Bee Keeping here I come!

WOW. I was feeling so frustrated with my beekeeping experience so I just can’t tell you all how much I appreciate all those comments. They were all informative and helpful. Between these comments and the comments made by the state beekeeping advisor, I’m finally starting to be convinced that maybe there isn’t anything wrong after all. I guess I just expected I’d get more honey and between the fact that my honey stores are way low and my bees have a winter coming, I am doubtful about their chances of making it through winter.

One thing that is becoming very clear based on all your comments and help is that I got my bees and hives way too late! I didn’t even pick up my bees until May 8 this year, and even though I immediately installed them, it sounds like I missed a lot of the most productive time of the year. So Bill and the rest of you were right in saying I may have missed the main spring honey flow.

I took Steve’s advice and watched some videos on robbing. I didn’t see any of the signs mentioned as robbing clues in my hives, so I think what everyone said about my bees just having to feed themselves and their babies probably does explain why I’m so low on honey stocks. I do have the entrance reducers so maybe I should be using them, but since I don’t think my hive is being robbed, I will leave it off for now I think.

Glad to hear the state guy was right about the queen excluder. THanks Muddy. Also glad to hear you think things are actually going ok.

Eric- its funny you mention the strength of the syrup I use. My local “advisor” always told me to mix half sugar and half water, but the state guy said 2 interesting things: 1) that the 50/50 is suppossed to be based on WEIGHT and not volume, so filling the jar half full of sugar and the other half with water is wrong (that what I’d been doing) and 2) that I probably ought to be using 2 parts sugar to 1 part water (again, by weight) so the last 4 days that’s what I’d been doing. Also, since you are in my general area/part of the country, I do think your experiences are quite transferable to my own, and everything you said really fit what I’ve seen.

Bob- I thought there must be a better way to feed than just switching quart jars 5 times a day! I will look into the types of feeders you mentioned.

I need to learn a lot more for sure…Bill, your last post was great and very helpful but I’m gona have to learn about dividing brood chambers and rotating supers, but for now, your information is appreciated!

THanks all. No matter what happens this winter, I will try again next year and schedule my pickup as early as possible.
thanks

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So…a little good news today (I think).

In spite of my often-complaining comments about my bee hive, I actually spend a great deal of time just watching them and checking on them (without disturbing or taking top off). This morning I noticed a very big change in my bees, and one that happened in just 2 days. All of a sudden, about 1/2 of the bees flying in have HUGE pollen sacks on both legs! Just 2 days ago I’d say maybe 1 out of 15 bees had that. I assume this means something is blooming? That bad news is that the guy from the state told me the next big bloom we’d have would be goldenrod, and I’ve had lots of people here- including @Chikn who I really respect, tell me that goldenrod makes terrible tasting honey! But it doesn’t look like I’m going to get any honey for myself this year anyway, so I guess its good they are at least building up their own reserves (I hope!).

Anyway, even with my problems this year, bee keeping really is fun and fascinating. TOday is a reminder -to me- of the relationship between bees and the natural environment. Its nice seeing all those bees coming in with all that pollen.

I’m not sure if it matters what it taste like as long as the bees like it. Due to their low stores of honey they most likely will need all they can store for the winter months. Your hive sounds like it is healthy and only needs an adequate store of honey for the winter. In my area bees start rearing young bees well in advance (February-March) of the spring honey flows but that is the most likely time for them to starve because a large amount of the stored honey is going into brood rearing. You don’t have to open a hive to decide if they are running low. I would periodically go by the rear of hive and simply lift up. After doing the lift test you can get a good idea which is in need of supplement sugar water. I always attempted to allow my bees to go into the cold months with two brood hives mostly full of honey. If you do this it is unlikely that starvation will be the reason a winter hive perishes.

THanks Bill. WHen I checked about 4-5 days ago they only had the equivalent of one full frame of honey (3 frames about 1/3 full) So unless they REALLY get to work, I don’t see how they can make it thru winter???

Chikn didn’t tell you that goldenrod makes terrible tasting honey, just that it smells awful while it’s curing. I like it. Goldenrod honey almost seems to have a buttery taste to me. It’s the asters that make can give honey a nasty taste. Try to relax.

