Bull City Bees Beekeeping adventures in downtown Durham

It’s been a sleepy summer here at the hive.  The bees don’t seem to have enjoyed the cool, wet weather nearly as much as the mosquitos.  Yesterday seemed like one of the first hot summery days that we have had around here all year and wouldn’t you know, the colony took advantage.  There is more activity going on around the hive than we’ve seen in a year.  The front of the hive is covered in bees and you can watch them flying back and forth to forage.  Hopefully this is a good sign and the colony will start using the new super that I installed (at great personal risk!) back in April.

obligatory bee thousand link

Or, how I nearly peed my pants on a morning when we’re already running late.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog (and who wouldn’t be, there’s not a six month period that goes by in which we don’t post), you’ve probably noticed that we haven’t said much about the bees recently.  There’s a good reason for this lapse, sometime late last summer, the colony went from this cool group of hive insects living in our backyard, to a terrifying rage machine, bent on destroying those who would disturb their work.  Walking near the hive, you could hear their normal buzzing go from “we’re working productively” to “don’t even think about it.”  Not a problem, we just let them hang over the winter, periodically fed them and went on with our lives.

Now spring is here and we felt something of a moral obligation to check on the colony and see if they need more space, bettle control, mite treatments, etc.  Step one in this process, order the fully protective bee suits (I’ll post some pictures tonight).  The bee suits arrived last Monday and we immediately set them aside because the week was a mess and we would prefer to deal with the hive when most of the colony is out foraging.

Fast forward to Saturday, we suited up, put on the glove, found the smoker, grabbed the hive tool and boldly went forth to check the state of the colony.  We lit the smoker, gave them a few puffs and then opened the top to expose the feeder.  All of the sugar water is gone, but there aren’t any hive beetles.  So far, so good.  Using our hive tool, we pried the feeder off of the 3rd box (the medium sized, honey collecting, “super”) and there were bees all over the place.  The 3rd box was about 80-90% full [most (all?) of that seemed to be honey storage which suggests that we have as much as 25-30# of honey and that’s before the main nectar flow in the area].  It was too late to go to the bee store (yes, there is such a thing) and the store is closed on Sunday.  A quick trip out during lunch on Monday and I’ve got two new boxes worth of frames.

Monday night, we were tied up, so last night, we did an emergency assembly/painting of the two boxes and ten frames.  This morning, the paint had dried and I thought that I would take a quick trip out and remove the feeder, replacing it with the new box and a new inner hive cover.  My first thought was, no suit – I don’t need a suit to make a simple switch like that, we’ve been in and out of the hive (outer cover!) for months without suits.  Jill suggested a suit.  Fine – suit.

But we were in a hurry, so I didn’t bring the hive tool, I didn’t put on gloves and I didn’t use the smoker.

For the record, the bees were very unhappy with me.  Twice, they darted from the hive, right at my face.  After the first of these dive bombing runs, I went back over near the house where Jill strongly suggested gloves.  Okay, gloves would be good.

Went back, was dive bombed again.  Finished up putting the new medium super on the hive, closed up shop and went back in.

So, this brings me to my new rules for interacting with the hive:

1. Thou shalt always wear thine bee suit when working with the hive.
2. Thou shalt put on the full bee suit, including the gloves.
3. Thine smoker is given to thee as a blessing from heaven, use it.  Always.
4. Thou shalt not leave thine hive tool in the house.
5. The middle of the day is a holy work time for bees, always visit the hive when they hast left.

By keeping these commandments, I hope not to have to rush to the hospital with a few hundred bee stings.

For the second day in a row now, I’ve pulled up in the driveway and looked over to see bees doing an orienting flight in front of the hive.

When I first started reading about beekeeping, I saw mention of an orienting flight in some of the books.  Basic definition is that when a bee first leaves the hive, i.e., goes from being a nurse bee to a field bee, she will fly in front of the hive a few times in order to figure out where the hive is located, what it looks like, etc. before she ventures off.  There are a number of supplemental issues that are covered when books discuss orienting flights, e.g., how you can move a hive a short distance, but place grass in front of it so that the bees know to re-orient, why a row of hives will find that more bees “return” to the outer-most hives instead of the inner hives, etc.

The orientation is often described as a set of figure eights, but to my eyes, it looks like the bee is Catholic and is “crossing” the hive repeatedly – up down, left right, repeat in larger and large movements until the bee drifts off to find nectar.

One thing that I don’t think was ever covered in the books is that, at least in our hive, all of the bees looking to go out for the first time seem to do it at the same time – almost like there’s a new batch of bees ready to go out.  You pull up in the driveway and the whole hive looks like it’s going nuts.  When I first saw it, I thought that the hive might be under attack by wasps or that something was wrong, but when I walked up, the hive was calm, there were just a hundred or so bees in the air getting ready for their first excursion.

Hopefully we can get pictures at some point.

One of the things that you’re supposed to do when you first install a new colony in the hive is to feed the colony until it is “established”.  How long does that take?  Well, it depends.  Jill and I fed the bees for a few weeks until we saw that a) they weren’t taking the syrup and b) the workers were returning to the hive with pollen in their pollen baskets.

In North Carolina, you are also supposed to start feeding the colony in the heat of summer when there aren’t as many plants blooming.  So for the past few weeks… or is it months… wait when was the last time… anyway, we’ve taken to feeding the bees again.  One of the questions I have is just how much syrup are they going through.  So consider this a marker, or maybe just a note to myself, I just fed Miss Coco Peru [have I mentioned that our naming scheme is based on the stage name of drag queens?] 10# of 1:1 syrup.  Or about 5# of sugar to 5# of water.

