The mud room is loaded with bees. There are clusters on the door and window. A few bees buzz around the room. A few more linger on the honey boxes in the center of the floor.
Even though Beekeeper Man put a bee escape on the hives to minimize the number of bees clinging to the honey boxes, there are always some that remain.
So, Beekeeper Man dons his protective gear in the kitchen and ventures into the mud room to plug in the vacuum. And he vacuums up the bees.
He has a vacuum dedicated for bees.
He also has a vacuum dedicated to man cave messes. He has the obligatory ShopVac, and he is the primary user of the DustBuster.
My husband has more vacuums than I do. It doesn’t mean he vacuums more than I do. He just has more.
I have a single vacuum. It cleans the house. I like it. A lot. My husband may not use it. He will get it dirty.
Eventually, however, all my vacuums get gross and less efficient and/or stop working, and they sit abandoned in a closet until my husband says, “Can I have that?”
I explain how it doesn’t work very well. And then he cleans it all up and it works great.
His vacuums are my rejects.
The Dirt Devil is his bee vacuum. It’s a cheap vacuum that I bought because I was tired of fighting with the large cumbersome Eureka which was clearly designed by a man clueless as to the vacuuming needs of women. The Dirt Devil was not only inexpensive (aka disposable), it is lightweight. But, alas, not really up to the challenge of a whole house. It eventually went to live in the vacuum graveyard—the closet in the guest bedroom.
Until…
One summer day, Beekeeper Man brought honey boxes into the mud room to harvest honey. There were more than a few straggler bees on the boxes and he wanted to use my brand new Shark vacuum to suck them up.
No way!
So I gifted him with the Dirt Devil.
And now he is Dirt Deviling bees in the mud room. Then he will take the canister outside and set them free.
And we will take the honey.
And my vacuum will remain unscathed by honey bees.
There are many things that set me off on a rant but the worst ones involve Any Other Person messing up My Stuff. It doesn’t have to technically be my stuff. If I use it and/or clean it, it counts as mine.
Any beekeeper wife will agree that beekeeping presents some challenges with protecting stuff. For instance, you can not melt wax using any pots or utensils you ever again would want to use for food prep. And even then, there are better and not better ways to clean up the wax tools. But the worst offender by far is propolis, the sticky stuff that bees use to seal up nooks, cracks, and crannies in the hive. It is all over the top and bottom edges of the honey boxes. And then it gets on everything else.
And it won’t come off. Clothing, countertops, floor, you name it, if propolis was there it will stick there.
Sunday, our newest junior beekeeper donned the junior-sized bee-suit to watch PopPop BeeMan pull a honey box from Hive 2. His sister stayed back at the house and joined in to watch the honey spin and be bottled. They learned quite a bit about the honey harvesting process.
Seth uses the smoker
They also learned that MomMom does not like to share.
BeeMan had used a bee escape to minimize the number of bees in the honey box. It’s a clever contraption that allows bees to go down to the hive box at night but then they can’t figure out how to get back upstairs. It’s a great way to bring the honey home without a couple thousand accompanying bees. Nevertheless, there were still some bees that made it back to the house with the honey. BeeMan blew off those he could with my new leaf blower but, still, a few made it into the mudroom where we process the honey and they were buzzing around the room.
Checking out the bees on the bee escape
What to do with buzzing bees inside? Vacuum them. BeeMan got the hand vac, but it was not sufficiently charged. So he asked for the vacuum.
Oh. No. Absolutely Not.
I explained to the children that I just bought a wonderful new Shark vacuum and have used it only two weeks. BeeMan may not get sticky bee glop on My Brand New Vacuum.
There is, however, a fully functioning old vacuum in the basement for BeeMan to use for any vacuuming needs he might have. So he sucked up the stray bees who continued to buzz in the dust bin while the children worried for their health.
Fast forward to today. The old vacuum still sits in the mudroom, the captive bees now dead. (Don’t tell the kids.) I have moved on to another project– cleaning out bathroom cabinets in preparation for painting them. I grab the hand vac from the charger. You know, the hand vac that BeeMan didn’t use because it wasn’t fully charged?
He didn’t use it.
He touched it.
The handle is all gooped up with propolis.
Arrrrghhh!
Propolis on My Stuff
But the internet is a wonderful thing. Rusty at Honey Bee Suite discovered that propolis can be removed from a camera with isopropyl alcohol. Well, having just emptied all the contents of the bathroom cabinet, I happen to know that I have isopropyl alcohol (and two bottles of witch hazel and more bottles of lotions, creams, and ointments than I know what to do with). Right at my feet. In one of these eight bags of stuff. Oh, there’s a whole bag of cotton balls, too.
