When Mark and I arrived at the bee yard on November 13, we expected that we had at least five healthy and active hives remaining. We no longer had colonies in hive boxes 02 and 07, and we were nervous to see how hive 01 was doing. We had empty hive boxes situated on the hive 02 foundation, but we had already removed the hive 07 boxes from its foundation. (Click on photos to enlarge).
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| All hives upon our arrival. |
We took a look at hive 01 and found hardly any bees and knew the hive was lost. This would be our third lost hive this season, out of eight hives. This sounds pretty bad and I wish we hadn't lost any of the colonies, but in all actuality losing half of the colonies each season is not unheard of. We are anticipating that our remaining hives will increase their populations in the springtime and we will be in a position to split a couple of hives to make new colonies. Also, we may have swarms in the springtime, so perhaps we will get lucky enough to capture one or two and bring them back to an empty box.
Remember during our last visit, we combined hive 02 with hive 03, as we did not have a queen in hive 02. The bees now seem content and the population is doing very well.
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| Hive 02 bees have been added to hive 03. |
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| Hive 03 frame of many bees. |
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| Hive 03 bees. The queen is near the middle. She has a white dot on her thorax. |
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| Hive 03 frame of capped honey on the right and left. |
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| Hive 03 at the end of our workday. |
Hive 04's population and honey stores are great.
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| Hive 04 bees are very active at the top of the hive, as well as on the landing board. |
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| Hive 04 honey stores for the bees to eat through the winter season. |
Hive 05 has tons of bees and they seem happy. Can you spot the queen among the bees in the photograph below?
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| Did you find the queen? Hint: She is on the left of the frame. |
We are confident in the population of hive 06.
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| Hive 06 bees are busy coming and going. |
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Hive 06 bees sitting on top of the queen excluder. This "screen"
keeps the queen from moving up into the super. We would not want her to
lay eggs in the honey found in the super. Generally, we would not have supers on the
hives this time of year, however, we decided not to harvest the
small amount of honey in them. We instead gave it to the bees to
use during winter season. |
Hive 08 also has a ton of bees. We saw the queen in this colony during our last visit and feel comfortable that she is still keeping her bees well in order.
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| Hive 08 is full of bees. |
As a special treat, we brought with us a little sugar water for the bees. We placed them outside the hives in plastic jar feeders. These feeders are meant to be placed just at the entrance of the hive, upon the landing board. However, our bottom boards (landing boards) are flipped on the "tall" side so that we can use the entrance reducers for the hives. This means that there is too much space for the jar feeder to stay in place. No big deal, we just placed them on top of some of the hives where bees from all of the hives can visit and have a sugar drink.
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Hives 01 and 02 are without bees. We positioned sugar water jars atop
the empty boxes for all the bees to enjoy. |
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| Bees have started visiting the sugar water feeder jars. |
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Tiny holes are drilled in the jar's lid, where the sugar
water slowly drips down for the bees to enjoy. |
So far, our late fall and early winter season has been very mild. Our visits to the bee yard will become less frequent, as the bees will need to remain undisturbed.
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