The hive is under attack!

As the weather gets colder flowers are harder to find and bees start looking for other sources of food for their winter stores. Unfortunately one source they look for is another beehive. Italian bees (Apis mellifera ligustica) are particularly good at this which means they are particularly hard to keep in the Fall.

Smaller hives frequently are attacked in this way, the workers who are old enough to try and stop the invaders are killed and the workers who are too young hide with the queen while all of their honey is taken away. Once this starts it is very hard to stop. Unfortunately my new observation hive is a small hive and I have some Italian bees in the back yard. One morning I noticed the observation hive was particularly noisy, on closer inspection there were quite a few dead bees in the hive and quite a few bees running from the entrance to the top of the hive and chewing open wax to eat the honey inside.

I acted quickly and closed off the entrance to the hive, trapping the invaders inside. Not long after the air outside the hive was filled with bees carrying pollen on their legs trying to get inside. The pollen marked them as bees who belonged in the hive so I opened it up to let them in and then closed it again. The hive soon was very noisy and it remained that way for the two days I left the hive closed. I left it closed for that long to try and convert the invaders to defenders, to make them think of this hive as their new home.

In the end it worked OK but not perfectly. I did save the hive from being killed but it was my fault this happened in the first place. I had put the equipment I used to extract honey this year in the back yard for the bees to clean up, they do a good job of licking up honey on equipment. Unfortunately it also puts the bees in the robbing mood, since they already found some honey to eat hidden away they learn to start searching for more opportunities. Before this I was a fan of open feeding in the fall but I'm not so sure anymore.

Kill all the males!

As the weather starts to turn cold something subtle changes in a beehive. The workers stop feeding the drones and they become less tolerant of their presence in general. The more cold weather you have the farther this goes. By the time you get your first frost the workers can be seen dragging drones out of the hive by their wings or legs! Something I see every year is what you see pictured here: workers refusing to let drones into the hive in the evening. By morning the drones are dead in the grass from exposure.

I saw something I haven't seen before last week, I saw the workers removing drone brood! When the weather is warm a hive keeps male bees around so they can mate with virgin queens from other hives but when the weather gets cold there are no queens to mate with so the male bees only consume resources and don't benefit their hive anymore. Since it got cold quickly the queen was still producing young male bees when the hive decided to get rid of them. This mean that the young males had to go too, including the two you see in the picture to the right. Healthy young bees are white like what you see here, although these two won't be healthy for long. The workers are biting them and will soon carry the larva away and drop them in the grass.

It's hard to move with a beehive.

Good news! The friend who invited me to bring an observation hive to the farmer's market sold her house, something that isn't easy to do with the way things are now. The bad news is that she won't be in town anymore and she can't take her bees with her! She asked if I would take the hive and I gladly accepted, since I just lost a hive I had an empty spot in the yard and one slot free according to city ordnance.

I've moved hives before but never one this large. I took some empty equipment and made sure I could fit it in the car somehow. The hive would be 2 deeps and 1 medium so I stacked up 4 mediums with a top and bottom to see if it would fit. Nope! As you can see on the left the stack is about 3" too tall. At least I can close the back most of the way with it in there. Well, at least more than half way.

A beehive is best moved at night. Since bees navigate by sunlight when the sun is down they are inside the hive. If you move a hive during the day all of the foragers are out working and return home to a surprise, no home! This late in the year it would be hard for a hive to recover from losing their foragers like that so I decided to move at night. A head lamp is a must in that situation so you can see what you're doing but still use both hands. The trouble is that bees, like many insects, are attracted to bright lights like that. To keep bees from flying towards my head as I worked I use a red light. Bees can't see red very well (some reds are invisible to them!) it helps keep things calm when I'm working. In the red photo to the right you can see the magic of moving a hive: stuff a cloth in the openings and put some tape over it. If you did it right you get to drive to the new location without bees flying around in your car. Bonus!

My friend helped me load the bees into the car which was good because the hive probably weighs about 150 lbs. Unfortunately (and fortunately!) this hive was fancier than the ones I'm used to. It has a nice peaked copper roof which was hitting directly on the glass of my car's rear door! Also, being another few inches taller, the door wasn't closing much at all. Turing it sideways helped and I could get the back closed far enough so a bungee cord would reach. Good enough! Luckily I only had about a mile to drive (yes, I broke that beekeeping rule) and there wasn't much traffic at 10pm. My friend said goodbye to her bees and I drove the bees to their new home, learning that an open hatch causes a powerful wind tunnel as you drive along with your windows open. I got the bees to my house and then unloaded them. I got the job done but there were a few close calls! I'll definitely add this to the list of things I shouldn't have done alone.