If they don’t collect enough for winter, then you feed them the 2:1 sugar water until they have enough stored. It doesn’t matter whether you go by weight or volume when measuring the ingredients because a cup of one equals the weight of a cup of the other. Easy peezy. You know to warm the mixture to get the sugar crystals to dissolve completely, right?

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Not exactly.

The main thing, though, is to measure your water separately, not to fill a jar part way/halfway with sugar and then the rest of the way with water, because then you’ll wind up with a lot more water in the jar than sugar.

As far as getting them fed for winter, with a decent feeder and fairly warm weather a strong hive can store away everything they need for winter (even if they’re starting from zero) in less than a week. Just feed your syrup thick and get a feeder you can keep full 24-7, and they’ll have 40 lbs of sugar (plus the water weight) stored away in a week. In Tennessee that should comfortably get you through the winter.

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I have eaten honey from wild bees that was very dark and had been stored in old dark comb and I still liked it , maybe better than the light honey that every one wants.

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As always, great tips! I do heat my water for easier dissolving, but I also have been doing what @cousinfloyd just said not to do: ie, I have been filling my jar 2/3 with sugar and then adding hot water to finish filling it. SO maybe it has been too watery. I’m sorry I misunderstood Phil, but I’ve read in other places that goldenrod does have a negative effect on taste, so I’m glad some of you disagree and that it might not be true. I did mention this to the state AG bee inspector and he said he hears that all the time (Goldenrod makes bad tasting honey) but he disagrees as well.

I do want my bees to build stores for winter, but so far even when I feed 4-5 jars a day to my one hive, the honey (or syrup) inside hasn’t gone up. That’s why I asked in an earlier post where it all goes. A gallon per day for 5 days in a row seems like a lot of syrup and its hard to believe they are just consuming all that…but they must be since the amount of on-hand honey hasn’t gone up.

Anyway, thanks for the help. This is still a fun and fascinating hobby.

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The weight of sugar and water are pretty close, so you can just use equal parts of each by volume to get a 1:1 syrup. But that does NOT mean fill the jar 1/2 full of sugar and then add water to make it up to the top. There is a lot of air space in dry sugar, so if you do that you will be getting something like a 1:1.5 mix. Try adding 2c of sugar to 2c of water and see how much syrup you get, it’s not 4c. 2/3 a jar of sugar might be close to getting a 1:1 but it’s easy to do some measuring and get it exact (if you haven’t).

I will soon be measuring again for the 2:1 mix, I just forget year to year exactly where on the jar the level is for 2:1. Key thing in the fall is not to be giving them too much water with the syrup because it slows down how fast they can dry it down.

If needed, you can also make bee “candy” and put it on top of the hive for winter feeding. Again, a bunch of videos online on how to make it, shape it and present it so that the bees can use it over winter.

Thanks for clearing that up. I hadn’t thought of the possibility of someone making that mistake, but I’m sure that more than one person has.

The simple point, as Steve said, is to weigh or measure the sugar and water separately, and that’s all one really needs to know, but for understanding, if you think of honey as a 4:1 sugar syrup (and it’s actually a little thicker than that), and you figure that honey weighs about 23 oz/pint (which, again, is a low end figure) – water, of course, weighs 16 oz/pint, which means a pint jar holds 16 fl oz – then you’d need more than 18.4 oz of sugar to mix up a pint of sugar syrup as thick as honey. That means there’s more sugar in a pint jar of sugar syrup mixed up as thick as honey than in a full pint of dry sugar. My guess is that if you were to fill up a jar 2/3 of the way with sugar, and then top it off with water (assuming you dissolved the sugar), you wouldn’t even have a syrup as thick as 1:1.

Something else to consider is that if you feed 5 lbs of sugar per week for 8 weeks (40 lbs total), you’re likely to have a lot less in the way of stores at the end of those 8 weeks than if you feed 40 lbs all in one week. How thick the syrup is supposedly influences the degree to which the bees are inclined to use the sugar up by building comb, raising brood, etc. vs. storing it away, but the bees (depending also on the bees’ genetics and the size of they colony) are also going to be a lot more cautious in expending resources when they’re “unemployed” than when the “money” keeps coming in. So even if you feed all 40 lbs of sugar the first week and they have access to it for the next 7 weeks, they won’t use it up as fast as if there’s an artificial (sugar) nectar flow for 8 continuous weeks. Just be very careful you don’t starve them. Here in NC, and I’m sure in TN, too, it’s easy to starve bees in July and August if you’re not careful. Three frames 1/3 full each is a very minimal reserve, especially for a really populous colony.

