Spring has sprung! There has been a great deal of concern across the U.S. with hives dying out for undetermined reasons.
We've been nervous, but have been lucky so far. We lost one hive this winter, but I'm attributing it to a young queen and the hive being weakened by multiple swarms last summer. The other hives look outstanding and I'm really excited to see how they do this year.
Above photos were taken 3.26.07 I didn't pull any frames, just wanted to do a quick observation. Lots of activity and noticed that they are already locating pollen; not sure where, but their legs were full.
These are pics of the same hive taken on 6.6.07 I've had to add 3 honey supers to this hive as they are working
over-time. What a difference in less than 3 months!
This is the time of a big nectar flow, you can bet when the peonies are blooming it's our first big push.
More bees, more supers A frame pulled from the honey super, they're working!
Can you find the queen? It can sometimes be like a 'Where's Waldo' book when you're hunting through hundreds
of thousands of bees to find her. The queens generally don't have the darker color or stripes like the workers/drones.
She is also much larger, with a longer abdomen.
The queen tends to avoid light, so she keeps moving down the hive to avoid being spotted. She completely
runs 'the show' in a colony, emitting pheromones to dictate the entire operation. The queen can also control what
type of eggs she lays, whether or not they swarm, and the temperament of the colony. This queen was from the first colony I started, so she is pretty old. A queen bee only mates once in her life, so over time she will lose the ability to lay fertile eggs. Unfertilized eggs become drones, non-working males. Worker bees (the lifeblood of the hive), are females hatched from fertilized eggs. There is no difference between the egg that produces a worker or a queen. An egg that is destined to become a queen must be laid in a special "queen cell" (shaped like a peanut) and is fed "royal jelly" as opposed to the regular diet fed to future worker bees.
This is the new queen that replaced the old queen pictured above. As soon as she arrived, the old queen was removed and hive was left 'queenless' for 24 hours. This allows the old queen's scent to leave the hive.
The new queen's cage is placed in the hive between frames to allow her scent to take over; if she were immediately placed directly in the hive without the cage the colony may kill her. I checked the hive 3 days later and the nurse bees had not released her from the cage yet, so I manually released her. I'll allow the hive to adjust for about a week before I check on her to see how well she is laying eggs.
This is uncle Martin holding the inside'frame' feeder, I'm doing the photos as we're checking the hives.
This is a frame from the new hive body we just This is a frame from the Russian Hybrid hive. Notice the white capped cells on
put on. You can see where they drawn out new the outside and top of the frame, that is nectar. The yellow capped cells forming a
comb and also some burr comb they've attached half moon in the center are brood cells. The Russian Hybrids are a bit smaller and
at the bottom of the frame. not as high production as the Italians, however they are supposed to be more resistant
to disease and colder temperatures. They are definitely more aggressive.
This is a full frame from the Russian Hybrid hive. I had two hive bodies on each hive this year to promote the development of the hives.
Technically, I could have put honey supers on and gotten some honey, but I wanted to ensure they had plenty of brood and food to
have a strong start in the spring. We fed the bees all summer with a mixture of sugar and water to help them get a good start.
This spring has been pretty eventful for the bees. The one hive had a 'dead out' this winter, meaning that the bees did not winter over. So, 2006 started off with ordering bees for additional hives and to replace the one hive we lost. THEN, starting on Memorial Day Weekend, the swarming began. Real swarming this time. So far, the Italian hive has swarmed at least twice, but there have been two other swarms in the one hickory tree as well. The pic on the left is a swarm that was just put into a hive body. The pic on the right is my Uncle Martin on a ladder at dusk cutting a limb to bring down one of the swarms.
Here are a few more pics from one of the 'Swarm Recovery Operations'. Everyone thinks that we're nuts, and they are probably right!