Three cotton balls later, the hand vac is sparkly clean– and sanitized, too. It was super easy. This is great! Now, after we are done harvesting honey, I can use alcohol to de-goop the counters and floor. Despair is lifted. I can return to the bathroom project.
A few weeks ago, in the midst of the spring nectar flow, with queen cells popping up everywhere, BeeMan decided to split a hive using some of the unwanted queen cells. The three other hives, with more room to grow and no longer honey-bound, resumed laying eggs and all is well.
Honey-bound is when the bees are so busy bringing nectar and pollen to the hive that there is no room for baby bees. The solution for the bees is to swarm. BeeMan averted the swarm by adding more boxes with frames and by providing empty frames in the queen box for the queen to lay eggs.. Having no longer a need to swarm, the queen would kill off any pretenders to the throne. And then, she would resume laying.
And that is what happened. The three original hives are busily filling the frames with brood and honey.
The split, however, never managed to produce a queen. BeeMan surmises that the queen cells he gave them were not viable. The queen from the original hive may have stung them before he created new hive. Why does he think this? He had taken a couple of queen cells back to the house and opened them. They were not alive.
Today’s mission in the bee yard was two-fold: recombine the split with its original hive and check to see if honey is ready to be harvested.
Combining the hives was pretty simple. Put the queen-less box on top of the original hive. Ah, but not that simple. The new bees in the original hive will not recognize the bees that had left. To make for a happy transition, a layer of newspaper goes between the two boxes. The bees will get used to their smells as they eat through the paper and become one big family.
And what about the bees who were out foraging when the hives were combined? They come back home to discover that home is not where they left it!
BeeMan says they hopefully will smell their group and find their way to the right hive. I certainly hope so!
As for the honey harvest, one large honey box on the third hive is ready to go! The other two hives have filled out frames but have not capped all the honey cells yet. We plan to go back into the third hive later this week for the first box of honey.
What’s the rush? Usually we wait until the end of July, but with a bear lurking in the area, we want to be sure the honey ends up in our tummies, not his!
Bear print on our property. Photo by Rich DeMarco.
Maywood is in its glory as the May woods blossom with tulip poplars, black locust, and wild roses. The bees have already had their fill of red maple and skunk cabbage and purple dead nettle, a pretty purple-flowering ground cover that brought in bright red pollen.
Yesterday we went in to the bees for the first time in a month and discovered exactly what we found this time a year ago–queen cells, drone cells, capped brood but no larva, and no visible queen.
A year ago, at the beginning of the rainiest year ever in Maryland, the condition of the hives sent us into a near panic. These were brand new nucs. Had we gotten poor queens–again? We did some quick research and managed to avoid two swarms while getting, in the process, a third hive by creating a split with some frames containing queen cells. What the heck, if it didn’t work, we would still have our two hives. But it did work, and the three hives made it not only through the summer, but through the winter, too! This was the first winter in years that we brought all the hives through the winter.
Last year, the rainy weekends kept us from keeping a closer check on the hives. This year it was a combination of rain, cold, and Mother’s Day that kept us away. At our April check, BeeMan put queen excluders and honey boxes on the three hives, happy that the bees had plenty of room to expand.
Hive A, the only hive with its original queen, had been thriving the least of the three. In April we saw the queen (that I had beautifully marked in green last year!) and lots of active laying, but they had done the least to fill up the hive. So, yesterday, we were dismayed to not find her. Hives B and C had lots of baby bees in progress last month, even though we did not see their (as yet unmarked) queens.
Green dot marks last year’s queen
While we inspected Hive A, a queen cell broke as BeeMan pulled out a frame. Out emerged a brand new queen, not that we recognized her at first. She ended up with some other bees in my plastic tub with the burr comb I’m saving. We were almost ready to close up the hive when I got a better look at her.
“Hey, I think this is a queen!”
Sure enough, the young virgin queen with her slender abdomen was wandering around the plastic tub. (Kind of like humans, the women are slender until they get fat with babies and stay that way forever. The queen gets one wild fling a mile up in the air with all the drones she can handle, and then she is just an egg-laying machine, confined to the hive to reproduce for the rest of the life. She doesn’t even get a career.)
The young queen was easy to trap and mark and plop back into the hive. Alas, I still only have the one green marking pen, so both the old queen and the new queen wear green dots. The new queen has a more delicate dot, since I did a better job this year. So, are there two queens in the hive about to fight to the death? Or just the new one? Our next hive check may tell.