What color is it? A deep gold is golden rod, a medium yellow is aster. If they are bringing in GR you will smell it at the entrance, well used sweat sox, you’ll not smell aster as much. GR honey needs to set for a month before use, like goldrush apples, so as to clear the smell, the honey is very acceptable. As Muddy said, A quart of aster honey can ruin a barrel of good honey. If you are seeing 2-4’ tall plants in pastures/roadsides covered in white or purple flowers, that’s asters. They are just starting here.

Easy way to get 2/1 sugar syrup. Sugar is sold in 4# bags. A gallon of water is 8#. Every gallon of water gets 4 bags of sugar. 2/1.

Lets remember some other math. A package cost$130. To get 40# stored sugar(you won’t, you have Italian bees and they’ll brood till the food’s gone and they starve in Nov.) you’ll need to feed at least 80# of sugar. Bees will eat 20 and make brood out of 20. That’s 20 4# bags of sugar at $1.80 per; about $40, add meds about $10, labor to wrap 2hrs @ $10 per $20, materials $10, 75% chance that they’ll starve, or mite, or freeze because the lid blew off…You have time, labor, material, etc. all on a 25% chance they’ll live through the winter strong enough to make it through May…let them protect the hive till Nov. from wax moths, then on a nice, sunny Sat. after you’ve sang Rocky Top for the 30th time, go dump them out and put your equipment in the barn. You won’t worry about having enough winter stores, or if the meds worked on the mites, or the top blew off, just remember to order early 3# packages asap in the spring.

The next spring if anyone cares, you raise your bees w/o chemicals.:smile:

This isn’t aimed at you, Kevin, it’s something to think about for everyone who tries to overwinter bees north of Georgia. Is it worth your time and energy to winter bees? I’ve keep bees long enough to know 25% is the best you ever get wintering and then you have that mess to clean in the spring from the deaders. I had 400 and I started 400 new colonies every year, 2 frames of brood and a new queen for every box. Just fuel for thought.

In case anyone is interested, the Krogers in my region have 4# bags of sugar on sale for 99 cents a bag this week when purchased in groups of three, mix or match with some other items.

WOW! What a great deal. Believe it or not, just last night I bought fifty pounds of sugar. I paid $4.99 each for five 10 pound bags. WE have Krogers so I’ll check ours for the sale you just mentioned. THANKS!

Bees are so strange. Today I took another look inside and to my amazement…there is more honey than I’ve had all year. Just 2 weeks ago I was at an all time low. And I thought everything was about done blooming here, and I haven’t been feeding. So who knows where they are getting this stuff from? :slight_smile: I will say that the last few days I’ve noticed lots of bees returning with both legs full of pollen. Mostly, its bright orange pollen on their legs but some have yellow. Interesting.

Another interesting thing, and this may be bad, is that my very top box on my 3-box hive only had honey on the frames all year long. But today I noticed each frame has a mixture of capped honey and brood cells with almost fully developed baby bees in them (I scraped caps off 2-3). Now, I probably still don’t have enough honey to harvest any this year, but if I did it seems like it would be hard to harvest frames that have honey and brood both. I took the queen excluder out about 3-4 weeks ago and I now wonder if that was a mistake. Since there are live brood mixed into the frames in my top box, I guess the queen obviously has been up there, right? any thoughts on all this would be great.

Look at it as a learning experience. I left my queen excluder on top of the 2nd box all the year unless a lower inspection was needed. You could carefully move the queen to the lower boxes and put the excluder back on if and only if you are confident that you won’t damage her. Once she is back in the lower chambers the brood will mature and then the emmpty cell will be filled with nectar/honey assuming the flow continues. Glad to here they have found a good supply of nectar. This should make over wintering easier. Best wishes, Bill

Bill- just wanted to say that you’ve been a big help to me throughout my first year of bee keeping and I really appreciate you taking the time to help me-.

