Bee Keeping here I come!

Everyone has been telling me that that bees don’t swarm after June or July at the latest. Looks like you’ve shown that not to be true. I hope you get these, but from what I’ve read and even experienced myself, a swarm doesn’t stay in place more than a few hours. But you know bees so you know this. Good luck! Keep us posted.

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I believe people have been telling you that bees that swarm after June aren’t worth the time to catch them. Catch it for the experience, catch to strengthen a weak colony, but don’t expect it to winter. That’s barely a teacup of bees and are doomed because they won’t generate enough heat to keep them alive.

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Yeah I am worried about the numbers. I am considering adding them to an existing weaker colony. I’ll know more when I stick my nose In them tomorrow

Well I never found the queen. Hopefully she is in the box and the rest will follow. I caught as many as I could and left the box. I’ll return in a couple of hours to see if the others moved into the box

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I added a small swarm like that late in the season to a weak hive by putting a sheet of paper between the new hive body and the existing hive. The bees slowly chewed through and mixed in a couple of days. I suppose the strongest queen survived

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I believe I will try this swarm like that. Thanks for the tip.

They all moved into the box. City man that swarm had been at this guys house for 48 hours so I guess one never knows how long they will stay around

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I think they stay until they find a home. Just a theory but maybe a small swarm has less resources for scouts to send out and may take longer to find a home.

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cityman
Thirty years ago I got bees in order to pollinate my fruit trees.
I will say this… it is exhausting to see your bees dead (a deadout) in the spring after a tough winter. But when they make it thru, it is a joy to see them all over your fruit blossoms. Around here, we use mouse guards in September (some of us leave them on all year!) The mice will nest over the winter and piss all over and drive the bees out. The British make the best design that I have seen (with their design, the undertakers don’t have to drag the dead ones over a hump to drag them out.) see here:


Also I can only say, jump right in to a motorized extractor. You can convert a hand extractor to a motorized one if you want to save some coins. Hand extracting will just unnecessarily wear you out.
I also do cutouts all over the Chicagoland (when bees make a nest in a home or tree). You will get into swarm removal which are free bees and fun to capture. Don’t get discouraged by the hive beetles, mites and other enemy’s of the bees (pesticides etc.) When you see those blossoms covered in bees, it all becomes worth the struggle.

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This is my first year beekeeping so I know your pain. Its possible the heavy flow quit in July. I know ours did because my frames havent gained any additional stores since then. My mentor did an inspection with me last weekend and she thinks im going to need to feed my hives some bee tea in mid september. That should give them a bit more food to get through winter. Dont throw in the towel yet. Like any new hobby there are ups and downs.

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Cityman, you might want to check for signs of robbing, that could explain the lack of any increase in stored honey. I have a severe problem with robbing from neighboring hives (there really are more hives up here than can be supported). From the outside signs are subtle, what can look like a busy day with your bees could be robbers in a mass attack. Inside a bunch of capping chips on the floor is a pretty good sign that robbing is occurring, home bees will carefully remove cell caps robbers just tear them out and drop them. If it is robbers you want to stop it as soon as possible, otherwise your hive won’t have enough stores to winter over.

Mpigg, one trick I have seen (but never tried) is to put a late/small swarm in a box directly over a big hive. With proper separation between the two and with entrances pointing in opposite directions. That way the heat from the big hive helps out the swarm over the winter. Feeding in the fall and winter is a must for a small swarm too.

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I am ready to just scream, and should now call this thread “Bee keeping here I go”. I deeply appreciates all your efforts to help and I’m sorry I’m having such a hard time and complaining, but this is just CRAZY! Today I looked into my hive and there is almost no honey left at all!!! Only 2 frames have any honey at all and they aren’t even close to being full. But please read on.

