And Then There Were None

HIVE INSPECTION: 05/09/21

SIGH. I’ll get to the Spice Girlz in a bit.

NUC HIVES B & D and SPLIT HIVE C had pretty decent activity in and out of the front entrances. The goal today for these hives was to do a quick feeder box swap* on each of the hives, remove the queen excluder on each hive, and take off the top supers. We learned that you don’t want to put a queen excluder in between two boxes unless there is at least a fist sized area of drawn comb in one of the super frames. (#NewbieBeekMistake #1639). We also learned that depending on your focus — and ours this year is growing our bee hives (vs. making honey) — supers shouldn’t go on unless the bottom box is at least 80% capacity. (#NewbieBeekMistake #1640) Hence the need to remove our supers.

SPLIT HIVE C had enough bees in the bottom box that we replaced the empty super for another deep. We had a heavy ant infestation, but only in this hive which is quite puzzling. Obviously they are attracted to the sugar water. They were in the top feeder box and under the lid — all places where the bees don't really have have access. We brushed off the ants from all the boxes as much as we could and changed out the inner cover with a newer one that is painted (so it’s sealed a bit better). We also treated the legs of our stand with Tanglefoot Insect Barrier but are also looking for alternate remedies. I have heard ground cinnamon and diatomaceous earth work, of course as long as it doesn’t rain.

Moving on to our NEMESIS…

We took a deep breath and braced ourselves to open HIVE A: The SGs. They went through ALL of their sugar water, which shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the sheer number of bees in this hive. We were prepared to remove the top super - given our new found knowledge - but they had already started to draw comb so we left it. These Girls are nothing if not productive. [Wish they could write code for native Apple applications. (#nerdtalk)] Moving on to the second super that previously had brood and (to our big surprise last week) a queen. We saw capped brood** and a lot of empty cells. We weren’t too concerned because most brood activity will be in the deep box below, but we made sure and looked at every frame to see what was going on. When we get to the deep box, we started pulling and inspecting frames from the middle and worked our way outward. Bees are very predictable in that the innermost frames always have the greatest quantity of brood (or honey) on them.

First frame: No eggs. No larva. Only capped brood.

Second Frame: No eggs. No larva. Only capped brood.

Third Frame: No eggs. No larva. Only capped brood.

etc etc etc

Uh oh.

HIVE A, that was literally flush with queens last weekend, appears now to be without any queen at all. 😳🤯

I honestly expected that one of the queens would have swarmed with half (or some) of the bees. That scenario did not play out, and there’s really no way to know exactly what happened. Perhaps in the Battle Royale one queen was killed and the other injured to the point of no return. Perhaps both were like “Nope, I’m outta here. Y’all bitches are on your own.” Sadly, it will remain a mystery.

RIP, her majesties. (Que: a tiny bugle playing Taps.) You were taken too soon.

During our inspection, we did see a couple of supersedure cells (queen cells the colony will make when a queen is missing or aging), so if I can’t get a new queen ASAP we are hoping one will emerge soon. A new queen usually emerges on day 16, eight days after a queen cup is capped. We *should* know something by our next inspection, but I find myself saying this every week.

[Supersedurecell is circled above)

If the queen does not emerge and I can’t get a queen, we have a big problem. There are no eggs or larva at all left in the hive that can be turned to a queen, so we will be forced to try and divvy up the frames and bees amongst the there other colonies and hives and try splitting those hives at a later date.

And there are still A LOT OF BEES. More bees than I have ever seen.

The Spice Girlz hives looked straight out of a horror movie when we reassembled it. 😳

I wish it wasn’t so, but it appears the saga of the Spice Girlz continues.

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* In preparation for today’s beekeeping adventure, Robbin built a few top feeder boxes. We were using supers which are quite a bit taller than the feeder, but we anticipate needing our supers for honey or more brood this year. We also took this opportunity to move away from spray paint (which in hindsight was probably not the best choice for bee boxes) that was not holding up to the elements well, to low VOC exterior paint that should weather the Texas heat much better. We are still color coding the boxes and I will repaint the stack of these supers to match the new color scheme of their respective hives.

**Fascinating tidbit for the day: A larva starts out curled at the bottom of a cell (think about what a grub worm looks like and you can picture a bee larva) and once it gets big enough it stretches out lengthwise in the cell and begins to spin a cocoon. At this stage the nursery bees will cap the cell and the lava moves to the pupa stage where it starts looking more bee-like.

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