Basswood flow is just starting but the hot, dry winds will shut that off fast, clover is also doing well this year. Good mix of flavors, basswood and clover.
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Sounds like very light honey.
It’s June, which is when a long summer dearth starts here. That means I’m more likely to wind up having to feed them, than they are to feed me. Rain at the beginning of the week made dandelions explode into bloom everywhere. They like that pollen.
Maybe we’ll have one of those autumns here where they more than make up for it.
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Most fall honey here is goldenrod, tastes and smells like sweaty socks for a month then is fine, light to medium amber, and aster which as little as a pint will ruin a drum of good honey, tastes dirty, ranges from water white to dark amber, good to winter bees on. I had a yard that would produce a honey that was glow in the dark yellow/orange and tasted like apricots, Spanish needles, hit in wet Augests, that was good honey too.
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I used to order bees from Calvert apiaries in Alabama but it does not seem like they are in business anymore. Anyone else have Italian bees that are wonderful you recommend?
Wish I had known about the lightening bug and honey flow correlation when I had honeybees. I took the hard route. I kept a hive on a set of platform scales and recorded the weight daily for two years. Wish I still had the records they would be interesting to share.
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Hey phil. Listen, the hive I’ve been bragging about for so long because it has had so many bees and so many frames filled with comb misled me a little. The reason I was so excited was that even though it had 3 boxes, the top one had most frames covered and so did the one under it- the middle one. Remember, I put all 3 boxes on there before you taught me about “the chimney” effect. Well, I recently peeked into the bottom box and sure enough- just like you warned me- it has less active frames and comb that the other 3 box. Even the middle one has less than the top one. The queen barrier is atop box # 2, btw.
Anyway, my question (finally!) is about the chimney affect: Can it be corrected at this point. I don’t want to rob the honey filled top box this fall and then have the bees starve over winter because I took the fuller, top THanks
Quite impossible on this forum with my technical ability. Later this evening I’ll answer your question. I want to talk about queenlessness to as it plagues me and others.
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Kevin, To further reduce your colony, take out the bottom box and fill it with unused frames from the other boxes or the bottom box. I’d usually pull any foundation that’s not drawn and then put the top box on the bottom board and the middle box on top keeping ten frames in each box. Remove the excluder.
As usual, I’ve had a colony go queenless and a colony replace its queen, losing about 40% of queens, which seems to be normal anymore. To begin, I am assuming you have a basic knowledge of honeybee biology. As the really large queen producers focus more on packages and less on quality queens we, the beek, have to be more alert to queenlessness the causes and fixes. Most of the time, we aren’t the problem when a colony loses a queen, but on those occasions when we see our queen and point at it and she gracefully flies away only to be snatched by a dragonfly 6’ above your head or you push a few frames together and that squish noise you hear is your queen or you look and look for the queen and finally find her on the bottom of your shoe, the remaining bees are very capable of replacing that queen as long as they have fresh eggs. The workers usually will first choose a egg which is of the royal caste, so if possible, protect those first queen cells as the earliest hatched queen cell makes the best queens. One thing about producing good queens, good drones. Early in the season, drones won’t be sexually mature. To check a drone for sexual maturity, pick up a drone in between thumb and forefinger with the head pointing inward. Holding the drone firmly, squeeze your fingers together and roll the fingers to the tips squeezing poor Mr. drones’ abdomen until 1 of 2 things happen. A mature drone, a very complex structure will pop out, his penis, an immature drone and his interior fluids will pop out, repeat with another drone. If you get interior fluids, call and order a new queen, a queen produced by this hive will remain a virgin and you won’t get any workers, just more drones. If you get complex body parts, allow the hive to produce a queen. Just close it up. They know what to do. You should see new eggs in 21 days.
Occasionally you will get a queen from the factory that is a virgin. You will get only drones from this queen and she is referred to as a drone layer. Sometimes a queen will run out of sperm and become a drone layer too. Bee eggs have to be fertilized to become workers. The queen has a system of telling what to lay, fertilized or not, I think from cell size. Small cells, workers, large cells, drones. To determine if your queen is broken, study egg placement in the cells. Queens always place their eggs, singly, in the bottom of the cells.
Most commonly, a queen is lost and the colony fails for some reason to replace her. Many times the first signs your queenless is a mass of capped drone brood in the middle of the brood nest. Your colony has developed laying workers. On inspection all you’ll find is drone brood and no worker brood and eggs scattered up and down the sides of cell walls and multiple eggs in each cell. Unfortunately, as the drones develop, the workers enlarge the cells to accommodate the bigger drones, ruining the drawn comb. Since the colony believes it’s queen right, the laying workers now give off the same pheromones as a real queen, introducing a new queen won’t work, they will be antagonistic to the introduced queen and kill her. If you wish to save the workers, shake them off in the grass in front of another colony and let them find a new home. Store the equipment and scrape the drone cells off in the winter when the wax is brittle.
