Got one !!!

I GOT A QUEEN!!!!! I was finally able to check out my hive a week ago and I saw some eggs. As soon as I saw that I probably had a qyeen I put the hive back together so not to disturb them. I knew I would have to open it back up and mark the queen. The following is the color you mark your bees based on the year:

Years ending in 1 or 6 = WHITE
Years ending in 2 or 7 = YELLOW
Years ending in 3 or 8 = RED
Years ending in 4 or 9 = GREEN
Years ending in 5 or 0 = BLUE

My strong hive has been moving right along, I just added another super to it so it now has a deep and 4 supers. I can't wait to pull some honey off. I should be able to pull 2 supers off which gives about 30 to 40 pounds per super. So that should be atleast 60 pounds!! I wish my other hive wouldn't of swarmed!!!!

Waiting on a Queen

Well It has been a weak+ and I have no Queen. I have an option to go buy a Queen or wait and see if they produce one? I see that there are at least 2 Queen cells but I do not know when they will hatch. It takes 16 days (from egg to adult) to produce a Queen. It do not know when the queen cell was produced but I am going to check again in about 10 days. That should be plenty of time. Again, I could go out and buy one but I need to learn how this all works and get practical knowledge vs. a book knowledge. This will probably hurt my chances on getting any honey on the next honey flow but I need to learn. I did take a frame of brood from the strong hive and switched it with the weak hive. I hope this will help some and maybee keep my strong hive from swarming. At least I should get some honey from my strong hive.

I also put a bid on an honey extractor on ebay. This bee hobby/biz iz getting expensive!!

Not so good

I looked at my bees today and it didn't look so good. I am going to do an in depth inspection. It definitely looks like I had my first swarm. Not what I wanted and I still can't figure out why. All the books that I have read, talked about over crowding as the main reason that bees warm. My bees had plenty of room. I did read one book and this may be the reason- It stated that bees have a natural tendency to swarm in spring and that is how they "populate". It also stated that a beekeeper should check their hives every 10 days and destroy any queen cells. So now I wonder if the other hive is going to swarm and I also wonder if the hive that did swarm how long will it take them to produce a queen. I may have to take a frame of brood from the strong hive and place it with the weak hive. Well at least I am getting some "practice" on being a beekeeper vs being a bee owner. I will try to post some pictures of this new adventure.

Queen bee or No Queen Bee - that is the question.

Maybe I should listen to my wife. She told me 2 days ago that she was in the front yard spraying off the driveway. When she was out there she heard a loud buzzing noise WHILE she was spraying off the driveway. She also said she stopped what she was doing and walked to the backyard and she heard a loud humming noise but no more bees than usual.

Well I noticed yesterday that one hive had a lot more activity going on than the other one. Today I looked at it again and there was still more activity at one hive VS the other. I decided to open up the less active hive to see what was going on. I tried to find the queen that I had marked with a big red dot but was unable to locate her. There also seemed like there was a lot less bees. I inspected the frames and I did see some brood that was not capped but I didn't see any eggs. I also didn't see any queen cells in between the frames but I may have some at the bottom of the frames??? It is my understanding if you loose a queen they will make one in the middle of a frame. But I also remember reading that before she swarm that she may lay a queen on the bottom. I may have a queen cell on the bottom frames?? I do not knoe why she would of swarmed. She had plenty of room and I think she was a first year queen?? I am going to give it a few more days and give it a good inspection. I will probably do it this Monday and see if I see a queen or new brood/eggs.

Moving my bees

This was very interesting. We are having some work done on our house and we have decided to have some yard work done. Of course it is in the same area that my bees are located. After doing some research it looks like the best way to do this is to use the BRANCH TECHNIQUE. I only have to move the bees to the other side of the house but I have to make sure the bees know where they are at. I don't want them to just fly off and return and wonder were their house is. I had my friend Mike help me carry them over to the new location in the middle of the night. This way they are all in the hive. I then put a branch in front of the hives so the bees would fly out in the morning and know that something is different. Luckily when I checked the next day a majority of the bees came back to the new hive. The only problem was that there was a couple of bees (50 or so) didn't find their new home and we noticed them dying on the ground. Big problem. Wife calls me at work and my son, daughter, and wife all got stung that day. The bees were on the ground by the pool and got stepped on and my wife got stung messing with the mulch. The bees like mulch - must be the moisture?? My wife said if it happens again she is getting out the lighter and gasoline... She is from WEST VIRGINIA so I better watch out...