I moved the bees to their new spot in the yard and let them sit for about 30 minutes before opening the entrance. It was good I waited as they got a little upset while they got bumped around during the move but it was also good I didn't wait too long, as soon as I did open the hive the workers instantly began fanning the entrance to cool the hive off. When bees get bumped around like that they end up creating quite a bit of heat and the hive was hot! If I had left them closed until morning like I was considering the hive probably wouldn't have survived. Close call! On the right you can see the six hives in my back yard. Try and count them if you want, one is a little hard to find. The new hive doesn't quite fit in but I'm very glad to have it. I'll give it a good inspection soon to make sure it doesn't have any nasty disease and to ensure they are prepared for the coming winter. At only 150 lbs the hive might not have enough honey and we're on our last round of flowers for the year.

Two hives lost, one hive gained.

I decided to try to overwinter small hives this year to avoid having to buy queens and bees in the spring. If it's done right I'm putting in a little extra work but saving $100 in the Spring. I planned to have two small hives on top of two larger hives for the winter with a double screen board between them. I made the splits in July but made some mistakes. I noticed some guilty bees going into one of the small hives so I opened it up to investigate. What I saw was the worst case of varroa infestation I've ever seen! The brood frame you see on the left is what I found, along with a small cluster of SICK bees and a queen. I didn't check varroa levels before I made the split so this small hive was left with way more mites than they could deal with. I'd normally replace the queen that caused such a bad result but this queen wasn't the one to blame, she inherited the problem from the split I made.

If you look at this picture closely you can see a varroa mite stuck to the top of the young bee in the center of the image. Young bees are white (when healthy) so the dark red mite stands out quite well. Also in this close-up you can see the perforated cappings of the brood cells, that is always a sign that something bad is going on. What bothers me a little more than it should is the dead young bees. You can see a few cells where a bee is just poking its head out of the cell, this is a young bee who just emerged from her cocoon and is expecting to be greeted by her sisters as she pulls herself out and into the hive. Instead these bees were met with a ghost town of death and destruction. There were a lot of young bees like this who didn't have the strength to pull themselves out of their cell because of the varroa that fed on them as larva.

The sure sign that this was a failure due to varroa was the deformed bees that were alive. The bees that were able to become adults were so sickly even an untrained eye can tell that there is something very wrong with that bee. In this picture you can see two bees, one is normal and healthy (from another hive, entering this one to investigate all of the unguarded honey) and the other is one of the bees that were clustered around the queen and covered with mites. Normally even in a bad varroa infestation it is difficult to find a mite on an adult bee but in this case every adult bee had multiple mites on them. The queen was running for her life and quit hard to catch!

It was still July and I decided I had time left in the year to make a new split for this queen to start a hive with. I went into one of my strongest hives with plans to remove some brood (WITHOUT varroa!) and try again. Oddly though the hive I opened had no brood of any kind, just signs of a failed queen replacement. I saw partial queen cells in the hive but still no queen. With no brood it was possible that there was a young queen somewhere who just wasn't laying yet (or perhaps she was out mating) but given how the bees were acting I was pretty sure they lost their queen a few weeks ago and weren't able to make a new one. That makes a second failed hive!

The good news is that I had a queen with no hive and a hive with no queen. I put the queen into a queen cage along with two healthy workers from her old hive (without any varroa on them) and placed the queen cage in the big hive with some marshmallow blocking the opening of the queen cage. I closed the hive up and planned to come back in 4 days to check on her. I opened the hive up on Thursday and the queen cage was empty, the workers had released the queen already. The frames next to the queen cage were filled with eggs so I knew the queen was accepted and well on her way to saving the hive and herself.

I also realized what a pain it is to have a hive on top of another hive, the hive that I added this queen to was one that had a small nucleus hive on top of it. I had to move the little hive to work on the big one which caused a lot of confused bees to circle and some to go in the wrong hive which caused the bees to be a little more defensive than I'd like them to be. I suspected the double screened board was the cause of the queen loss (the bees below smelled the one above so they didn't replace their queen correctly when she needed to be replaced) so I replaced the double screen board with a regular outer cover and bottom board making two separate hives. Unfortunately I can't move the little hive to a new location because all of the foragers (adults who leave the hive) wouldn't move with the hive and the little hive can't spare that population loss this late in the year.