1 to the new hive, and came home.  Once he relocates this car port hive, the Barhams will have their limit of bees!

Thanks, Birney!

Introducing a New Bee Yard and Hive: Barhams' Bees 1

We're blessed with fabulous friends who support our passion for bees.  Eldon and Frances Barham let us set up three "Back Saver 1000" stands on the opposite side of their lake in the middle of March (and I have an entire post of pictures to share about that process eventually). Remember that swarm call on March 22nd? Those bees ended up with lakeside accommodations, with both ag fields and one of the finest gardens I've ever seen near enough to supply their every need.

Waterfront Property for the Bees.

We paid the bees a visit this afternoon to check and see how they were doing.  Mark has fed them bee tea twice, and today the jar was empty.  He traded the jar for a round feeder he picked up last week at Rossman (that's another post too!).  But before we put it on, we decided to check and see if we could see wax, brood, etc.

So, here is BB1 as Frances and I decided to call it.  

Above the deep hive body there is a feeder board that has an entrance hole so bees can go in  at the top or bottom or the hive.  We noticed the yellow stain from pollen hitting the board as they fly in. The bee on the right is loaded up with pollen.

Eldon Barham, who really wants to get closer to see what is going on.

My dear friend Frances, who sat in Mark's truck to watch the proceedings. Eldon was stung once years ago and had a terrible reaction, so she's not thrilled with Eldon's fascination with the bees at this point, but thinks they're far away enough from the house to be permitted to stay.

Mark fired up the smoker, just in case. It was sunny but very windy, and the bees have stung him repeatedly both times he's come out to feed them.

A bonus bug sighting! This grasshopper was soaking up some sun on the metal cover.

This is the first frame we pulled out.  The bees are grouped around open, uncapped honey/nectar. Notice the yellow pollen stains on the tops of the frames closest to the entrance!

I backed up to get a shot of Mark working and was excited to see so many bees and some solid yellow, capped brood.

This is when we got really excited.  That appears to be solid capped brood, with uncapped brood just below it (the white mushy stuff is bee larvae!).  They're also storing pollen around the edges of the brood (the gold stuff on the bottom).  Mark said, "I bet this is one of our high dollar queens who swarmed off."  Often when a swarm leaves, the queen is older and needs to be replaced. But this one is doing a fantastic job.  I saw her before Mark did, which always tickles me. I love finding the queen! (If you click on any of the photos, you should be able to see larger versions of the pictures.)

It's no big surprise these bees are thriving, because everyone who comes to the Barhams' house is pampered and fed well.  Eldon wanted us to take home some frozen figs and corn, but we knew we weren't going home soon, so we had to turn him down. 

We spent the next several hours on bee-related tasks, but that's a story for another day, as we were putting up swarm traps and looking at a tear-out in someone's house.