Bees: Sunday, June 12th, 2011

Weather: cloudy, low 60's, very mild wind, sporadic short showers

You wanted to see us in our HazMat suits, right?

Yesterday was raining all day and we decided not taking any chances on opening the hive and disrupting them. However we did go take a look to see what they were up to from outside of their hive. There wasn't much activity with a few bees near each opening drinking water to bring back to the colony. The nuc that was set up last week was surprising with bees going in and out. Seeing the activity outside the nuc made me happy because I thought the queen hatched from her cell and was commanding her worker bees to build a colony....WRONG!

At the first available moment on today, Jim and I suited up and decided to open the nuc first. Upon opening it we noticed a large number of drone bees. When we pulled out what was a full frame of capped honey, we noticed it was completely drained of any honey. All that was left was empty comb. The next frame was the brood frame and unfortunately even these were destroyed by marauding bees during the robbing. The queen had emerged but was quickly killed by the robbing bees. I was very disappointed but learned a lesson which was to never mix bees from two colonies in one hive. I believe they fought to the death immediately and when they were dead, the bees from the other hives had an opportunity to rob.

This is what a Nuc looks like

The next hive we opened was the Alpha Hive. The first thing we noticed after opening the telescoping cover was that ants had made a home in the cover. Last week we had put the legs of the hive stand in cups full of water to fend off any ants looking for a free meal. What we didn't count on was a very long blade of grass touching the hive which created a bridge for the ants. Crafty fuckers. After killing them one by one, we went through the lengthy process of pulling off the honey supers and were glad to see this hive was doing an incredible job at making honey. Hopefully the next time we're up at the house we'll be able to remove a whole box of frames and bottle some honey. Jim pulled off each box carefully until he was down to the lower brood super. We found the queen's cage we put in last week and the queen emerged successfully. We then began pulling out each frame looking for the queen herself or even a sign that she exists such as newly laid eggs....no luck. We then pulled out frames from the 2nd brood super and Jim did it again...he found the queen immediately and pointed her out to me. Last week when we installed her, she was on the smaller side and this week she was plump full of eggs. She was making her rounds laying her eggs in empty comb cells and the worker bees were tending to her. We were satisfied, loaded up the remaining honey supers and closed her up.

Empty Brood Cells on frame from Alpha Hive. It's amazing how uniform they create these cells.

The next hive was Hive C. The hive was calm even though when we removed the cover, a few brood cells were killed. We found the empty queen cage and again the queen successfully emerged. Overall the colony was functioning but we believe something is wrong because there were 3 supercedure cells that we killed off. Jim found the queen again quickly and she looked healthy and accepted by the colony. We closed her up and moved onto the Nasty Hive.

The Nasty Hive kept to its name and were dive bombing my face netting as we got closer. They're very protective and Jim believes they're Africanized. We opened it quickly, looked around, didn't find the queen but knew she was there because the brood looked great. We shut her up and called it a day.

Next week we're staying local but the following week we're hoping to begin collecting the honey...FINALLY! We'll post pictures ;)

One more HazMat suit pic of me that Jim took!