I’ll try to check back every day for the next few to get a sense of how fast the colony is consuming the syrup.

I grew up in Louisiana and I know hot weather, and well, it’s been hot here in Durham.  I mean really hot.  8:30pm and it’s still over 32 degrees (C), hot. It’s so hot that the bees have taken to a rather freakish behavior… bearding.  In a nutshell, after all the workers return home from their foraging, they decide not to go inside.  Instead, they hang out on the front porch.  No word on whether or not they are sipping mint juleps.  From what we could tell this morning, they probably wound up bearding all the way to the top of the hive box.  Fortunately, the bearding doesn’t imply that they’re about to swarm, but I can say that the bees that look so cute individually are slightly terrifying en masse.

(the picture’s a touch blurry, but the sun was going down and it was an iPhone… we do what we can)

Who are you? One of the freaks?!  (nb: the link is not “Jill-approved”, but it goes through my head every time I see the bees beard)

Yesterday was the day to check to see if the colony had freed the queen from her marshmallow prison.  I tried to get home a bit early in order to check the bees while it was still light.  Pushing it too far in to the evening runs the risk that all of the bees will be home, so in general, most bee keeping activity occurs mid-day.

After suiting up and getting the smoker going, I went out to the hive, removed the cover, removed the top feeder and went looking for the queen cage.  Now, on Saturday, when we were setting things up, we were a little uncomfortable with just using nails to hold the cage between two frames.  Instead, we tied some yarn around the nails, then taped the yarn to the hive body, leaving the cage to dangle inside the hive.

My recollection was that we had put the cage near the middle, so I was somewhat surprised when the yarn was hanging down between the first and second frames.  Assuming that I must be misremembering, I pushed back the frames and pulled up the string, finding nothing.  Uh oh – the cage must have fallen, I hope the queen is okay.  I peeked at the bottom of the hive there wasn’t a cage between frames 1 and 2.  Nothing between 2 and 3, or 3 and 4.  But between frames 4 and 5, I saw the cage – not on the floor of the hive, but actually glued to the side of frame 4!

I carefully made room and pulled out frame 4.  Sure enough, the queen had been freed.  I flicked the cage off of the frame and closed up the hive.   I’ll post a picture of the opened cage and the “glue” when I get home.

I think I’m glad that I hadn’t seen this before.  Jill and I were estimating that each honey bee weighed a half a gram (500 mg).  There are 454 grams per pound, so a pound of honey bees would number about 1,000 bees.  Our three pound package would contain roughly 3,000 bees.

However, according to this EPA appendix (yes, it’s not a primary source, but it sure sounds authoritative!) bees weigh 128 mg on average.  So rather than dealing with 3,000 bees over the weekend, we probably had closer to 10,000!  *shudder*

[update] Neat – wordpress has a latex equation parser:

On Saturday, we were scheduled to pick up our bees around 11am out in Hillsborough.  After breakfast at the farmer’s market, we ran a few errands and took the Honda out I-40 to Busy Bee.  We opted to go with the honda because it has a trunk and the idea of sticking a three pound package of bees into the hatchback of Jill’s Subaru was a little disturbing.

We picked up the bees and put them in the trunk, along with a few stragglers whom came along for the ride.  The queen and several attendants rode in the front in a small box with a marshmallow cork.

Once we got back to the house, we popped the trunk and started collecting our gear:

1. Bee veils – check
2. Bee shirts – Chris wearing a long sleeve dress shirt, Jill in a sweatshirt
3. Smoker – got it
4. Smoker fuel – we have the dried pine needles right here
5. Hive tool – why? but yes, we’ve got a hive tool
6. Deep hive body – of course, and we even removed 5 frames

Once we were all together, we took the queen’s box out and put some small nails into it in order to hang it in the hive.  This didn’t seem to work, so we taped it using yarn.  The queen stays in the box for several days while the bees work on eating the marshmallow in order to free her.  In theory, it will take them several days to get her loose and by that time, they will have accepted her scent and recognize her as the queen of the colony.

After we put the queen in place, the moment of truth – dealing with three pounds of bees without freaking the hell out.  I know in theory, bees are gentle, they don’t want to sting me, they really just want to build a home and stock up honey for the winter, but either a million years of evolution or a childhood with a few too many yellow jacket incidents makes my skin crawl to see that many bees.

The box containing the bees has a circular hole cut in the top and a jar of syrup is resting in it.  There is a small wooden cover which holds everything in place.  Using the hive tool (ah ha! it did have a purpose!), we pried the cover off of the box.  Fortunately, the can of syrup is still keeping all of the bees in place.  We then jolted the box to the ground to knock the bees off of the syrup, and carefully pulled the syrup can out of the box… immediately covering it with the lid.  We opened the syrup and poured the remainder into the feeder, setting it aside. We then set the box into the hive in the place where the frames had been removed, slid off the lid, and put the hive feeder and hive top in place.

The sound of 3# (3000?) bees in a a hive is slightly terrifying.  The entire box buzzed, but we were basically done for Saturday.

Sunday, we had to get the box out of the hive and put the frames back in.  We got the smoker going and smoked the bees a touch.  We took off the hive cover, removed the feeder (with bees all up on the inside feeding!) and looked inside.  The ladies were already hard at work building out comb from the wax foundation they started with!

Jill bravely reached into the hive and lifted the box out.  We put the frames back in place, one at a time and replaced the feeder and hive cover.  We didn’t check the queen, because… well, because.

All in all, a successful weekend – we installed the bee package and no one got stung!

The hive looks like it’s ready… now we just need the bees.  Three pounds of ’em coming up on Saturday!