Time keeps on ticking

WOW, time sure does fly. I have been very busy and so have the bees. Since it has been a while since the last posting, let me bring you up to speed. The bees have filled up the main hive body and I have added on shallow super and will be adding another one as soon as I paint it. I picked up some paint at Lowe's and Sam (my 4 yr old son) has been picking out the colors. Sam decided to paint the first super pink. He now thinks that he honey will be the same color as the super and wants to paint the other one purple. Kids and their imagination!!! I am going to try to add some pictures since they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here are some of a friend of mine helping put our brood frames together and add foundation.

I've got Brood and a pest

It has been 2 weeks since I put my package of bees in and when I checked my hives today, I have brood. Nope it is not disease or anything weird like that. Brood describes all immature phases of the bee: egg, larvae, prepupae, or pupae. This will be first batch of new bees. It takes 21 days for a worker to go from egg to bee. So the next week I check out my hives I should have more bees!! Maddy is doing the best and I am a little concerned about Sam. Sam seems to be a little slow but at the same time it had more brood. Maddy has drawn out 7-8 frames while Sam has done only 6. I'll just have to keep an eye out and see how it goes.

I hate to say it but both my hives have a pest. I thought I might avoid it but they say you can't. I saw 3 small hive Beatles and was only able to smash 2 of them. They say you have to watch out for these little creatures or they run your bees out. I'll eventually put a trap in the hives and see how they work but for now I'll just smash them until there are to many.

Looking Good

Well it finally warmed up into the mid to high 60's so I decided to remove the empty packages from the hives and insert the 5 remaining frames. I used the smoker for the first time but barely used it. I didn't know what they would do since they don't have any honey to eat. They say when you use the smoker they start eating a lot of honey thinking that their hive might be on fire and they may need to escape the fire. Since they eat a lot of honey they become lazy - just like us at Thanksgiving. This allows the bees to stay calm while the beekeeper works them. Even though I used the smoke sparingly they were very docile. Hopefully I have some very non aggressive bees. Both hives seem to be doing very well - They are both very active and actually Maddy is a little more active than Sam is. They are both drinking their sugar water and are going through 3/4 of a quart per day. When I looked into the hive I couldn't tell if they had started making wax yet but I will check it out this Saturday. That will give them 1 whole week since I inserted the bees. Hopefuly I will be able to see the queen and make sure she has escaped the container she came in. The place I bought the bees from did not mark the quees so it is going to be tough. I may get my instructor to come out to my house and see if he can find her and mark her for me.

COLD- Did another one bite the dust

It has been very cold in the Upstate today (mid 40's) and I am a little concerned about the bees. I have visually checked on them twice today and everything seems OK but still concerned about a couple of things. I am going to name the hives so I can reference them. I am going to call the hive on the the left Maddy and the other one Sam. Maddy is not as active a Sam but they have taken the same amount of sugar water. I am using a ration of 5 lbs. of sugar/ 1 gal of water. There are a few dead bees laying on the ground and on the hives. I wish it was warmer so I could open the hive and make sure they are OK and also to retrieve the package container out of the hive and replace it with the 5 frames. But I think it is to cold to open the hives and may do more damage to them. Mike called me and stated that his bees were active today but there was about 200 dead bees at the entrance of his hives!! He said he couldn't wait any longer and opened his hives. He stated that they were all grouped on the center frames were we put the queen but they weren't moving. I told him it was probably to cold for them to be moving much and that they were probably trying to keep their hive warm. They need to keep it around 93 degrees. It is supposed to get into the 70's in a couple of days so I will probably check them out then and just pray until then.

One last observation was that Maddy had a couple of little ants hanging around the feeder. I am not concerned with them yet but will be keeping an eye out on them.

