combining hives | Talking With Bees

Beehaus Up & Buzzing

In May 2018, with 3 weeks of great sunny weather, I set-up my Beehaus (external link to Beehaus), dragged it up the farmer’s field and installed bees. Exciting times.

Before The Beehaus

Two 14×12 colonies, back to back, lots of bees.

After

Installing Bees Into Beehaus

Key points:

Turned the two 14×12 wooden hives 90 degrees and moved them 1m away (see photo above)
Allowed flying bees to enter the Beehaus
Unable to find the Queens in my busy 14×12 wooden hives, I made two simple splits, making sure eggs in all 4 colonies (2 colonies in the Beehaus)
Both 14×12 hives had brought in loads of nectar

Result

No idea where the Queens are but all should be OK.

One Week Later

Left wooden hive – Found Queen (and eggs, brood, stores), marked her and walked her in to the left side of Beehaus
Right wooden hive – Found 7 Queen cells (but no eggs) and removed 5. I left 2 queen cells right next to each other, so hopefully first Queen out will kill the other rather than creating additional swarms (both queen cells looked a bit on small side, so I wasn’t confident to kill them both)
Beehaus – No eggs and no queen cells (and hence walked in the Queen from left wooden hive). Put newspaper between 2 sides of the Beehaus in order to combine
I added supers to all hives as they had continued to pile in the stores despite a cold start to the Spring

Further One Week Later

Beehaus – The bees in Beehaus had accepted the Queen and combined
Beehaus – I saw Queen in left side of Beehaus, moved any frames with brood into left side of Beehaus and added QE so that Queen stays in left. In 30 days I will close right entrance and put blocker between left and right so that I have spare hive for a swarm
I added the Beehaus entrance narrowers – “wasp” setting – as the number of flying bees is decreasing as they die off
Left wooden hive – Found 5 Queen cells and removed 4 leaving 1 large Queen cell
The left wooden hive had drawn most frames in super and filled half (uncapped) – so I added additional super
I did not disturb the right wooden hive as it may have virgin Queen now
None of the colonies bringing in much pollen

Lessons Learnt

Add supers by end April – even if think it has been cold
Queen from split hive can be walked back into her old colony one week later and accepted

Plan

Not expecting swarms for next few weeks
It’s 17C and rainy for the next week … so just as I want good weather for queen mating the weather is not conducive
All colonies – I will leave for 2-3 weeks to inspect for eggs
Beehaus – in 4 weeks, seal and close right hand side so that this is a spare hive for swarms

Detailed notes in My Apiary
My Beehaus Review
Beehaus (external link to their website to read about all features)

Chaos In The Apiary

Grateful for thoughts on my analysis below.

The Events

Big week at work: which left me only 15 mins to catch swarms during the day, no time to analyse and just having to combine colonies during the evening without too much thought
Swarms (that I suspect were casts from south facing allotment hives) on 22, 24 and 25 May – but I had no time to count days since artificially swarming and since the combining to analyse what was going on
Ran out of nucs on 22 May
Combined two farmer field hives of unknown queen state using newspaper method to free up a 14×12 brood box
Put two separate swarms in to two supers and combined on top of a hive that in the end had 3 separate colonies separated by newspaper
I peaked at 10 colonies for a few days but am back down to 7 colonies
I’ve done my analysis in the last few hours and feel a bit more in control and that I know what might have happened

24 May Swarm

This swarm escaped 10 minutes later and appeared as two swarms? Is this because of multiple virgin queens? Or just because sometime swarms just do this before deciding on one location to hang from?

Series of videos on the day:

My Last Nuc Box On 22 May

Swarm in nuc box - Steve/Suki allotment — Swarm in nuc box – Steve/Suki allotment

The Analysis

I had family obligations Saturday and Sunday and so it is only today, Monday 29th May, that I can actually read back over my hive notes and understand what happened.

The Swarms

Please read My Apiary notes for 22 May to 28 May 2017 for all the detail.

I had a quick look in the middle hive that had not been artificially swarmed as it had been starving earlier in the season and was in recovery. I could not find the unmarked Queen but this hive had new eggs in it. If this hive had swarmed it would have been the first large swarm on 22 May which I put in the nuc box n the farmer’s field.

I suspect all three, or at least the other two swarms, were casts, headed by virgin queens, from both of the two south facing hives.

At least the swarm on 24 May was a cast as I found two virgin queens and there could have been more.

I artificially swarmed these south facing hives on the 7 May and they were queen-less at that point (I know this as the queens were definitely left in the nucs). They would since have raised at least one queen and in this case, evidently more than one. This was 15 days ago. It takes 16 days for queen honeybee to hatch from an egg, so if they created a emergency queens with an egg that was already laid, we are in the right time frame, or if they had already started a queen cell we are also in the right time frame. Worker bees can hide virgin queens from other queens so that they can then create a caste with that queen up to a few weeks after they have hatched out.

The Combined Hives In Farmer’s Field

Please read My Apiary notes for 22 May to 28 May 2017 for all the detail.

In summary, I discovered that both boxes had laying queens before I combined 6 days ago and that the North facing hive must have always been Queen-right and the South facing hive must also have been Queen-right … when I had been sure both colonies had been Queen-less due to no eggs or brood.

Is My Analysis Correct?

Have I drawn the right conclusions? Were they more probably prime swarms rather than casts? Were the field hives always Queen-right? Please comment.