Early signs of queenlessness can be; no new eggs/brood, brood nest filled with nectar, stopped honey production and roaring, a sound the colony makes, a louder and more aggressive tone than the normal hum of happy bees when the colony is first opened. Capped worker brood produces its own pheromone to suppress laying workers, so if you run across a colony you suspect as queenless and it’s running low on worker brood, a frame of eggs and brood from a healthy, queen right colony will give you an 80% fix for the queenless colony with out the mess of laying workers.
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Had a big swarm up higher than I wanted to go for lastnight as well as wow… it’s hot.
Swarm in May worth a load of hay
Swarm in June worth a silver spoon
Swarm in July not worth a fly
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How true. I caught a swarm once that was twenty feet up in a tree by weighting the end of a rope and throwing it over the limb. I gave it s hard shake and bees just filled the air. It was a pretty impressive sight. The queen fell to the ground and soon all of the bees were in a waiting hive.
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I go up and cut the limb off gently with a hand saw. If it’s a real big limb take the hive up and tie it on underneath. Shake or brush the bees in the box and let it down. I have a 20’ step ladder.
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I should of called you!!
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Bob,
Wish you were my neighbor we would have got them down. A big step ladder helps for fruit as well. I noticed one hive of Italians are all dark black bees now so I’m not looking forward to lifting that lid and finding out what their temperament is like. When it’s hot like this leave the truck running with the AC on so you can jump in and cool off. You might have been right to leave them in this weather because they won’t be drawing comb much longer.
Agreed, after mid June, swarms are more of a pain than a plus. If they swarm in June/July or later, there may be genetic issues. And you’re right, its too hot!
I had some swarm out of a hollow pecan tree in the front yard in late August. I had noticed that there were a lot of wax moths hovering around the entrance at night. I wonder with the pressure a hive can be under these days if they will abandon a hive that is full of mites/wax moths. Wild bees used to stay in the same tree here for decades but now they just live foe a season or two and die out.
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Well, my weak hive finally gave up today. Actually, I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did. For just over 3 months the entire hive population lived and was able to fit on a total of about 1.5 frames They build comb that basically filled one frame up with (foundation?) comb and about 1/2 of the frame that sat up against the one they covered with comb. They stayed that way for about 3 months, during which time they actually did hatch new bees, However, they apparently died at about the same rate new ones were born, because their overall numbers didn’t seem to increase much, and they only seemed to work the same comb- never really spread out, increased, or even decreased for that matter. Just 3 months of almost the same thing- 1.5 frames full of comb and bees. They looked healthy and I could almost always find the queen so she was there moving around all the time. I’m still very curious what went wrong with this hive. Remember, about a day after I bought 2 packages of bees and put 1 in each hive, the bad hive had about 80% of its bees disappear. I’m almost certain that they went over to the other hive, because I’m almost certain it had MORE bees than what were in the package I put in there. But I say “almost certain” because I’m, well, only “almost certain”.
I’d sure love to know what went wrong. Local people have guessed that maybe the queen had bad genes or was in some way sick or not good. Others have guessed that the packages had been stacked together for a few days (that part is true because I watched them pick up both of my packages from a huge, stacked pile of packaged been in the little boxes) and becuase of that the bees in the 2ed package had “tuned in”/acclimated to the queen in the first package, so when I put each package in its respective hive (which were only about 2 feet apart) the bees left the 2ed hive and went over to the other one because that was where “their queen” was. Other guesses also were made, but none seemed to fit. If any of you have guesses, I’d like to hear them.
Now, I owe some of you a bit of an apology as well as some thank-yous. The thank-you’s are for all the people who have been so incredibly helpful to me through this whole ordeal. I mean helpful in general- not only trying to help with my “weak hive” problem, but just offering lots of advice and information about bee keeping in general because this was my first time. So thanks everyone who did that, both here. in private messages, private e-mails, and even some phone calls from some (you know who you are, and I am forever grateful for your time and effort to help me with no personal gain from doing so. SO thank-you.