Peanut shaped thing hanging off the bottom of the frame is a queen cell
Hive B was very active and full and looking more like it wanted to swarm than to replace a queen. The top box was all honey, so we were assured that the queen was in the bottom box when the excluder went on. BeeMan decided to make a split, taking two frames with queen and brood cells, two frames with honey/nectar, and three empty frames to start a new hive. He will add more empty frames soon. There are still queen cells in the original hives but since we did not see the queen, we were afraid to destroy them. He added another honey box so they have more room.
Hive C was also very active and looking more swarm ready. BeeMan, on a hunch that the queen was probably still in there, got rid of all the queen cells and added another honey box.
The advantage of having several hives is being able to try different things and see what works. We learned a lot last year. Let’s hope that we learned enough!
I took this photo because a student bought a painting of it. Came home to realize that I bought the same scene three years ago!
We were dining in Montmartre when the news broke that Notre Dame was on fire. Almost instantly, our phones began dinging with texts from back home.
“Notre Dame is on fire!”
“Where are you? Are you ok?”
Concern for our well-being came with snarky comments, too: “Was John smoking cigars in the restroom at Notre Dame?”
“We are fine! We did not do it!”
After dinner, we made our way to the steps of Sacre Coeur, the highest point in Paris, where we joined many others in dismay to watch the glow of a historical treasure burning into the night. We stayed up there until 11:00 p.m. to give our group their first glimpse of the twinkling Tour Eiffel, but the Tour Eiffel did not twinkle that night.
Notre Dame as seen from the steps at Sacre Coeur. Photo by Addison Mueller, a student on our tour.
Our initial fear for the structure of the cathedral gave way to concern for the bees of Notre Dame. We knew that three hives were kept on the roof of Notre Dame, but the roof was now gone! Fortunately, the hives were not kept on the very top of the cathedral (that would be a bit difficult to manage!), but rather, thirty meters lower on roof of the sacristy on the north side of the cathedral. The sacristy did not burn; however, Notre Dame beekeeper Nicholas Geant had concern for the temperature near the hives. The bees would be doomed by melting wax as much as by flame.https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/19/europe/notre-dame-bees-fire-intl-scli/index.html
Miraculously, the bees were not harmed by flame, heat, or water. Drone footage and video by those with access to the roof show the bees zipping hither and yon as usual. (Now the question is when the beekeeper will be permitted to tend to the hives. Spring is a very busy time for beekeepers as well as bees!)
The fire at Notre Dame affected, but did not diminish, our trip. We had planned to attend a Tenebrae service on Holy Thursday. Instead, we took our group to see the magnificent stained glass at Sainte Chapelle, built in the 13th century to house the Crown of Thorns relic which was rescued from the burning Notre Dame.
Sainte Chapelle
Streets near Notre Dame were blocked and some metro stops were closed, which made getting to dinner in the Latin Quarter less direct, but we had only one glitch, when our guide had us going the wrong direction on the metro! Good thing our group knew to follow the listing of metro stops posted on the train!
“Hey, Bibi! Aren’t we going the wrong way?”
“Oh! Yes! We are! Everyone off at the next stop!”
And just like that, our group of twenty-three hopped off and turned around to go toward the Latin Quarter. At dinner, our waiter told us of the cinders that fell just outside the restaurant when the spire of Notre Dame crashed in flames.
Our Seine River cruise detoured to avoid making its usual circuit around Notre Dame on Ile St. Louis, but we still got plenty of photos of a now-twinkling Tour Eiffel.
But amidst all the usual touristy stops, Beekeeper John and Beekeeper Wife Me were in search of honey. Our first stop, at the Opéra Garnier, yielded nothing. The honey from the hives on the roof of the Opéra had sold out quickly after last summer’s harvest.
Opéra Garnier, home of the Phantom of the Opéra and some beehives
We had more success in Giverny at Monet’s Gardens. John found a sticky jar of Normandy honey in the gift shop. I gave him grief for selecting a sticky jar, but he assured me that all the jars were sticky. Ah, what a homey touch! (I would have wiped the jars before selling them in a gift shop!)
Monet’s home and gardens in Giverny
My coup came at the unlikeliest of places–the Paris Catacombs. My students had added this to our itinerary and waited patiently–and even happily–in line for three and a half hours–yes, 3.5 hours–to climb down and up over 200 steps to see the bones of 6 million Parisians arranged in artistic patterns. The drama teacher sang creepy stage songs and multiple students simultaneously played their cellphone recording of another student’s laughter for a frighteningly good creepy atmosphere.