I removed the queen excluder because the guy from the state who came to look at my hive suggested I do that- though I never really understood why. @MuddyMess_8a agreed with the recommendation and suggested it might help the queen access the whole hive and therefore have better winter survival chances. But hearing that you leave yours in place, combined with the fact that I’m now getting brood comb mixed in with my honey comb on most of the frames in my top box leaves me thinking I might take your advice and move the queen back down and put the excluder back in. However, I just can’t imagine trying to find my queen in one of the 3 boxes I have. One thing that everyone who has seen my hive says is that I have an unbelievable volume of bees. They guy from the state who examines hives every day, year after year, says he has never seen such a large number of bees in one hive. I wish you could see it…even a novice like me notices that I’ve never seen a single video online where the hive had anything like the number of bees I do. AND YET…I have more than 1/2 of my frames in the top box empty!!! Its crazy, but I suppose I don’t have a lot of honey because all those bees have to eat.

BTW…one thing I haven’t really ever understood: If bees eat the honey for their food, and honey is basically just the liquid nectar that bees collect from flowers (lets assume no sugar-water feeding), then why do I have so many cells filled with pollen? Do the eat the pollen also, or do they somehow use it to make liquid honey? I know this is beekeeping basics but I don’t quite understand the role and/or relationship between pollen and honey and why the bees collect the former. Thanks.

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Kevin, the queen and the rest of the bees need to be able to move toward the top in the winter. It’s not winter, yet. You don’t want an excluder to block the queen’s access during winter. Where I live there is a spring flow, followed by a summer dearth when it can be difficult for them to survive without supplemental feeding. There is another flow of nectar in the fall from plants that bloom in the autumn. In good years, especially when there is abundant fall goldenrod blooming, it can be a really good fall nectar flow here. Other years, it’s a bust. It sounds like your fall flow is going on now. Other areas in the country and in Canada get good flows throughout the summer.

Pollen is important. Think of honey as calories and pollen as protein. They need both to survive. Pollen is particularly important for raising brood. Those little bee larvae need to be fed before they get capped off.

Honey is more than just condensed nectar. It also requires enzymes from the bees to become honey.

Just to add to your worries, :wink: Mite loads can dramatically increase in the fall. Have you been keeping tabs on them? Going into winter with too heavy a load of varroa can severely weaken the colony. With a colony as strong as yours sounds, I doubt you have much problem with small hive beetles, even though they’re attracted to watermelons.

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Thanks for your warning, Muddy, and it seems to have been very timely.

Here is my update:

First, my honey supply has grown dramatically the last 2 weeks!!! I have probably 7 frames of honey- both sides are full on about 7 frames and more than half is capped. I couldn’t be more shocked or happy.

But just as I’m about to celebrate, I realize I may well have a big problem. I had just left my empty hive sitting beside my full one. The empty one only has 2 boxes and the sad little colony that was in it only managed to build comb onto about 4 frames out of the whole 20 frames that are in it. Well, today I looked inside it just out of curiousity and was very troubled by what I saw. Some kind of insects have certainly taken up residence and have eaten a lot of the comb and left behind a big bunch of stuff that looks like spider webs. Its possible it was some kind of spider- because there are some critters inside the pile of spider-web looking stuff and they look like dead spiders (sort of). But there is nothing I can see alive, and I’m not sure the dead things are spiders, and even if they are I’m not sure that is what has eaten the old comb.

I’ve seen no trace of any spider web looking stuff in my active hive and I’ve looked all through it last week.

Anyway, I thought I’d post a couple photos and see if anyone knows what I have. Also, there is quite a bit of stuff that I would describe as “Frass” looks a lot like what comes out of peach borer holes or carpenter bee holes, but I think the sawdust-type stuff is actually chewed up wax.

Obviously I’m doing lots of guessing here. And my photos aren’t too good. but its worth asking if anyone sees anything that tells them what’s going on here? Thanks.


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Look up wax moths. Even when supers are stored away the moth can get in and do damage. I put mine in a storage building.

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