Brian Shaffer

Despite our best wishes for our two nucs, one failed. The other one was doing very well and we moved it back into a full size 10 frame box during the first weekend in July. We are continuing to feed it and two of our other hives that seemed to be full of bees and shy on stored resources. On Wednesday, July 6, Michelle was checking bees, watering plants, and went to feed the three hives that needed food and one hive swarmed in front of her. This hive is called Juliet. We are in the middle of drought conditions with no significant rain in over a month. The cause for the swarm is unclear. We thought maybe the queen opted to leave because of the lack of resources. So we ordered and picked up a new Italian queen and opted to examine the hive during our weekend inspections. Saturday came and we were joined by Sherri, Kathy, and Elizabeth, the latter two of which were completely new to beekeeping. Our first order of the day was to inspect Juliet. Despite having swarmed, we found that Juliet was still chock full of brood, bees, and had a goodly amount of stored honey (see images). We installed the new queen and set about checking our other hives. Our one remaining Saskatraz queen still appears to be doing very well and is very productive with a good laying pattern. All the other queens also seem to be doing just fine with their royal duties. A few patterns were apparent in our inspections. Despite the drought and apparent lack of wildflowers, all of the hives seemed to be doing a good job of accumulating nectar and making honey. Pollen was not in short supply, either. With the exception of just one hive, all of the hives seemed to be of good disposition and not terribly defensive. We saw no live hive beetles and only a handful of dead ones that had been trapped in oil traps or on Swiffer sheets. We saw only one wax moth and no spiders. Examination of the brood revealed only a couple of empty queen cups, plenty of female brood, and virtually no drone brood. As a bonus, we even managed to pull a few frames of honey. As for the swarm bees, we know exactly where they are and there doesn't seem to be much we can do about them. They are about 20 feet up (inset photo) on a dead tree limb and have started building comb on the tree. Currently, we have no way to access the bees safely.

June was a busy month for us in Argyle. The last major rainfall event was on June 3 and other than a couple sprinkles after that, we have been, and continue to be very dry. As a result, the country flowering population has dwindled considerably. I know from speaking with some other members that their bees are doing quite well and socking away the honey, but I suspect most of those folks are benefiting most from nicely watered lawn and garden situations. The club's honey extractor is being utilized. While we enjoy the honey, we have our bee hives for the purpose of a tax exemption and so maintaining hives is more important than harvesting honey. With the current dearth situation, we may not be getting much in the way of honey this year. Most of the wildflowers on our property are not blooming and the vitex (6 plants) that we planted and that bloomed so nicely early on has gone to seed and isn't being much help either, despite having blooms until late in the summer last year. We had a lot go on with the hives. We had 3 weak hives that we were trying to get established. All three were overrun with hive moths in short order. That was sad and depressing as nobody wants to lose a hive. We took too more hives down to nucs as we were afraid that they might eventually succumb as well and we started feeding syrup to the nucs. As of our last check 10 days ago, both of the nucs seem to be doing well and we may be able to expand back to full hive status as long as we continue with the supplemental feeding. Two of our larger hives were also in trouble. The queens were laying and the population looked good, but they were not able to create much in the way of stored food. We put them on supplemental feeding as well. Four of our hives seem to be doing well as of last check and are putting away extra resources. These all have honey supers on them but whether we get the honey or they use it is still yet to be determined. Of the hives doing well, one hive is a beautiful example of hive management, and a lot of good luck, maybe more on the good luck. It was started from a split early in the year and started with brood including queen cells, but no queen. Over the next few weeks, we added to it two hives that were weak and queenless. A queen was successful in emerging, mating, and returning and is generating a lot of brood. This is something of a Frankenstein hive, but is also quite the survivor with good honey stores. Two of the hives we lost were splits that we queened with Saskatraz queens. However, the third, established hive we put a Saskatraz queen into is doing absolutely great. She is producing a lot of brood and well patterned. This hive is one of the ones with a surplus of honey as well. At the end of June, we also inherited a beautiful top bar style hive. This is our first experience with this type of hive, but it came to us healthy and with a strong queen. So we come into July with seven full hives and two nucs and hopefully will finish July with nine full hives...

Well, May turned out to be quite interesting. By our 2nd inspection, all of our hives but one had managed to swarm. However, we had more queen cells created than we have ever seen before with some hives producing as many as eight. Some hives managed to have no queen cells or had an apparent failure to requeen on their own and so we did a lot of hive management. We were fortunate to have the help of several mentees (Ryan, Nick, Taylor, and Andy) and two agri-tourists (Chloe and John). We had enough queen cells on frames with brood that all 7 hives needing queens that were deficient in queen cells received 2-4 queen cells each (whatever was on a single frame) and we created 3 new nucs. Along the way, we split two hives and we recombined two weaker hives. By our 2nd inspection, we found that four hives still had not successfully requeened and one hive that had been previously noted to have a weak queen (the hive that didn't swarm) was deemed too weak to continue. So we ordered 3 Saskatraz queens and added them into two hives and did a coup against the weak queen and requeened that hive. Two out of the three nucs had successfully queened and we integrated the nucs into the remaining two queenless hives. Why Saskatraz bees? We had never tried them previously. We had used Italians, Golden Cordovans, and Buckfast bees. For whatever reasons, our Italians had been good producers but had a bad temper over time. The Cordovans were terribly gentle bees and were not very hearty. The Buckfast also were not terribly hearty for us. So, based on the marketing, the Saskatraz aren't supposed to be very aggressive and are supposed to be good producers. This will be interesting to see how they do. The flow is certainly well underway in Argyle. As of our last inspection, all of the hives seemed to be packing in the nectar and a goodly amount of pollen. We are hoping that with things settling down after the swarms and getting all the hives squared away with new queens that the bees will go into full production of brood and honey. To help them along the way, the privet trees we planted have started to bloom and our 4 vitex budded out beautifully and started to bloom. Bees are greedily taking advantage of both...