The Catacombs of Paris
We emerged from the Paris underworld and entered the gift shop, which was full of ghoulish humor and plenty of skulls on tee shirts, mugs, posters, magnets, you name it. And there it was…Le Miel de Paris! Paris honey from the beehives of Les Invalides gardens, L’Ecole Militaire, and the Musée D’Orsay. Sweetness, for sure! I was even willing to pay eighteen euros for the tiny jar.
Some people wonder why we would buy honey in Giverny and Paris when we have our own honey at home. It has to do with terroir. Just as wines vary not just by grape but by the environment in which they are grown, every honey tastes different. This French-teaching beekeeper wife came home from Paris with three new scarves, four new kitchen magnets, two jars of French honey, and a sigh of relief that the bees still buzz at Notre Dame.
Getting a new hive of honeybees established is exciting but sometimes exasperating. Lately it has been more exasperating. Last year was so exasperating that not one of our new hives managed to survive even the summer. We strongly suspect the problem was the queens. When they arrived last year, the queens were so small we could barely distinguish them from their attendants. (Yes, queen bees have attendants.) In hindsight, we question the regal stature of those “queens.” So this year, we ordered three new bee packages from a different supplier.
Two months after installation of this year’s packages, two hives are ready for second hive body boxes. The third hive shows very little activity. Mr. Beekeeper inspects the hive and finds very little brood and a dwindling number of bees. Exasperating.
But lo and behold! A queen cell! How exciting!
The hive has recognized its problem and has chosen to raise a new queen. Why last year’s hives did not do the same is a question worth pondering. Why this hive needs to re-queen is another question. Did the queen die? Was she ill? Was she…gasp…old? Was she just a poor lay-er? (This reminds me of my sister and her poor laying hens. She shrieked death threats at them and the very next day, they resumed laying.)
Queens cells take eight days to hatch from the time the cell is capped. About ten days after spotting the capped queen cell, we take a peek inside. The queen cell is now empty. We look for the queen. This is sort of like Where’s Waldo–find the one bee that is longer than the hundreds of other bees. Fortunately, the bees are only on a couple of frames, one of those frames is exclusively capped honey, and the other frame is where the queen cell was. And we find her!
Now we wait. The new queen needs two weeks to get established. She must exit the hive for mating flights with drones. There are drones visible in the hive and a few drone cells waiting to hatch. There are also plenty of drones buzzing around the other two hives. Our queen will not lack opportunity. And then she must get busy laying eggs. In about three weeks we will peek inside again, hoping to see lots of new brood cells.
Here’s hoping we will still be excited in three weeks.
It’s the end of March. We turned the clocks to “summer time” two weeks ago. Last week the vernal equinox made it officially spring. Today we took delivery of four new packages of bees.
And it’s snowing.
At 9 a.m. we head to Snyder’s Apiary in Whitehall, windshield wipers brushing snow from the glass. The car thermometer reads the outside temperature as 28 degrees. Out at the apiary, the countryside is dusted white and snow “flurries” blow sideways in the wind, whipping our faces. Beekeepers in winter coats greet one another with snide remarks about the great weather.
Why, you ask, are we getting bees when it is so cold outside? Because one orders bees weeks in advance and the Snyders drive down to Georgia on a scheduled day to pick up the orders in a truck. The bees have arrived. We have already paid for them. We must take them home.
BeeMan and Junior BeeMan carry 16 lbs of bees to the car.
Junior Beekeeper comes with us this morning. He helps carry the bees to the car. They take up the entire back seat. A few Klingons (“cling-ons”) try to hitch a ride too, but without the advantage of the warm group hug in the bee boxes, they won’t last long. Sure enough, back home, when the boxes are removed from the car, a few motionless bees remain on the back seat.
No, we don’t buckle them in.
Alas, it is too cold to put the new bees in their hives. Tomorrow will be better and the rest of the week will be perfect, with temps in the 50’s and sunshine. So for now, 58,000 girls (and a very few guys) will have a little sleepover in the mancave.
Today’s conditions for the snowbees.
Conditions downstairs are almost ideal. The mancave is heated only by a woodstove. With no fire going, the temp is 55. And the only light is from the door. With the overhead lights off, it is both cool and fairly dark. A few bees buzz at the screens of the boxes but, for the most part, the bees quietly huddle around the caged queen and a can of sugar water.
They can’t get out. Really.