The apology part is because I really didn’t do much to help the situation, which means some of you took your time and kindness to think about my situation and come up with some possible steps i could take to improve it. Many of your suggestions are seen above in this very thread, and some of you offered possible solutions via private messages, e-mails, calls, etc. But the apology is needed because I never actually did the things you suggested. Partly because the suggestions were so different, partly because some of them required a lot of work or time or things I didn’t really know how to do, and partly because I was just too busy to devote the kind of time and effort it would have taken me to start trying the suggested “fixes”, That makes me feel guilty toward those of you who did offer solutions for me to try. So I’m sorry if you took the time to do so and I didn’t even try all your suggestions.
Oh well…my other hive has incredible numbers of bees and hopefully will be full of honey!
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Bad queen… poor/low sperm numbers, low pheromone production, too long of a time between mating and the start of laying, lots of other things. The workers know, that’s why they all went to your good colony. Certainly not your fault or anyone elses. Happens all the time to fine beeks everywhere.
Learn from it, build your own nucs next year, very easy and profitable. most of all, don’t make the same mistakes next year.
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Thanks phil! Hey…on a different bee topic… I have 2 questions:
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How do I know when it’s time to add another box of frames to my stack? It appears that the 10 frams in the one box above the queen exculuder is pretty much full. But amazingly, due to the chimney effect you told me about I suppose, there are still a few frames inside the 2 lowest boxes that are not full yet. So, should I not add any more boxes until the lower ones are completely full of comb, or should I go ahead and add another box since the one box above the excluder is full?
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I am just dying to pull out one frame that is full of homey (out of the very top (3rd box in my case) box and rob it of the honey. Can I do that now or will it cause too much disruption at the wrong time of year? If I do pull 1 full frame, should I replace it with an empty frame to prevent having the empty space (which you taught me that bees will fill up with Burr comb. Or is it just a flat DO NOT ROB early rule? It is just killing me seeing that beautiful honey!!!
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You didn’t ask me but here is my method for this situation. Lift the top super off that is about 3/4 full of honey and place an empty one on the brood hive. Then set the 3/4 full one back on top. Take one frame of capped honey out for yourself and replace with one that is empty/foundation. Move the empty frames to the center and close hive. You get a sample of honey and have also done one of the most important things toward reducing the chances of the bees swarming. Keeping bees from swarming and making honey will also go a long way toward maximizing honey production. Sorry about butting in. Bill
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Bill, stick your butt in any time you wish. There is as many ways to keep bees as there are bees to keep. Plus, I don’t know any beek that won’t tell you when you are wrong based on their opine. The bigger the discussion, the better for people who won’t go on to make the silly and expensive mistakes we made.
Kevin, In my opinion, I don’t like to pull honey till goldenrod starts to bloom or its Ia State Fair time(mid Aug.). That way I’m sure my honey is below the 18.6% moisture level that separates honey from nectar.
If you really can’t wait, extract one frame and replace the wet comb back in the same spot. They will refill it quickly.
Questions for you:
Do you want to kill your queen? At this time of the year, keep yourself outta the brood nest, its too easy to get bees started replacing queens by disturbing the brood nest and you don’t know what your looking at yet anyhow. Sorry if that sounded harsh, stay outta the brood nest unless you need to be in there.
Are you expecting a honey flow now other than fall honey?
Do you remember what started the chimney effect?
Ok, verbal spanking over.
Enjoy a frame of honey, if it is real runny, you have nectar. When you harvest, you will cause disruption. At this time of the year, I wanted the bees to pack honey in every nook and cranny, I also wanted them to slow way down on brood production because good honey is slowing down or totally stopped and the bees they produce now will spend there lives eating your almost honey and sitting out on the front of the hive until there 6 wk. life is over. It will cost you 10-15# of honey to give your bees more space now. If they swarm, bid them a warm adieu and harvest ALL the honey out of the hive and wish the bees remaining good luck. This is situational ethics now, in the spring your ethics are to build a strong, bee heavy colony full of young workers to gather you a large crop of honey. In the later part of July, your ethics are to protect YOUR honey from robbers, internal and external, in the fall your ethics are for the bees to survive till a hard frost kills the wax moths and then have the bees die so they can be replaced with a new, vigorous queen and new mite and disease free bees in the spring from a nuc you produced. Overwintering bees is false economy from the late 50-60’s and is hard idea to kill. With the advent of mites and their associated diseases, why keep the mites and diseases alive on old bees in a winter situation. Take the $2.30/lb. wholesale honey, extract it, and let those old bees go. You’re going to loose 50-75% of all your wrapped, fed, and medicated hives anyhow, go inside and spend that time watching football. Save your money on feed and meds and use it for new bees in the spring. Order your bees Jan. 2, so you have them installed April 1-10 for you. Feed only 1-1 sugar water till dandelions start. Install them rain or snow and feed them. Enough for tonight.
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