The Outcome

The field hives look to have combined OK and I hope will have let the 2017 queen survive. (Though I am a bit concerned why they are already raising more queen cells – which I removed)
The stack of three colonies on one hive … looks to have combined OK, again, hopefully with a 2017 Queen leading the colony
I have a spare nuc box again! Phew!
One of the allotment hives looks to have complete 2 supers of honey with thin foundation! Wow! My hopes are once again raised for a large summer harvest!
All colonies look on course to be productive in July
Senen and I scraped out some honey from the supers where the swarms had been captured:

Roger & Senen Eating Honey From Comb (28 May 2017)

Plans

According to the “track and trace” function on the transport company website, on the 1st June I can expect my two new Thermosolar Hives to arrive. These are much needed. I can then put the 2 nucs in the allotments into 2 full 14×12 hives and put the south facing colonies into the Thermosolar hives! Very, very exciting. I will then be able to fully try out killed varroa without chemicals in these two hives. I will also be able to free up a further 2 nuc boxes.
I have got the two field hives into a good position to put into the Beehaus when it arrives early summer
Add supers and put my feet up in June and July??? I guess not!

Please read My Apiary notes for 22 May to 28 May 2017 for the detail of this week
How-To Catch A Swarm
How-To Hive A Swarm
How-To Combine Hives
Beehaus Review

Top Tips For Preparing To Winter Bees

Chris Wray, the Bee Cosy guy with a mission to insulate our bees, is back with his top tips to help keep our bees through the winter. Go Chris, I’m all ears:

Getting a colony of bees through winter can be quite a challenge unless you the take the right precautions and prepare properly. Here are my top tips:-

Make sure you have a viable colony with a good laying queen before the end of autumn. You can often spot a failing colony by the bees – not flying in good numbers on sunny days – seeing that they are anxious (walking quickly over their frames) – not bringing in pollen – or if you’ve seen hive weight drop despite good weather and forage . If weak or failing, combine or make the decision early in autumn to re-queen if possible.
Check for stores – do more than just heft the hive – use spring balances to estimate hive weight – deduct 10% for the possible error in this method – deduct the weight of the hive plus drawn comb and say 2kg for the bees! – My colonies consume between 8 and 12 kgs of stores in the winter (end of October to end of March) depending on their size (with a Bee Cosy fitted) so I plan to have at least 12 kgs of stores – ideally 15 kgs – depending on the strength of the colony. In practice, for a strong colony, at the end of October you are aiming for a spring balance to read 15Kg on each side of the hive (remove the roof before you weigh).
Feed 2 kg :1 litre sugar syrup if stores are short – warm weather is best- between 12.5 and 15 degrees depending on the level of sunshine during the day – Don’t overfeed! – They may still be able to bring in stores from Ivy if they need it and some empty cells for winter brood rearing and clustering is better than a brood full of stores.
Varroa treatment – pick a week when the weather is fair – ideally with some sunshine to raise hive temperatures – the later the better as there will be fewer varroa in the reducing winter brood and more will be impacted by the treatment you choose. Do what you can to keep heat in the hive – varroa treatments work better the warmer the hive.
Hive check and prep – take off queen excluders, replace glass crown boards with wooden ones, reduce draughts in and around the hive, check for gaps between floors / brood boxes / supers / roofs – fix mouse guards. I prefer to leave the plastic trays in my OMFs in and reduce air flow through the hive.
Reduce unnecessary space to help your bees keep a good hive temperature – If you have roofs with big empty spaces fill them with paper / carpet / foam – and if you have small colonies where there may be 3 or 4 frames not occupied take empty frames out and replace with blocks of insulating foam cut to size (see photo below).
Check you have your Bee Cosy fitted! – as well as reducing the stores needed in 2 above, it will also help with points 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Good luck for Winter 2015 – let’s hope it’s kind to our bees!

Thanks Chris. I recommend everyone visiting the Bee Cosy website to learn all about how modern hives compare to trees as a home for the bees and to understand better the insulation requirements of bees.

Previous article by Chris Wray on how Bee Cosy winter losses compared with the national averages: Hive Insulation & The Bee Cosy

Combining hives = less to worry about

One of my hives was Queenless and the Bee Inspector had advised combining the hives using the “newspaper method”. The theory behind combining hives is that it will strengthen the stronger colony and help it to survive the Winter. How would they manage without us?!

The so-called “newspaper method” involves putting one colony on top of the other, separated by a single sheet of newspaper and pierced with some holes. The theory is that the bees smell each other, eat their way through the newspaper and are then happy to be united as a single colony and not get into fights with each other.

As you will see from the video clips the hives were a bit light which is a bit worrying because it might mean they don’t have much food in there.

Dad was getting a bit confused about his role as Camera Man and my role as Beeman/Presenter/Director. I think he is still holding onto his role as Parent & I Know Best and his perspective of me as Son & Utterly Clueless. So rather than one long clip where the viewers can decide when they have watched enough, we ended up with Kodak Super 8-style 30 second clips. Please see the first clip below.

The Combined Hives

After I had finished there was a lot of flying bees and I could see the hive-less bees trying to work out where to go, but it only took 5 minutes before the scene was peaceful once again.

During this uniting of hives, I added the second dose of Apiguard as 2 weeks had passed since the first dose. I have been counting the varroa on the varroa board over the last couple of weeks and so far about 300 have fallen off the stronger colony with the high varroa count. When I have finished the Apiguard treatment I will take another varroa count to calculate the mite population.

My plan is now to leave the colony like this for a week before removing the 14×12 brood box and then a week later, remove the Apiguard and start feeding with sugar syrup.

Relevant How-To Guides

Combining Hives – A how-to guide
Varroa Management – A how-to guide
Feeding Bees – A how-to guide

Tag: combining hives

Beehaus Up & Buzzing

Beehaus Up & Buzzing

Before The Beehaus

After

Installing Bees Into Beehaus

Result

One Week Later

Further One Week Later

Lessons Learnt

Plan

Read More

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Chaos In The Apiary

Chaos In The Apiary