4 pounds of bees
The bees can stay in the package boxes for up to five days. That includes the time they spent traveling from Georgia. Today is probably day three. If this cold weather were to last all week, we would have a dilemma on our hands. Fortunately, it won’t, so we don’t. BeeMan has enough to do prepping the hives for the new residents. Cleaning out the Room of Outer Darkness to install a temporary apiary is not on the Honey Do List.
Tomorrow the bees will be installed in their new homes–outside in the bee yard where they belong. Maybe then we can pronounce the beginning of spring.
It started as a joke at choir rehearsal. The bitter winter killed off all the bees and some wise guy suggested that we bring them inside for the winter.
Roars of laughter as we all contemplated John and the bees watching football in his mancave.
More laughter at the death glare I shot at my husband because I know the wheels are spinning in his brain. He has already been scouring the internet. How do bees survive the winter in places like Idaho? They bring the bees inside to potato cellars, which are dark (so the bees sleep) and a constant temperature (cool but not cold).
Alas, people are researching this. Granted, they are not researching it for the backyard beekeeper, but the information is out there…
Research is currently being conducted on controlled environment wintering. A temperature somewhere in the mid- or low-40° F (5° C) range, total darkness, ventilation to reduce excess moisture and humidity, and fall feeding of Fumidil B to suppress nosema disease are some of the major considerations. Provision for refrigeration should be considered also because sudden warming spells in late winter or early spring could result in undue restlessness and activity within the controlled-environment room. Colonies on flat-bed trailers that can be rolled outdoors or back into the room during warm or cold trends also would be desirable.
Unfortunately, we have such a space. It is the room of outer darkness. The entry is through the death trap known as “Dad’s Workshop.” Well, that’s what the sign over the door reads. It’s more like a holding bin for every man-toy needed to do any man task, a conglomeration of total disorganization amidst whiffs and piles of sawdust.
The room of outer darkness is a full cinderblock basement room under the side porch. In an earlier vision of our house, the side porch was going to be a library-sunroom but we eliminated it to save a few thousand dollars and because it was over-the-top not needed. However, by the time the room was cut from the project, the basement was already in place. (Don’t even ask.)
The room of outer darkness is underground with–duh–no windows, so it is dark. Being below ground, it maintains a constant cool temperature. It is ventilated, so air circulates. It could be a good wine cellar, except that we can’t keep wine in the house long enough to bother storing it way back there. And there is very real danger involved with walking through “Dad’s Workshop.”
So, is the outer darkness the right kind of “cool” for the bees? The main mancave, when the woodstove is not on, stays in the 50’s, which is great for using the treadmill but too warm for hibernating bees. Mr. Beeman would have to monitor the temp in the outer darkness to see how cool it really is. The last thing we would want is bees waking up to take a cleansing flight in the mancave while we are watching TV.
That raises another question. Can bees last an entire winter in a cool, dark room without occasional bathroom breaks? This winter was difficult, not just because of the bitter temperatures, but because of the extended stretch of days that never went above 50. Bees take advantage of balmy winter days to relieve themselves.
Would the bees be better off outside with better winter protection? Rusty, at Honey Bee Suite, successfully overwintered by using a quilt board and wood chips. Moisture in the hive is a bad as cold, and the woodchips successfully insulate and absorb moisture. Mr. Beeman might want to check out the following link:
Fortunately, Winter 2015 appears to be over. New bees arrive (we hope!) the end of this month. That gives Mr. Beeman an entire season to research the dilemma of Winter 2016 and to maybe clean out his shop and the room of outer darkness. Hmmm…if overwintering the bees inside gets him to clean out the basement, it just might be worth it.
You know it has been a long winter when the woodland critters start digging themselves paths through the snow.
I wish I had seen them with their little shovels!
This morning, I looked out the kitchen window to see not just prints but a regular daggone pathway leading from the house to a hydrangea bush. I figured it was a squirrel route, but squirrels (like my students) don’t have the attention span to dig a pathway. They just leap and scurry. No, this pathway must be the work of tunnel digging chipmunks. In summer, the rock wall by that hydrangea is one of the entrances to their Maywood Metro System. Yeah, I can just picture Simon, Theodore and Alvin (!!!!! ) with tiny little shovels working their way across the garden.
The snow pack reveals a lot about who is coming and going out there. For example, it revealed my brother-in-law’s visit to the front door the other day. It also reveals all the routes the squirrels take to get to the house. One route is across the patio and over the abandoned hot tub where they leap on the house and into the attic to party until spring. There are other routes that involve leaping, Tarzan-like, from trees to the roof.