Last Friday I finally got the State of TN’s beekeeping adviser- who works for the states and looks at hives all the time, to come and look at my hive. I was not impressed. Maybe my problem is just undetectable, but he looked at everything and basically his only comments were “Wow…I’ve never seen so many bees in one hive. You certainly don’t have a shortage of bees. I can’t belive how many bees you have and various other comments about how many bees I have- something I’ve often told you guys”. But basically he said that was a good sign and meant everything was healthy and going well. But even when he was here I only had about 3 frames with any honey and they didn’t have much either. I asked why I had so many bees coming and going and yet my honey was going down. He said not to worry, its probably just that there isn’t that much blooming, and that I should start feeding them sugar water. He also wanted me to take out the queen excluder…never really explained the logic behind that but I did it. I probably will put it back in. Anyway, all in all, he offered me no useful information at all and thought it was just normal and fine that I (apparently) have world record number of bees and less honey than any hive in the state.

I have read and thought a lot about what Steve333 and others have mentioned- robbing. It certainly could explain what’s happening to my honey. And there have been times late afternoon when I’ve seen a pretty big swarm outside my hive. But still, I think its just a traffic jam of my own bees coming back home. Today I looked very hard for caps and didn’t see any at all and I looked hard.

I’d also like to hear from you all about your thoughts on feeding. Based on that joker’s advice, I’ve fed like crazy the last 4 days. I have so many bees that- believe it or not- they empty out a quart jar of sugar water in about 1.5 hours!!! Since I’ve been around this weekend, just for fun I’ve refilled the jars about 3 times a day. SO they’ve had about 15 jars of sugar water in 4 days. WHERE DOES IT GO??? There darn sure isn’t that much liquid in the combs. Also, I tasted a little “honey” that WAS capped, and it actually tasted a little like sugar water. So what’s the point in feeding them if all I’m going to get is combs full of sugar water instead of honey?

Another interesting observation is that there are a lot of comb with yellow pollen in it on the first 2 levels of boxes. Also, there are TONS of brood and cells with eggs. So again, I have lots of pollen, lots of eggs, lots of larvae, and tons of bees…but almost no honey. I’m so discouraged but also just plain curious what is wrong? thanks

I lost my largest and what I considered my strongest hive this summer. The hive I assumed I would
Lose remains and continues to grow. I say don’t lose heart bee keeping is a strange and wonderful thing. Try as you might, the bees will make honey on their time when there is a good strong flow. Next year in the spring and early summer with a strong hive I bet you are surprised at how quickly they fill your frames.

Thanks so much for the encouragement, Mark! I guess I’ve just had a bad year. I’m sure I’ll try again next year. However, I think I’ll probably have to start over with a completely new package(s) of bee(s) because there is no way mine can sustain themselves with the tiny bit of honey that exists in my hive now. But that is ok. Thanks again.

I think your peak population of bees occurred after the main spring honey flows so now you have a bunch of hungry bees with no other options but to consume the stored honey. Feeding is your only option assuming you want to keep and overwinter them. An overwintered hive starts a massive brood rearing well in advance of these flows and they are ready for peak honey storage when the nectar is abundant. They will also swarm if you don’t keep the supers rotated properly. Sorry about your situation but honeybees have a steep learning curve as you can see. Bill

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@thecityman, Kevin the signs of hive robbing are subtle but once you know them pretty hard to miss. You can go to youtube and look at a couple videos. The things to look for are fighting between bees at the entrance, bees exiting the hive in a hurry (“like a robber” taking straight off from the entrance not coming out on the landing board to look around to get oriented). And of course inside the hive, look for chards/flakes of beeswax on the floor and tops of lower frames.

The chards of wax is a surefire thing, the hive’s bees would not just drop the wax they would save it for reuse; only robbers do that. Fighting at the entrance is also a pretty good sign, but it could be just a one-off fight; if there is a lot of it though…

The fact that there was a bunch of stored honey in the hive and now there is much less in a short period of time is also a pretty good sign of robbing.

Things you can do to stop robbing are: Throw a wet sheet over the hive during the day, this discourages the robbers, for the moment. Close down the entrance, way down if need be. The smaller entrance is easier for a weak hive to defend.

