Our Buckfast Queen

What crazy weather we have had in central and southeast Texas these past few weeks!  Four weeks ago, we actually had a pretty heavy dusting of snow.  Last week, we had several days of very cold weather along with a couple of hard freezes at night.  That’s not typical of Houston winters.  As beekeepers, we worried about our bees and hoped they would hang in there during the short cold snap.  But, we also welcomed the freezing temperatures to help kill off the Small Hive Beetles (SHB) that we found in nearly all of our colonies during our last inspection.

The weather during this inspection was great; it made it into the low 70s.  The bees had been busy stretching their wings and legs outside their boxes.  Each hive had a pile of dead bees on the ground, just off of the landing board.  These dead bees weren't able to stay warm enough inside their hives. During our visit, the weather was warm enough for the remaining bees to clean house and move the bee corpses out. (Click on photos to enlarge).

Hive 01 and hive 02 both house about a half box of bees each.  We were happy to see both queens and no SHBs.  They still had plenty of honey. Hive 03 also had honey and the queen was active.  She was even laying eggs!

Queen in hive 03 laying eggs.

But, hive 04 was a totally different story...we didn’t find our queen.  And, this was heartbreaking for a couple of reasons.  First, this was my favorite queen – a Buckfast queen that we had for about a year and half.  She was great the moment we installed her, keeping her colony very strong for a long time.  Second, it appeared she had been gone for a while, as there was an abundance of drones (usually kicked out by the workers before winter) and SHBs.  The odor from fermentation was extremely strong.  The colony was in very bad shape.  It’s now critical that we find a queen very quickly to replace her, or we will risk losing this colony in just a short while.

Can you spot the drones and SHBs in this picture?

A mess on the bottom board, caused by SHB destroying the comb.

Some good news was that our hives 05 and 06 were in nearly perfect shape.  We didn’t notice SHBs and we did not notice any fermentation in either hive. 

Hive 07 was just fine, but a little low on honey.  Because hive 04 had more than enough, we took a frame of honey from that box and added it to hive 07 to supplement.

Hive 07 queen.

Our hive 08 had a ton of bees, but also a ton of SHBs...the most SHB of all of our colonies. We did see our queen and we are hoping the bees will continue their battle against them.

Way too many SHBs.



Hive 08 queen with larvae.



Because queens are difficult to find this time of year, we plan to order a new queen for hive 04 from Hawaii.  She will be an Italian queen and we hope to have her in just a few days.