It’s been a busy spring, some of it my doing, some of it I was drafted into. I’m not protesting too much.
My dear husband Bill decided to take a beekeeping class to assist with the bee hive at our church. The first hive died last fall and he didn’t know why.
The class met for seven weeks at a school less than a mile away. Couldn’t be easier, except Bill had to be at a conference one week. He asked me to attend and take notes, assuring me this was right up my alley because this was the plant class–the main nectar and pollen sources from February through November. In other words, Skunk Cabbage to Asters.
Yes, I did like it. I knew most of the trees and wildflowers, and now I can’t pass one of them without thinking bees! Pollinators and their importance have been on my mind a lot the last year–and we have a wild hive at our cabin–so I decided to attend the remaining classes, including the hands-on field trip to the instructors’ bee yard.
The first stop was their honey house:
Making frames
Dealing with pests
Feeding
Then we suited up and went to the bee yard.
We get the smoker going and…
open a hive.
We all want to see a queen. These are split hives that the instructors are creating for the class participants, and we want to mark the queen, both to assure she is there and to make it easy to find her again. Each frame is inspected.
Nectar in the cells. The yellow is pollen.
Brood in the cells.
A queen cell that has hatched, likely taking a swarm with her.
The class splits up and smaller groups open their own hives.
My husband opens a hive and removes a frame heavy with honey covering both sides.
In an eureka moment he figures out why his hive died–its frames were full of honey, so full, the bees didn’t have room to raise brood in the fall. The fall workers died out, leaving no new bees to carry the hive through the winter. Sad, but now we now what to look for and what to do.
We find a queen–she moves so quickly I can’t get a photo, but our instructor catches her in a clear tube fitted with a sponge and plunger.
He works her to the top and places a dot on her back. The color indicates the year.
The class has been great. We head home with more confidence and supplies to wait for our bees to pass an inspection to assure they do not have American Foulbrood, a very persistent bee disease.
Our new hive starter arrived this week, a ‘nucleus hive’ or ‘nuc’ of five frames with a queen.
The ‘ladies’ as our mentor beekeepers called them, happily flew over to inspect the larger quarters, then the five nuc frames were moved. The rest of the hivebox is filled with a third capped honey in case they can’t collect enough and two-thirds empty frames for them to build out and raise brood. We have to keep a watch on how fast they are filling those cells and add another level.
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