I have made some simple devices which I saw online. Basically a rectangle of 1/8" hardware cloth cut to fit the width of your bottom board, and 6 to 8" tall. With 4 pieces of wood 3/8" thick around the perimeter. The two vertical (short) pieces go on one side, the two horizontal ones on the other. I stapled and glued it together. It goes in front of the hive entrance, vertical pieces to the hive, horizontal pieces away from hive. It makes it so the bees need to crawl up to the top of this thingie to fly in or out of the hive. The hive bees mostly get it. The robbers are honing in on the smell of the entrance and pile up down on the HW cloth and can’t get in. If my description isn’t clear, go online and search there are a couple of sites with a full description.

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Nothing is wrong from your description. That’s the way things work. You have a heavy population of bees that also have to feed your tons of brood, but your nectar flow has been diminished as summer goes on. Your bees had stored up honey to use when times were lean. They’ve been using it for the purpose they stored it. There is lots of pollen to feed brood. So, egg laying is still heavy. The only thing that I’d say was ‘wrong’ is that the population hasn’t yet adjusted downward to balance with the diminished resources.

Where does all that sugar water go? Part goes to immediate survival and part goes into attempted storage so that they can feed themselves and their young. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a good fall flow. Maybe you’ll be able to pull some of that for yourself. Then you’ll probably have to feed them enough that they can store a sufficient amount to get through winter. Your inspector was also right about the excluder. It needs to go before winter. Otherwise, when the bees move to the top for food and warmth, the queen won’t be able to.

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Depending on how thick you’re making your sugar syrup the bees could be evaporating most of it away. Are you mixing at least two parts sugar to one part water? If your goal is to get stores built up for winter, then I think you should mix it at least that thick. Thinner syrups can supposedly help to promote extra brood rearing and possibly comb building, but – and I haven’t read your whole story; this is a long thread – if you’d like to see the bees store the syrup away, they’re going to need to get it as thick as honey for storage anyway, so there’s no point in you adding any more water to it than you need to add to get it to mix, just to have them evaporate it off again, and you probably don’t want to promote extra brood rearing at this point anyway. Big populations during the summer dearth – other parts of the country and world have summer flows in July and August, so summer dearths are far from universal – just means your stores get depleted faster (more mouths to feed.) The real question isn’t how many quarts of sugar you’ve fed them, because the water is, of course, worthless as feed. The real question is how many pounds of sugar you’ve fed them.

As for making honey, I’m in North Carolina, so probably pretty similar honey flows to you. We may have had similar weather this year, too. My bees basically haven’t made any honey since April. Normally May is my biggest month, but it rained way too much the first half of May this year. My bees almost always lose weight (i.e. eat more honey than they make) in July and August. June and September are frequently deficit months, too. They almost never make very noticeable gains in October. Basically there’s a 3-6 week period starting sometime during the second half of April when, if the weather cooperates, the bees make almost all the honey they make. The rest of the year they’re pretty much eating whatever they collect as they go instead of making honey or they’re not even doing that and they’re depleting their stores. Making honey here is all about having the bees strong when the honey flow starts in April. And if they swarm right before or at the start of the honey flow (which is peak swarm season) that’s very likely the end of any hope for any harvestable surplus honey that year.

Edited to add: From the very limited amount of this thread that I’ve read, I don’t suspect you’re dealing with significant robbing. I’m guessing you just have a lot of bees that are eating a lot and using a lot of feed resources raising more bees.

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When there is a dearth or I am getting ready for winter, I don’t feed quarts, I feed gallons. Look into very large feeders like gallon baggies, hive top feeders, internal feeders. Quart jars sitting at the front only invites robbers. You can get SEVERAL quart jars and put on top with a large hive top over them and reduce access from possible robbers. But in a nutshell, gallons of sugar water is the way to go internally and close down the front so it can be defended.

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Just a little more information. If you have a healthy well populated hive next spring they will in most cases make enough honey so you won’t have to go through so much feeding if any at all. In addition you could take off several pounds for yourself. Looking ahead if you decide to continue beeking I would suggest increasing your hives to at least three so if one does not survive you have two to fall back on. A simple expansion method is to divide brood chambers and the box without a queen will rear their own queen. I would not suggest the division this year and if you decide later to do so I will give more detailed information. Good luck. Bill