We’ve added a third hive to our beehives, and our package of bees arrived on Saturday. The weather was not great, cold and windy, so we thought we’d wait until the next day, Sunday. We kept our bees in the basement to keep them from overheating.
Sunday arrives with wind and 32F. Not good. But we waited until 1 pm and the temperature rose above 50F, and it was time to hive the package. Hiving the package went really well. The worker bees stayed close to the queen in the new hive.
The bees in the package are surrounding the queen cage and the sugar feeder in the boxOpening the top of the package reveal the queen cage and the sugar feeder canRemoving the queen cage from the bee packageThis is the queen cage, the fondant on the left is pierced with a small nail and the worker bees will eat thru this to release the queen once this is put into the hive. Two bent nails are inserted into the queen cage, with the fondant candy facing up, this queen cage then sits between two frames in the middle of the new hiveAfter the queen is placed in the new beehive, the bees are added to the hive by shaking the hive packageYou have to move the package back and forthThe worker bees cluster around the queen cage that was placed in between the frames.I tear open the screen of the package to allow the last of the bees to exit to the hive.An entrance reducer allows the young hive to defend the entrance from robber bees and yellow jackets. I did not have one of those wooden reducers, so I used a mouse guard.
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?
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.
Mike and Eric talk about Jamie Oliver’s reality show about how he tries to change the eating habits of one of the heaviest towns in America, this year’s Maple Syrup season, Farmers Market shopping theories, salt pork and how to find recipes based on what you have in your fridge and of course, Viewer Mail!
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 pattyHoneybees 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:
In late winter, when you have a warm day, say 44-50 F, its a great opportunity to quickly check your honeybees and beehive. In this beekeeping 101 video, we show how we open the hive and place some fondant and a grease patty in the hive to get the bees through the last bit of winter. Links to more of our beekeeping videos at end of this post.
Note: Since making this video, we have changed our methods and are no longer using the styrofoam outer covers or fondant, but its still a good video on caring for your bees in winter. Watch our dry sugar feeding videos here.
Your honeybees may or may not have enough food stores to make it thru this last part of winter, but I am of the mind that it pays to put in some fondant. Other beekeepers will have differing opinions on this and many other practices related to beekeeping. It is too cold to feed your honeybees sugar syrup in late winter, feed them fondant.
We have produced this series of Beginning Beekeeping Videos to document our first years of beekeeping to show people how fun it really is and to demystify it, and to spread the word on raising honey bees. We are not beekeeping experts, we are still learning. Tell us your experiences below and we can all learn more.
Bee fondant and Grease Patty recipes are based on information from Cass of WVBeekeeper’s Blog and the BeeSource forums . A big thank you to Cass for his writings.
Fondant bee candy can be fed directly to the bees once cooled. Fondant is a good food source for mini-mating nucs because there is no drowning involved when you have a small amount of bees. It is also common to use this recipe in small quantities to plug the hole on a Queen Cage.
> 4 parts (by volume) white sugar
> 4 parts (by volume) 2:1 Syrup or HFCS
> 3 parts (by volume) water
Boil water and slowly add the syrup and sugar until dissolved. Continue heating until the mixture reaches 238°F (114°C). Without mixing allow the solution to cool until it is slightly warm to the touch. Then begin to mix and aerate the solution. As you do this the color should lighten. Pour into shallow dishes or mold and save for later use. I prefer to make the fondant thin enough to where I can work it into an empty frame of drawn comb.
Grease Patties:
I made my own based on reading thru the Bee Source forums and WVBeekeepers blog.
2 cups vegetable shortening – NOT butter or other flavored shortening
4 cups white sugar
10 drops of food grade pepperment oil or wintergreen oil
1/4 cup mineral block – this is a mineralize salt lick you can get at a farm – ag supply store. break off a chunk with a hammer.
mix this together and form into 4″ wide patties, they have to be thin enough to be placed between hive supers.
you can wrap these patties in wax paper , put in a freezer back and freeze for future use.
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 attitudes
Our 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.
Here is our first honey harvesting video where we show you how to use a comb knife and an extractor to extract the honey from the honeycomb.
Our teacher, Jim, sent us an email after he saw our video with the following comments. Jim has strong opinions, like most beekeepers, I agree with most of what he says here, but not all of it. Again we are beginner beekeepers, so we can and do make mistakes. my goal here is to show people that they too can raise bees. So here is Jim’s take on our first honey harvesting video.
Offered in what I hope is noticed to be a TOUNGUE-IN-CHEEK and FRIENDLY
tone, are the following comments from your peers, as summarized by me:
1) Putting an undrawn frame of foundation into a hive in September is a dead
give-away that not only did you fell asleep in class, but you also failed to
do the reading. Bees are very unlikely to drawn comb after the middle of
August. Much better to simply replace the extracted frames when you are
done extracting.
2) The “purpose of the smoker” is not to drive the bees down in between the
frames. That level of smoke was last used by Richard Nixon against anti-war
protestors. The purpose of the smoker is to simply block alarm pheromones
from alarming other bees, and can be used sparingly.
3) When you are fully suited, veiled, and gloved, the bees can fly around
without endangering you. There is no reason to be concerned that they take
flight when you are brushing them off frames.
4) Brushing should be done with the frames upside down, so that any bees
with their heads in cells will not be bent backwards or pulled apart. Cells
slant upwards within the frame, so brushing from bottom of frame to top (by
bushing with the frame upside down) is much easier on you and the bees. If
your sound effect was the actual brushing, you also need to use much shorter
strokes, so as to avoid “rolling” bees on the frame. A fume board and some
Bee-Quick might have made the job quicker, easier, and sting-free, but I’m
not going to shove specific choices at anyone.
5) “Finding the queen” should not wait until frames are hanging on the frame
rest, as the queen might fall outside the hive. One wants to inspect frames
as one removes them, while holding them over the hive. The odds of the
queen being on frames of honey are small, but they are non-zero.