Moving at the speed of a Honey Bee

I finally received my bees and my equipment on Saturday all within 3 hours of each other. Talking about calling it close. Doesn't help that Dadant was closed on Good Friday and spring break for my 4 year old son was the following week. I was extremely lucky that a friend of mine, Mike, from church had decided to take the class and raise bees with me. Or God was actually wanting a couple of laughs. Mike and I decided to order all of our equipment from dadant and have it delivered to his house. He put 4 complete hives together. He said the first 2 took a little over an hour a piece but by the time he did the last 2 he had it down to 45 minutes per hive. iIwas able to get back in time to put some frames and foundation together. I told him that I would also put the supers together but that's not for another month. So hopefully I can get that done in time.

Once I got back in town and attending my sons soccer practice I met over at Mikes house to do a little prep work and to pick up my equipment. He showed me his set up and we were off to pick up our bees. The place we were picking them up from called us twice to see if we were on our way. They closed at 5pm and it was only 2:30 so we would be there by 3:15 but when we picked them up we discovered we were about the last one to pick up their bees. They had ordered over 230 packages!! I hope we didn't get the scrapes but there wasn''t very many dead bees in the pakages so I wasn't concerened.

Once we arried at my house, we set up my equipement and put the bees into the hive. I have read numerous ways to empty the bees into a hive but I decided on the following:

Take 5 frames out of a 10 frame hive body and then put the package of bees in the space were the 5 frames were located. The reason I slectd this method was just in case there was a lot of dead bees I would be shaking them all over the interior VS. putting in the open package into the hive and then in a day or two you open the hive and take the package out, put back the 5 frames and your good to go. No mess for the bees to clean. See the video to see why you should wear a bee suit when doing this.



THE ONLY CONCERN IS THE TEMPERATURE SATURDAY WAS ONLY ABOUT 45 SO I HOPE THEY MAKE IT.

RUSH RUSH RUSH

Just not enough time in life. Tuesday was the montly meeting for the South Carolina Piedmont Beekeepers Assoc. and it was very informative. There was an experienced beekeeper by the name of Charlie Holden that delivered a presentation on "Swarm Control and Supering". I have realized that there are times when you have to pay attention to the bees and times you can forget about them. I also discovered you can ask the same question and to different beekeepers and get a different answer everytime. Each one thinks they are 100% correct!!
My bees are coming on March 29th and I haven't even had time to order the equipment yet. I have to order it tomorrow to ensure that I get it in time. Class was tonight and we put together a complete bee hive. It was a "some assembly required" bee hive. The instructor had us put together one from pieces, just like you would receive it from the distributor. I thought the instructor was just getting some free labor but it was actually beneficial. The distributor also sales them preassembled so I still want to check out the price then make my decision. I have priced all the other equipment and it looks like it will cost around $500 to get up and running. That includes the 2 packages of bees I ordered. Each package contais about 10,000 bees and 1 Italian Queen bee.

What am I doing??

I have now started my latest project and I am letting the world take a look at this and maybe someone will learn something or maybe just get a good chuckle. For some reason which I can not explain, I want to raise honey bees. When I tell people this I get all kinds of reactions but so far they are either excited about it or they laugh. Well once they see this blog, hopefully they will learn how to raise bees or learn what not to do (Ha! Ha!). Before I start this, wonder how many times I'll get stung???



To bring everyone up to speed I have zero experience on how to raise honey bees. I have read one "How To" book and recently enrolled in a class that is held at a local Tech. College. This 6 - week course meets once a week. I am currently two weeks into the program. So far I have a little bit of knowledge and a whole lot of questions.



In my last class, 2 nights ago, I discovered that the deadline to order bees was in 2 days if I wanted to get a good price from a local store. Since I would be saving $25 per package I decided to take the plunge and place an order. No backing out now!! I ordered 2 packages since my goal is to have 2 hives to compare to one another. Each hive will eventually be home to 30,000 +/- honey bees. The store is going to place their massive order from a place in Florida. I was wanting to raise Russian bees but it looks like this group is getting Italians. It's my understanding that I can eventually switch in future years if I decide???