Busy time of year and so this blog is a bit late. April showers failed to bring May flowers as we were in a bit of a drought in April. What little rain we did get did help get the local wildflower population going, but not what we were hoping to see had we gotten sufficient rain. For us, the flow is more of a trickle rather than a flood. Now that May has started, the rains have come and we are hopeful that resources will be come more available very soon. We started off April with 11 hives, sold one, and then things got really interesting. In doing inspections early in the month, we discovered that two hives had swarmed, leaving behind a goodly amount of brood, nurse bees, and capped queen cells, lots of capped queen cells. With the help of Nick, Sara, and Ryan, we did inspections, added honey supers to hives that were in good shape, moved resources between some hives, and did several splits. We finished off the first inspections with 11 hives, two of which had or had been given frames with capped queen cells, and three nucs that were set up each with at least one frame of brood, one frame of brood with a couple of queen cells, two frames of honey/nectar, and a drawn out frame for expansion. Things were looking good. End of the month inspections were not as promising. We had another hive depleted due to swarming. This swarm apparently ended up in our neighbor's tree about 20 feet up and another DCBA member was able to successfully capture it. Only one of the two split hives with queen cells was queen-right and there was no indication any of the nucs were queen-right despite queens having hatched. We combined the hive that had swarmed (but that had capped queen cells) with the remaining hive that wasn't queen-right in hopes of one of the queens surviving and saving the combined hive. Otherwise, we may be purchasing queens. Of the remaining strong hives, most seem to be putting away some surplus nectar. The honey supers are being put to use. With a bit of luck, we will be maintaining 10 hives which is about ideal for our situation.

It has been a rather dry spring so far and we have been waiting on the flowers to really start blooming and the nectar flow to really get going. Finally, the blooms are starting, but very slowly where we have our hives in Argyle. Michelle and I were lucky to have the benefit of two mentees, Shawn and Nick join us for hive inspections. I think they have gotten to see more than they expected. Wanting them to benefit from seeing as much as possible, we started with our largest hives and went from there. Of course that benefits us as well as many hands make for light work. All of the hives inspected on the first day seemed to be doing quite well in terms of being queen-right, good laying patterns, sufficient brood, and moderate stockpiles of food (honey/syrup). While we had been feeding occasionally through the month of March, hives with good stores of honey or syrup had their feeders removed and given honey supers with queen excluders. We thought that the excluders were going to be necessary as all of our queens were laying throughout the hives (most were either two deeps and a medium or one deep and two mediums). We were in the process of deciding which hive to do next when we spotted Alpha hive swarming, literally pouring out of the reduced entrance on the front. We tried tanging which seemed to have no influence on the bees' behavior and we opted to inspect the hive (comprised of two deeps) and see what we had left. We had brood and capped queen cells in both deeps along with quite a few bees in each and we separated the two deeps (walk away split) creating their own hives and gave them feeders of syrup....hoping the remaining attendees and brood will bring the queens to fruition and that the queens will be successful in mating. As expected, we found no remaining queen. Day 2 Nick and I inspected the last 3 hives. Bravo hive was interesting and needed some help. We ended up borrowing capped honey/syrup from one hive with a surplus to supplement Bravo that was LOADED with brood and very little stored food. It still amazes me how hives can develop so differently despite being in close proximity and with similar access to resources. Bravo was also given a feeder with syrup and we will inspect it again in a couple of weeks to see if it is managing to bring in sufficient nectar on its own and if so, be taken off the supplemental feeding. Most of the hives were generally in good shape given the conditions we have been having. We did take the opportunity with this first full inspection of the year to look at the wooden ware and switch out boxes in need of repair with others in better shape. We have just had some more rain and more is on the way. Hopefully, the flowers will be in full bloom soon...

I hope everyone's bees have come through the winter cold snaps so far and are doing well. Earlier this month during some brief warm periods, we managed to get into all of our hives and check to make sure that all was in order. With 11 hives, it is interesting to see how much variation there is in terms of food stores and queen activity. Fortunately, everyone was queenright. Some of our queens are quite prolific and some seem to be pacing themselves, by comparison. While everybody had food stores (and we are feeding, currently), the amount of stores varied considerably, but the one pattern that I am seeing this year is that smaller hives definitely had a lot more empty comb than much larger hives. The bees really seem to be stocking up on pollen right now. On our property (7 acres in Argyle), we are not seeing a lot of wildflowers blooming yet, very few in fact. The bees, however, are managing to find plenty of pollen and I was able to observe the pollen jocks at each hive, arriving at the end of the day in large numbers, laden with pollen. When we did our inspections, it was just far enough to make sure that the hives were all free of any remaining Apivar strips, to verify that we were queenright with multiple sides of brood, evaluate food storage, remove whatever superfluous burr comb and propolis we encountered from the frames checked, look for signs of other insect activity, and verify the condition of woodenware. Looks like I will be spending some quality time with a screw gun on a few of the boxes. At this point, we are waiting on the start of the nectar flow and replace medium frames (partially) loaded with simple syrup for frames of empty comb for honey storage.