We pulled the inner cover on our biggest hive, and it was not easy this time. The honeybees had sealed it pretty tight with propopolis, a waxy resin that bees collect from trees.
Category: Beekeeping
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Honeybees seal the inner cover with propopolis
bees seal shut the inner cover with this waxy resin this stuff makes it take some work to open the top of the hive -
Essential Oil Recipe for Honeybees
calm these bees with this spray This essential oil recipe for honeybees is similar to the several commercial essential oil concentrates you can buy from beekeeping suppliers. These essential oil mixtures are said to have several benefits. They improve the disease resistance of the honeybees, they calm the bees when you are working them, and they can help introduce a new queen to a beehive.
NOTE: I now buy the essential oil mix from a beekeeping supplier here. Its saves time for me, is easier than putting together all these ingredients, is safe, and works very well.
I keep getting questions about what is an essential oil. An essential oil is the extracted oil of a particular plant. That’s it. For some reason, people ask if they can use mineral oil, and no, you can’t.
After reading through this recipe post, take a minute to check out our other beekeeping posts here and beekeeping videos here.
The two main ingredients here, lemongrass oil and spearmint oil are said to reduce the presence of diseases and pathogens in the hive.
You MUST use food grade essential oils for your bees, do NOT buy oil used for aromatherapy, it can contain ingredients toxic to bees.
To buy food grade spearmint essential oil on Amazon click on this link → Spearmint Food Grade Essential Oil. Double check the Amazon listing to make sure the oil is food grade, Amazon’s search function isn’t perfect.
To buy food grade lemongrass essential oil on Amazon click on this link → Lemongrass Food Grade Essential Oil. Double check the Amazon listing to make sure the oil is food grade, Amazon’s search function isn’t perfect.
I got this and many other beekeeping recipes for honeybees from Cass, whose blog is WVBeekeeper.I have tried to contact Cass to ask permission to reprint this recipe but could not, so I’m hoping he’s ok with the idea of us all helping honey bees.
Essential Oil Recipe For Honeybees
A well known commercially available general purpose essential oil product for bees that is similar to the following recipe claims many benefits even though many of those claims have yet to be proven. The following recipe should work about as well as that product and is way cheaper. It can be added in small quantities to feed to encourage feeding. It has been known to occasionally cause robbing behavior due to its great appeal to bees.
> 5 cups water
> 2 1/2 pounds of sugar
> 1/8 teaspoon lecithin granules (used as an emulsifier)
> 15 drops spearmint oil
> 15 drops lemongrass oilBring the water to a boil and stir in the sugar until it is dissolved. Once the sugar is dissolved remove the mixture from the heat and quickly add the lecithin and the essential oils. Stir the mixture thoroughly. This solution should have a strong scent and not be left open around bees. Cool before using.
NOTE: i have had difficulty getting the lecithin granules to dissolve in the mixture. I have made this without the lecithin and it seemed to be ok.
Cass says: “Use the Essential Oil Mixture in early spring and during periods when no nectar is available and to build up packages, nucs ind swarms. Two teaspoonfuls in a quart of 1:1 sugar syrup delivers a total of one cc of both essential oils. The essential oils are evenly distributed throughout the syrup. The Essential Oil Mixture helps produce rapid build up of bees when used as a feeding stimulant. In addition, using 4 teaspoons in a quart of one to one sugar water of the Essential Oil Mixture as a spray instead of smoke helps calm the bees, and spraying caged new queens and bees helps with queen acceptance during cage introduction and reduces balling during direct release when sprayed on new queen and bees. It also helps to reduce stings: mix a little on your hands and watch the difference in bee behavior-very few or no stings at all. Acts as a bee calmer when sprayed on the bees and helps prevent fighting when combining nucs, swarms, and colonies. Spray on a colony while doing a cut-out for some extra calm bees! When sprayed on new foundation helps encourage the bees to draw out new comb or plastic comb.”
Cass has a number of interesting recipes for beekeeping on his site, please go check them out here.Read more of our beekeeping posts here and watch beekeeping videos here. Thx!
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A Hive Prepares to Swarm, photos show how
I was watching our hives last week, and thought Hive #1 was looking less busy at the entrance. I was thinking it had swarmed. So we opened up the hive, and found our marked queen, which means the hive had not swarmed. ( When a hive swarms, the original queen flies off with half of the honeybees ) But we did find lots of drone cells and 3 queen cells that are being built. We removed the queen cells, but I know we can’t stop them from swarming that way. We are going to do a split to reduce the hive population, and remove any more queen cells.
We just received the queens we ordered from Jennifer Berry, so we have to do this quickly. Its best to do splits in May, I understand, but this being early June I think we’ll be ok.