Like the squirrels, the mice have no desire to shelter under a hydrangea bush in the Maywood subway system. No, they want the full comforts of home for as long as they can get away with it. Maywood Man keeps tossing snapped invaders and still they come. You’d think they would get the message that the one-way track of mouse prints leads to a cozy house of death.
Meanwhile, out yonder, the deer have gotten the message that we are turning the clocks forward tonight for Daylight Savings Time. They have been seen traipsing across the field, brown against white, as though spring is coming, it isn’t below freezing, and they aren’t walking through nine inches of snow. Is it the longer days or the lack of men sitting in trees that signals to them that it is safe to use their usual paths through the yard? It sure isn’t the weather.
So it’s March, and we have no idea who remains in the beehives because it has been too cold to look inside and they certainly have not been coming out to play in the snow. We know at least one hive is empty and suspect that a second was not going to last the winter. It would be great to find the two strong hives waiting for us when the temp breaks 50 later this week. Regardless of who has survived, we ordered four packages of bees for the new season.
Spring is coming. It always does. The chipmunks are ready. And maybe some bees.
The honey bees are busy with the last burst of blooming weeds that cause humans so much distress, so bee season has not quite ended here. However, we have not inspected the bees in awhile. A gorgeous summery weekend in early fall was a great opportunity. (Especially since the next two weekends will find us on the road.)
Lots of brood in Hive A.
The good news from the bee yard is that Hive A is strong and healthy. No honey from them, but we did not really expect any this first year. Hive D, the provider of our July harvest, has several frames of capped honey in the second honey box. Mr. Beekeeper decided to leave the honey box on a bit longer because the goldenrod is still blooming and (the real reason), because he did not bring the fume board with him to enable us to take the honey. So there’s some fun to look forward to…a little fall harvest. To those of you who are weeping desperate little tears hoping for honey, I’ll let you know what we have when we get it all into jars.
A peek at the fall harvest.
And now for the beekeeper worries…
Small hive beetles can ruin a hive and its harvest by breeding in the bee’s brood cells.
Small hive beetles were seen in Hive B. This is not ok. There are a variety of ways to eliminate them, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. On the chemical side, Checkmite+ is a varroa mite control that will also deal with beetles. It is authorized for use in Maryland. However, Mr. Beekeeper already bought Apistan for fall application against varroa this season, so we won’t be buying Checkmite+. It also is a heavy duty chemical attack and the beetles do not seem to be that prolific.
There are non-chemical options for physically trapping the beetles. Traps vary in design and placement in the hive. What they have in common is a physical trap for the beetles to fall into and something for them to drown in, like mineral oil, vegetable oil, or vinegar. One calls for a mixture of water, apple cider vinegar, sugar, and ripe banana peel. That sounds like too much work. I’m looking at getting a type that hangs between the frames, with a simple oil bath to drown them. I am fully aware that the bees may seal the thing with propolis, because they like to seal things with propolis. But these traps are cheap and disposable.
Propolis is the sticky stuff bees make to seal the hive. It’s a real pain to get off countertops.
The hive is dead and full of wax moths. They can do serious damage to the hive structure.
Hive C is, alas and indeed, dead. And completely ruined by wax moths. Mr. Beekeeper stopped up the entrance to prevent stray bees from going in and, more importantly, moths from coming out. There were many cocoons in the hive. He will be removing the hive and putting the frames (wrapped in plastic bags) in the freezer to kill off the moths before cleaning the frames and storing them in plastic for the winter.
What killed off Hive C? Was it the wax moths? Or was it a weak queen? This is a hive that survived last winter but has been (along with Hive B which has the beetles) slow to build all season. Did the queen die and the hive fail to produce its own queen? Did the moths get established in a weak hive or did they seize the opportunity to take over a dead one?
A puddle in the hive, most likely from condensation.
Hive D continues to thrive but opening the lid revealed a puddle of water, presumably from condensation from inside the hive. Some online searching offered many solutions for winterizing the hives to avoid condensation, but it is not winter yet. I do not have any ideas at the moment, but do know that condensation in the winter freezes, and cold, wet bees die. (Beekeepers, your suggestions are most welcome!) Aside from water on the lid, the bees were busy in the honey box and several frames have capped honey for us!
So many questions. Here’s one I know some of you are thinking: What else does she have in her freezer? And oh, the tales we could tell. But that’s another post!
Group work. What are they doing? Probably guessing what I’ve got in my freezer.
Slightly Off the Grid 