Midsummer Bee Diary

August 2, 2014

We went to visit Sophia, another urban beekeeper.  She has two top bar hives.  Top bar hives are used in warmer climates such as Africa but we are experimenting with them here in Canada. Usually they don't have foundation and only a bar on top with no sides.  To harvest the honey, the comb has to be cut from the bar and crushed and strained like I do.  They are a bit more fragile since the comb is only attached on the bar whereas mine can be attached to the sides of the frame as well.  One of Sophia's hives is a hybrid in that the original colony was built on frames with foundation.  She is working on switching them to pure top bars over the summer.

Hybrid top bar hive

Traditional top bar hive with slanted sides and Hybrid

Going into a top bar hive is less stressful for the bees since the whole hive doesn't have to be taken apart like mine.  We are not sure how they over-winter in our cold winters so that will be interesting to see.  Her bees looked very busy and happy and have a beautiful pond to get their water and a garden full of vegetables and flowers to pollinate.

Frog in the pond

August 3, 2014  Sunny, humid, 24 degrees centigrades

Paul joined me in the bees today!  I had a packed agenda for the visit.  I needed to see if the queen in No Name was laying.  I had decided if it wasn't working, I would amalgamate her with Olivia, where she originally came from.  I showed Paul the difference between workers and drones, the different capped brood, capped honey and we also found bees with deformed wings from a virus.

Paul and I looking at the frames in No Name

There was no sign of laying, no eggs and no larva.  We found many empty frames and we decided that we probably would be amalgamating her.  Then on the second last frame that we inspected we found...them!  Two queens on the frame...one on one side and one on the other.  This is clearly the summer of double queen hives!  We decided to take one box away from the hive to make it a smaller hive and make sure that the bees weren't overwhelmed by too much space.  We looked at a comb being newly built by the workers.  The workers hang on to each other to start building.  This is called festooning.

Looking at the bees festooning.

Close up of festooning.

Paul and I then went into Olivia.  We saw lots of new larva, capped brood and some eggs.

Looking at a frame of brood and bees.

Paul wanted to see the whole hive so we went through every single box to the very bottom.  It all looked great though we never found either queen...you might remember that Olivia also is a dual queen hive...or was, who knows?  Down at the bottom on the screen we found a large pile of dead bees.  The box directly above the screen was all empty comb.  It is a mystery to me exactly what happened.  We cleaned it up, took the bottom box out of the hive and hoped that all would be well.  It has been raining a fair bit and perhaps there was too much humidity in the hive.

While we were working in the bees, Paul's son, Kai was busy too!

Kai with Smokey

August 4, 2014

I checked on Mab just to make sure that she didn't have the same problem as Olivia but I didn't find many dead bees at the bottom at all.  I gave  Mab and Olivia each a box with empty frames so they can start storing extra honey.  I have harvested about 8 frames from the three hives but I will leave them alone now to store for the winter.

August 10, 2014

Today was No Name's last chance as far as I was concerned.  I planned to go into her, see if any laying was going on and if not, into Olivia she was going.  I went through this hive this morning.  She was very noisy and the guards were being very aggressive.  I am used to gentle bees so I knew something must be awry.  I found some small capped queen cells so I figured that she was queenless again.  Why they thought they had enough time this summer to start over again, I don't know!  I got ready to amalgamate her with Olivia.  I got some newspaper and opened up Olivia.  I laid the newspaper over top and prepared to put No Name's boxes on top.   I would slice some slits into the newspaper with my hive tool and the bees would slowly eat away at the paper until the two hives become one.

To make sure I didn't add chaos into Olivia, I went through the frames again and proceeded to take out the capped queen cells.  I was checking the frames thoroughly when what did I find?  The two queens! They were on the same frame, one on each side.  Now I had to make a decision.  Do I kill the two queens or do I put the hive back together?  I did not have the heart and I figured we still have about 4 weeks left of the summer so I put her back together and I wished her well.

Now she/they need a name.  How about Queen Gemini for the twin sister queens?  Any other suggestions?

Happy August!