Steady as She Goes

Donna Brown
May 31, 2021
5 min read

Updated: Jul 30, 2021

We started using tables to set gear and tools on. Two words: Game. Changer.

HIVE INSPECTION 05/31/21

Due to the massive amounts of rain the past couple of weeks we were not able to check on the Girlz for over 2 weeks. Luckily we saw a break in the forecast Saturday afternoon and pointed Henry (our 17 year old Ford F-250) NW.

Now that we have five hives (OMG 5!!) we plann to divvy up the inspections moving forward. I purchased some duplicate equipment like a heavy-duty multi-function hive tool (that looks like I could build a shopping mall with it, if only given this tool, a few planks of wood, some twine and a Q-tip), a frame holder (that hangs off of the hive box and allows you to hang up to 3 frames at a time), and a frame grip (that helps pull frames out of the hive box; especially when the frames are kinda stuck to the box, or each other, with propolis).

And now with the Cadillac of smokers (left) in our toolkit, we are well armed to tackle the day’s work.

[Quick note: Using smoke has two benefits: 1. smoke masks alarm pheromones that are sent out by the guard bees that alert all other bees to get ready to attack and defend the hive; and 2. It fools the bees into thinking there is a forest fire nearby so they gorge themselves on honey in preparation of fleeing their hive. This also helps keep them calm.]

A first glance, with bated breath, revealed activity at all hive entrances. Sigh of relief followed.

Robbin started on HIVE D, and I on HIVE E. As always, we wanted to check sugar water levels, stored resources of honey and pollen, and look for eggs and larva — especially in HIVES A and E where we installed new queens.

HIVE E did not touch their sugar water at all. It’s not too surprising given that we put a pretty full super on top of the deep brood box when we made the split.

Another tool — called a frame spacer — has recently made its way onto my radar. This tool spaces frames every inside a box when you don't run the full amount of frames. Why would you not pack the box full of frames? Two reasons: for brood boxes, you leave one frame out so it's easier to move and remove the frames for inspections. For honey supers you would think 10 is better than 9 because, duh, more honey. BUT I found out that if you evenly space 9 frames instead of 10 (not smooshed together like in a brood box) within the box the bees build out much deeper comb (because there is more room between the frames), so each cell contains more honey. Supposedly this actually yields more honey than in 10 frame supers. Whoa. Every day I'm learning. So for in HIVE E I removed a frame from the honey super to test the theory. The frame did have a bit of honey on the frame so we propped it up on top of HIVE A for any bee to get and take back to their respective hives.

Making my way downward through the honey super, I was a bit surprised to see they had not built out more than the original three frames with which we started the hive. I didn’t see much in the way of new brood, but I was ecstatic to see larva and more happy to spot her majesty the Queen. I removed the empty queen cage and pulled the sugar water box off the top and just left them with their stores of honey.

A note about sugar water: I am a member of MANY (too many?) beekeeping groups on Facebook. This community is always happy to share information and help new beekeepers with all their myriad of questions and troubleshooting. Something I learned in the past two weeks: bees will actually store and cap sugar water like it’s honey. One beek (short for “beekeeper”) said he added a drop of blue food coloring to his sugar water saying, “if the honey is blue it’s not for you.” MIND. BLOWN. Looks like we won’t be harvesting honey (even a little) this year after all. 😢 Giving sugar water consistently is very important to help new hives jump start their colony and helps the bees drawn out comb. This is pretty much where we are with 4 out of 5 hives. The Spice Girlz always have their own agenda!

Why do bees cap honey? Forager bees bring nectar back to the hive in their stomach, regurgitate it into a cell and add an enzyme called invertase. This enzyme helps break down the nectar into 2 simple sugars. Nectar is 70% water and honey is less than 20% so it needs to dehydrate a bit and ripen. The bees will help dry out the nectar by fanning the cells to aid in water evaporation. Once the nectar is ripe, it contains so little water that microbes are no longer present and is then capped. The capping keeps it clean from dirty little bee feet, creates pathways to other uncapped cells and makes sure it doesn’t run out of the cells on really hot days.

We made it through HIVES B through E in record time. We managed to find new larva in all hives, though not as much as we would have liked. My gut feeling is the queens should be much more prolific right now given the season, but these are ALL fairly young queens and perhaps they are channeling their inner Stellas, just getting their grooves back.

Strangly the girlz in HIVE D built out drone cells along the bottom of one of the frames. I don't believe I have ever seen this before. We added a new deep box to this hive since we were more than 80% full in the first brood. They really didn't touch there water but we refilled it anyway.

Moving to the SGs, HIVE A, we removed the empty (yay!) queen cage and looked for eggs and/or larva. We did see tiny new larva so the matriarch is alive and laying. We added another deep brood box and removed the sugar water since they had not touched it.

A few general observations:

I am a tad concerned of the spotty brood pattern we saw in a few hives but there is nothing we can do but keep an eye on them. The hives have a way of righting themselves. They have only been doing this for 100 million years. :)
The Spice Girlz are FAR less spicy! We can enter the ranch without incident and even after inspecting the hives, we can drive by and leave without incident. This is probably due to the fact they are no longer as HANGRY and new genetics (though it might even bee too early for that).
We are currently only feeding Hives B, C and D