Category: Pictures

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Update long past due…. supercedure cells

It’s been an awful long time since I’ve written here; been building a house near our bee yard, mostly on our own (literally); it’s an ICF house (Nudura is the product and Holdfast is our local distributor and technical support…. cool stuff…. good people!)….

Every spare moment it seems is spent on the build… and we are waaaaaaayyy behind where we would like to be, but that’s part of the journey right? (“How hard can it be?”)….

But, we went into winter with 8 hives, and have come out of winter with 8 hives; all are thriving, and the nectar flow is happening (has been for the last 2 weeks at least).

We were inspecting this past weekend, doing general checks, looking for queen cells, signs of laying, queen, volume in the supers, etc. Swarm signs are very low at this point (but we are watching); nectar flow is good; all hives have good queen laying patterns, and all looks well

But, one of our best hives (our blue styro-foam hive) had 3 of these:

Supercedure cells; hmmm…. she was a good queen too; maybe 2 years old?

Based on the capped brood and other signs of recent laying, she’s still active and doing some laying, but the other girls know that she’s on her way out….

We left 2 of the cells totally alone, and put them back into the hive; we took this one, and made a split into a small Nuc…. hybrid split… food, brood, THIS frame, shaked a bunch of bees, etc……making the small Nuc on the right of the picture below….

Now we have 9, and now we wait….

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Our Bees Have Arrived!

You are looking at 1 frame of bees (out of 8 frames) from our overwintered Nucs that we put into our Blue Hive today! Strong; we are very happy with how this has turned out, especially compared to the experience of installing (and tracking) packages at the Ohio State Open Bee Yard.

When we picked them up, Dan Williams found our queens, showed them both to us, put them into protective transport cages, while he transferred frames from his nucs into our boxes. Then he put the queen cages back into our hives, we strapped them into the truck, and drove them to our bee-yard (about 50 miles away).

We showed up with our Blue and Yellow hives (screened bottom boards, 10 frame, Mediums, 10 wax and wired foundation frames, inner cover, telescoping lid, and queen excluder between the bottom board and the first (and only) medium box).

We (Anita) had to reach into this mass of bees to let the queens out when we got them into our bee yard. (That was an experience that Anita was just fine at doing for us both).

Dan advised that Blue was probably ready for another super, so we put another Medium with 10 frames of wax and wired foundation, before we finished closing up Blue.

 

And this is Anita holding one of the frames in Yellow hive. Chock-full of bees; good pattern, good brood, pollen, honey, etc.

We installed top feeders with wire mesh so that the bees can be fed without bees getting out, 1 gallon of sugar-syrup each, we removed the inner covers, and put the telescoping lids on.

We have our Broodminder devices all ready to go, so I’ll give it a few days, then describe how those are working out, and how these hives are behaving. We’ll have to come back in a couple of days to remove the queen excluders.

The Real-Live part of the journey has finally begun!

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Today was planting day

Had an atypical day; temperature was up to 70 degrees (F); it was cold before today and will be cold after; perfect day for a December planting of bee-friendly prairie flowers.

We planted about 2000 square feet of:

  • West Virginia Beekeepers Seed Mix
  • Ohio Pollinator Oasis Seed Mix
  • Lemon Mint
  • Sky Blue Aster
  • Sneezeweed (Helen’s Flower)
  • Blue False Indigo
  • Partridge Pea

www.ohioprairienursery.com is where I sourced all the seeds; easy to navigate site, fast delivery.

I’ll take pictures in the Spring; they say it could take 2 seasons before the prairie really takes off; we shall see.

Man, I’m going to be sore tomorrow (lots of raking ground today)…

Bee Yard looking East:

Bee Yard looking North-ish:

Resting in the Bee Yard:

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Bee Equipment has arrived

Been putting together the hive boxes and the frames (and foundation) from Brushy Mountain; 5 boxes of cool stuff, absolutely no missing parts, but this can get tedious… 70 frames to put together….

Decided to paint the boxes different colors; that, and separating the hives should be very good at preventing any colony drift as the bees navigate.

We are going to try 2 systems; one of the hives will have a medium super for honeycomb honey, and the other will have the flow hive for harvesting any surplus honey; it’ll be a neat experiment. The FlowHive is cool, but you don’t harvest any wax from it; so if you want wax or pure in-the-comb honey, then the FlowHive is not what you want.

My fingers are a little tore up…. 70 frames with tiny little nails…. buahaha..

Brushy Mountain has plenty of videos online to help understand how to put those things together, but you might have to search YouTube to find them.

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Our First Bee Kit

Well, there we were at Tractor Farm Supply; Anita has been doing a little research, and wants to look at Bee supplies out there.

We bought a bee “kit”; has a smoker, lid, hive tool, 10 frames (with foundation), 1 deep box, and an entrance reducer (already assembled).

I laugh because on the box (trying to make this seem easy) is a blowout that says “Just Add Bees”…. I’m sure its not that simple, but the marketing cracks me up.

Sent a picture to the kids with me opening the box, pretending like bees are flying out of it (cause I’m so awesome hilarious)…..