Bee Yard Visit June 29

We’ve got a lot of critters near our hives.  This yellow garden spider is huge and a bit of a nuisance because I’m terrified of them, even when wearing my protective bee suit.  They aren’t aggressive, actually they’re a little shy.  They do feed on our bees, still we work around them in the bee yard. They’re a part of nature, too. (Click on photos to enlarge - By the way, isn't Mark a great photographer?  He takes these pics while in a bees suit and wearing beekeeper's gloves.)

 

Yellow Garden Spider.  This female's body is almost the size of a quarter!

It’s super-hot now and officially summer in southeast and central Texas.  The “feels like temperature” is in the 100s and with a bee suit on, it's like a wet sauna.  Here is a valuable tip when beekeeping in the heat: Do it as early as you can in the day.  Not only is it more comfortable for the beekeeper, but also for the bees. 

Early morning in the bee yard.  A little cloud cover was helpful today.

Mark and I are racking our brains a bit.  Our girls haven’t produced much honey for us at all this year.  We thought we’d been doing everything right, but something is amiss. After spending today in the bee yard, we decided that our problem could be that we are giving our bees too much space to work in when they aren’t collecting enough nectar to fill up the boxes with honey. 

We saw our hard working queen in hive 01.  She’s given her colony tons of brood and honey, but there’s hardly any honey at all in the top super. Otherwise, this colony is fantastic. 

 

We use our hive tool to "crack" open the boxes.  Bees add propolis
like a mortar to seal up the gaps between the boxes.

No luck with honey in the super in hive 01.

Great brood pattern.

Notice the queen near the middle of the photo?

New eggs prove the queen is doing a great job.

We also saw our queen in hive 02, as well as some brood. This colony has only one deep hive box and the queen is relatively new.  They’ve got some growing to do. 

 

Capped brood in hive 02.

In hive 03, we saw our queen in the bottom deep hive box, although be noticed there wasn’t much brood.  This colony has placed some honey in super, but not much. The top deep hive box has plenty of uncapped honey.

 

Hive 03 has a tiny bit of honey in the super, but not enough that we
will worry about extracting this year.

Uncapped honey in hive 03.

You may recall that we lost hive 04 earlier this year.  One day, we'll get this colony back up and working. 

There’s a lot of honey on top deep hive box of hive 05, but none in super.  We saw this queen as well.  She is also a new queen.  The colony seems to be in great shape. 

 

No honey in hive 05 super.

Removing empty queen cage, now that she's out among
her colony and working hard.

Hive 05 queen near the center of the photo.

There's some good news in the bee yard to report today.  A few weeks ago, we expected that hive 06 might not make it with the bad luck the colony has had.  Mark and I were sure we wouldn’t find a queen, even though we just added her as a “last ditch” effort a few weeks ago.  But we did see her, and she is laying eggs to boot!  She’s trying her best.  But even still, the colony was suffering from a terrible wax moth infestation. The bees were holding their own on about three frames.  These three frames seemed unaffected, but the rest needed to be removed.  We cleaned out the moths and caterpillars (they creep me out just about as much as the yellow garden spider) and we’ll have to come back soon to put new frames in place of the ones removed.  The colony also needed some honey, so we took one frame from hive 05 and another from hive 01 to help hive 06 out.  Hive 06 has 5 frames total now.

 

Hive 06 has a very tiny population, still more than we
expected to find today.

Hive 06 queen.

New eggs.  Good job queen 06!

Disgusting wax moth webbing.  The moths begin as caterpillars.
They're a little over an inch long and spin this webbing all around the hive.
We beekeepers step in and try and help the bees.

All the frames with wax moth webbing have been removed.

Hive 06 is clean of most of the wax moth infestation.
We've pushed these three frames together to give the bees their real estate.
We added two frames of honey; one from hive 01 and one from hive 05 (not shown).

We didn’t notice our queen in hive 07, but we did notice eggs, larvae and brood.  They haven’t done a great job collecting honey for themselves, so we hope they get busy soon.  We’ll keep a close eye on this hive to make sure they have enough food. 

 

Hive 07 bees and capped brood.

Hive 07 uncapped honey glistens in the sunshine. 

We also didn’t notice a queen in hive 08.  And to no surprise, there’s no honey in the super. This colony did have eggs, larvae and brood in the top deep hive box, so we think they’re in good shape.

 

Hive 08 no honey in the super.

Hive 08 nice brood pattern and capped honey near the top.

Hive 08 larvae.

So, Mark and I decided that next season, we’re going to feed our bees a little extra sugar water in late winter to help give them a jump start before the honey flow.  We are also going to try something a little “spooky”.  We’re going to see if the bees might be more successful using another hive box configuration; maybe only supers and no deep hive boxes, or maybe one super and one deep hive box.  Perhaps if we give them a smaller space to live in, then it may work out better.  We’ve got some time to plan it out.  We’ll be happy if our colonies are healthy until then.