Our original queen is still in the hive, so it has not swarmed yet. The queen is the bee with the blue mark. 
the beginning of a queen cell among drone cells 
here are 2 queen cells being built at the bottom of a frame -
Queen has been released in our newest beehive
The worker bees have released the queen bee from her queen cage which you can see in the lower right of the photo
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Beehive lost to nosema?
I went over to a friend’s house yesterday to find he had lost a hive recently. There were few dead bees in the hive, but here was a ton of what I think is nosema in the hive, evidenced by the amount of bee droppings in the hive. Nosema is an intestinal ailment in honeybees, it gives the bees diarrhea.
And bees normally don’t poop in their hive, seeing bee poop in a hive, i think, is a sign of something wrong.
Both of our hives have signs of nosema, and I have been treating them with Fumagilin in a sugar syrup, spraying the hives once a week for 3 weeks.
You don't usually see comb spotted with bee droppings and in the frames with honey, there was what looked like crystallized honey in some of the comb. Again, not sure what this is all about. Anyone know?
Crystals in some of the comb -
How to move a Beehive : GardenFork.TV Beginning Beekeeping
We decided to move a beehive, so I learned how to move a beehive, and now we’ll show you how we moved the it. Moving a beehive is not hard, watch this Beginning Beekeping Series video and learn how.
Have you moved a beehive? Please tell us below:
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What honeybee starvation looks like in a beehive
A neighbor lost a hive, and as we took it apart, I saw for the first time what honeybee starvation looks like.
Bee starvation Bee Starvation can happen for a different reasons, here are a few:
• There just isn’t enough food to get them thru the winter. This can happen if the beekeeper has taken too much honey off a hive, especially a young hive, and/or has not fed the bees enough 2:1 sugar syrup in the fall, it can also happen for no discernible reason at all. Bee Starvation can happen to the best beekeepers.
• Brood Rearing can start in the late winter, and if the weather has a cold snap, the bees will not leave the brood, even though there may be food in comb a short distance away. Read more on Jim’s blog
• Nosema, a bee disease that impairs the bee’s digestive tract, can cause winter starvation.
Note the bees face in to the comb, looking for food I think. I didn’t see any brood on these frames, and there was no honey in the frames, so I’m guessing it was a lack of food stores, but I am not the expert here. What do you know about bee starvation, have you lost bees over the winter?
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Late Winter Check and Feeding of the Honey Bees
We’ve had a cold winter here, and we’ve had few opportunities to open up our hives to check on the bees.
It depends on which expert you are asking, but you should only open up a hive if its above about 45F. The rule I’ve read is if you have to wear a heavy jacket, you should not be opening up a hive.
Why open up a hive? Many hives perish in late winter or early spring when they may have run out of food. You want to get a quick peek to if there is food in the comb and if they bees are alive.
After reading and talking to our bee mentors, we decided to slip some fondant into our hives, as well as new grease patties. Fondant can be bought at a bakery supply or some craft stores, or you can make it yourself. There is a good discussion of making fondant on the Bee Source forum here. Pressed for time, we picked up some fondant at a craft store.
Bees entering thru inner cover gap We finally had a day where the weather was in the 50s F, we opened up our hive at Maple Knoll Farm. We found a lot of dead bees on the bottom board, and we cleaned these out. The bees were out, already bringing in pollen ( we think from maple trees ), and they were entering the hive through the small gap in the inner cover.
Honey bee with pollen in late winter To put the fondant on top of the frames, I built a simple spacer to allow the fondant to sit on top of the top super. We did a quick check of the frames in this top super – do not pull out the frames, just look down into them – and we found ample food in the comb. We decided to add the fondant and a grease patty just to be safe.
Spacer or shim allows for block of fondant and grease patty 
Honeybees brining in a yellow pollen in late winter We watched the bees, and despite us cleaning out the dead bees from the bottom board, they continued to use the inner cover entrance.
Dead bees pile up at the bottom of the hive during winter A few days later we decided, since it had been so warm, to put a sugar feeder on top of the hive, with a 1:1 sugar syrup ( 1 lb of sugar to each 1 pint of water ). We pulled off the polystyrene and inner covers to find they bees had barely touched the fondant. They had been using the grease patty.
We left the fondant and spacer on, then put on the sugar feeder. We saw the feeder had warped, and there were gaps along the edge that mates with the hive body. The honeybees were trying to get into the hive between the feeder and the spacer. ( When adding a sugar feeder to the top of the hive, you do not use the inner cover, as it would allow bees to get into the syrup reservoir and drown. )
Bees trying to enter hive under warped feeder Remembering in some of my beekeeping books, people do drill entrances into upper hive bodies, i opted to drill a hole in the spacer to allow the bees to enter the top of the hive. I also screwed the warped edges of the feeder into the spacer.
