Swarm... of People

We had my favourite kind of bee meeting. The outside kind. I volunteered this time for the club to come to my yard.

The weather held off for us which was very kind. It was really hot though, high of around 30 and very humid.

We opened Hive #1, my booming hive, and the experienced beekeepers confirmed it hasn't swarmed. The overall comment is that it's a nice hive.

I wasn't using a queen excluder so we put one in. A half hour later though a ton of bees had come out of the top exit and the bottom. I was reassured it'd just take them some time to figure out how to traverse through the excluder.

Oh, and honey! I lifted the second super and had to set it back down quick. It was heavy. I guesstimate the weight to be 40+ pounds. So Dad and I now need to consider extracting some of our honey now. The advice is to remove a few frames and extract them, and put back the empty frames for hte bees to refill.

There was some honey filled burr comb mixed the drone brood between the honey boxes - as a result of no queen excluder in use.

The advice was to clean that off. Now when I did this in the past I'd virtually pick each bee off so as not to snarl them in the comb and squish them. They showed me how to angle the hive tool down low and slide it under the combs and run it the whole length of the frame, picking up the comb and then dumping the whole thing in front of the hive for the bees to lick up.

We loaded it onto a paper plate to pass around first and then set it in front of the hive. Would you believe two hours later that plate was clean and dry. The bees had licked every bit of honey off it.

Of course we'll have to come back in a week to see which side of the excluder the queen is on. That's when it's handy to have a chart showing the development of an egg to bee, showing the growth day by day. That's because in a week I'll be looking for eggs are smaller larva that are younger than 6 days.

We opened Dad's nuc, or I should say he opened his hive. The bees were just getting started on their second brood chamber. In the first brood chamber the advice was to insert blank frames between the middle established nuc frames.

The reason for this is to get the bees to build up the comb faster and the queen to lay in those frames. At this time of year, keeping the brood together for warm isn't an issue as it would be in the spring or fall.

We topped up sugar water on both nuc hives and then we congregated in the grassy area to have coffee snacks and lots of conversation.

Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. I was too busy to get many photos of the crowd but I'll upload those later once others email them to me.

Of course with beekeepers around there was advice a-plenty.

To Exclude or Not to Exclude - Queen Excluders

Four days ago I added a queen excluder and honey super to Hive #2. I also left them the hive feeder - but only because they must build comb in the super before they can store honey - so I'll keep an eye on that.

Then my friend Henry called. He's been a beekeeper for well over 30 years and he called to give some advice. Whenever Henry gives advice, I listen.

He said to take the queen excluder out of the hive, otherwise the bees will likely swarm.

His explanation was that bees don't really like to go through the bars of an excluder and so they won't - at least not at first.

The advice was to remove the excluder, let the bees move freely and build the comb and start to fill it with honey. Yes, the queen might go up into the honey box and lay a few eggs, but she'll stop, Henry advised, once the bees get that super filling with honey.

Then later, check to be sure the queen is not in the honey super and put on the excluder. Then the bees won't be able to resist going through the excluder to get to their honey above.

So I returned the very next day and took the excluder off of Hive #2.

I also thought I'd better do a really brief inspection on Hive #1 to see if they had filled any more frames in the brood box. The last inspection they had 6 of 10 frames full.

I didn't plan to do this inspection for another 4 days. Thank God I did check it!

(photo - adding medium honey super with plastic foundation to hive #1).

Their frames were chockers with capped and uncapped brood - 8 out of 10 frames. They were more than ready for their honey super, so I added it right then and there, leaving them with the hive feeder on top of everything.

I did a little googling around about queen excluders and like many things in beekeeping, there's lots of opinions out there about them. But it seems the prevailing opinion is that it's more of a "honey excluder" than a queen excluder. That nickname being given because the bees swarm and leave rather than go through it with their nectar.

This web site had some good information: http://www.beeclass.com/DTS/queenexcluder.htm

It seems queen excluders have a few different uses: They can be used as Rotating boxes to keep the queen below; they can be used to create splits - watch for eggs to see where the queen is.

There are 3 different kinds of excluders - plastic, wood frame and metal. The bees will fill the spaces with burr comb - I have a metal excluder and I was told it's easiest to freeze the frame and then bang it to get the comb out.

Then there's this whole other group of beekeepers who don't use excluders at all. Instead, they rely on monitoring to know where their queen is and what she's up to. I think this method is probably for the more experienced beekeeper. I believe rotate the boxes to keep queen below.