With no inner cover on the hive, I made an upper entrance. All the time we were at the hive, the bees were bringing in pollen, which i was suprised by. I’m thinking it was probably maple tree pollen and some other early flowering plant that was a nice yellow color, perhaps pussy willows.
Each hive got a gallon of sugar syrup, as well as leaving the fondant on the hive. This week I will probably remove the fondant and top up the sugar syrup.
What have your experiences been with late winter beekeeping? Please let us know below:
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Honey bees bringing in pollen in late March
Its was real warm this weekend, and the bees broke cluster a while ago, and this weekend they were out collecting pollen. i think its from Maple Trees.
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Re Queening both our hives this spring
After reading a glowing article in Bee Culture about Jennifer Berry and her excellent queen rearing program, we have decided to replace the queens in both our hives with queens from Jennifer Berry.
Why requeen? What is most important to me is the bees display what is called hygenic behavior. This means they keep the hive clean, and because of this hygenic behavior, the varroa mite population is lower.
Many beekeepers requeen every year or every two years. Queens don’t last much longer on their own. The BeeAnonymous blog lists a few reasons:
* Older queens are more prone to swarming
* Replacing a failing queen
* Better stock traits like pest and disease resistances
* And in my case, improving bad attitudesOur hive at the Maple Knoll Farm did amazing for its first year, giving us a few frames of honey to harvest. We opted to leave the majority of the honey in the hive, and also fed both our hives a lot of sugar syrup to get them through the hard winter we have up here in NW CT. Our bees are not aggressive, but we do want a to improve the stock of our bees, as we don’t want to have to use miticides to combat the varroa mite and tracheal mites.
Feeding bees sugar syrup in the fall to prepare them for winter The hive that is in our yard, which is in a shed to protect it from bears, did not do nearly as well last year as our hive at Maple Knoll Farm. I checked on them last month and I think I heard them in the hive. This hive will benefit from a new queen.
The hive in our shed, wrapped with a insulating blanket and a polystyrene outer cover Our hive at Maple Knoll may not need a new queen. The hive was great last year, and we saw them doing cleansing flights in 38 F degree weather. And whenever we went to check on them, the hive was alive with energy, tons of bees coming and going.
So I am thinking that we may split this hive. A split is where you take some of the bees from a healthy hive, some frames of brood, eggs, and pollen, and place them in a new hive with a new queen. A split allows you to populate a new hive without buying a package of bees, and it allows you to choose where your queen comes from. I’ve been reading up on how to divide or split a hive and I think we can do it.
Maple Knoll bees on cleansing flights I do believe the queen in the Maple Knoll hive has been replaced by the bees. This may be a natural thing, or it may have been due to us being clumsy when working the hive. We weren’t always good at pulling out the first frame, making room to pull the other frames up and out. We may have killed the queen, as we did find what we think were opened queen cells on a few frames in the middle of the summer. Finding this queen will be a challenge, since she was not raised by humans, she is not marked on her body for easy identification.
Finding the queen in thousands of bees can be hard To requeen a hive:
• Find and remove the existing queen.
• Wait a day if you can.
• Put in the new queen ( in her queen cage) in the hive between 2 frames, make sure the sugar plug is pointing up so no dead attendants can plug up her exit, poke a small hole in the sugar plug to get the bees to eat through it.
• Leave the hive alone for a week.
Our new queens arrive in May, we’ll make a GardenFork Show when we do the re-queening. Jennifer Berry’s Queens are only available through Brushy Mountain Bee Farm.
Beekeepers: what can you add to this post? Please comment below.
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The Screened Bottom Board, leave open or closed in winter?
Both our hives have a plastic screened bottom board. I think screened bottom boards are a must for controlling varroa mites.
Varroa mites are a big problem for bees, and with a screened bottom board, mites that fall off bees fall thru the screen and out of the hive. You can have even more mites fall thru the screened bottom board if you dust your bees with powdered sugar. – Here’s a video we did on that.
But I’ve been wondering about the screened bottom board being wide open in the winter. There are different opinions on this, some bottom boards have a wood slide that goes in to close off the screen.
Our bottom boards do not have a slide to close the screen. So I decided to make one out of thin plywood and a foam gasket.
To get this closer board up against the screen, i used cedar wedges to lift the board up to touch the screen.
Whether this is a good thing to keep the hive warmer in the winter, or not as good a thing because some mites that fall off the cluster of bees may be able to climb up into the hive again.
Beekeepers, what are your thoughts here? Do you have a type of bottom board you like? The plastic bottom board will not rot, but I don’t like the entrance reducer it uses, very clunky.
Update: I now believe in areas with winter, one should close up the screened bottom board in winter. See our complete winter beehive prep video here.
