Switching some boxes around and moving our swarm to a permanent home

07-28-13

I'm not gonna say a whole lot right now. I'm too tired. I just wanted to get these videos up. I'll let them speak for themselves

I'm hoping now that both hives will stay strong and use the next month or two to build up and fill out at least a second box. We'll just have to wait and see!

 

 

 

Removing a swarm from our bait hive.

07-26-13

Here's the videos we took when we moved the swarm from our bait hive into a standard Warre box. We'll join up that Warre box with the new hive we built at some point in this next week.

Please be aware that we're totally new to beekeeping. These videos are not intended to instruct you on the correct way to do things. We're totally learning as we go. We expect that you'll learn just as much from our mistakes as we do from our successes. Also know that not all the information given in the videos may be technically accurate. Please verify anything you hear on this blog with reputable sources before taking it for gospel truth. Finally, we are doing this as a project with my two boys (ages 8 and 6 when we started this spring), so I apologize for the shaky videos, etc, but it is what it is.

All that said, enjoy the videos!

Warre hive inspection post ant problem / third box addition

07-15-13

It's been about two weeks since we removed the ants from our hive (quilt) for the second time and about five days since we added the third box. We stopped out at my parents' to check on the bees and the two bait hives. I'm pleased to report no ants in any of our hives and the bees have also actually started building comb in the third box too!! Crazy bees. Doing things on their time and not mine!

When we took one of the two boxes from our bait hive to place on our main hive, we took all the top bars from the bait hive as well (I only had 9 top bars in it to begin with). So that bait hive has been "top bar-less" for about two weeks. We brought some new top bars out to put in it, but they didn't have beeswax strips on them yet. Here are the boys and their friend putting some melted beeswax on the top bars.

After painting our top bars with beeswax and installing them in our bait hive, we checked on the main hive as well. You can see that video at the end of the post. I do have a question for all of you out there in the internet world, does anyone know what all those little white dots on the plexi-glass in box are (see video)?? I have NO idea. I'm going to try to look it up online, but if anyone out there knows and wants to share their valuable knowledge, I'm all ears! Enjoy the video:

Adding a third box to our Warre Hive

07-10-13

Bees are interesting creatures. It has been said that bees are not domesticated, just that they allow us to live with and interact with them. I have found this summer that is very much the case. When we first installed our (small!) package of bees, they took off like wild fire. They filled the first box in  what seemed to me like record time. So, at that point we moved a small bit of comb down to the second box to try to entice them to continue building comb downward. But when we did that, it seemed like they just stopped. No following the will of their beekeeper. No nothing. For weeks. The top box was completely full, but every time we looked into the second box, just nothing. Then, after about a month of nothing, which was a little less than two weeks go now, they finally started building in the second box. And when they finally started building it was like wild fire again. They've got the second box probably half full right now, and my dad called me to let me know the bees were covering the outside of the hive and flying around the entrance "like a cloud."  I knew from my reading that many times on hot days, bees in Warre hives will beard around the entrance (come outside the hive and just sit on the outside of the hive). Unfortunately, they also do this when they're preparing to swarm. Because the last few days have actually been COOLER and LESS humid that last week, I was terrified they had swarmed. Thankfully, when we got out there the following day, it appeared there were just as many bees coming and going and there was still some bearding going on. So I don't think they've swarmed. Anyway, with the second box half full and the bees bearding, we decided it was definitely time to add a third box.

I went out to grab one of the extra boxes we had used as a bait hive (one of the two boxes stacked together, you can see that in this post). When we got out the bait hive, we found more ants. I guess we need cinnamon out here too!

 

 

Long story short, we cleared out the ants from the bait hive, took one of the two boxes to use as the third box on our hive, and left the other out as a bait hive (thoroughly doused in cinnamon). Here's the video:

 

Ants and wasps and and broken screws, oh my!

06-29-13

It's been a while! I'm sorry I've been so busy; there's a lot we need to catch up on! As you can see in the video at the end of this post, we've got good news and bad news. The good news is that the bees have finally moved down into the second box. I was getting worried there for a little bit.

The bad news is that ants have invaded the quilt. As far as I could tell by peeling back a bit of the top cloth, they're not in the hive itself, just the quilt. This is still annoying, however, as they're nasty little buggers that bite when they get on you (you can see in the video, I thought I had my first bee sting, but it was just an ant that crawled up my back). They're also pulling out all the quilt material (sawdust) and dumping it all over the ground. This is not good cause we need that there to insulate the hive and help pull the moisture out.

After some research online, I found out that ants HATE cinnamon, but the bees don't mind it. We've decided to use cinnamon around the base of the hive, mix a bit with petroleum jelly to create another barrier around the bottom box, and finally added some cinnamon directly to the quilt material as well.

Another bit of bad news is the fact that there are paper wasps that decided the roof made a convenient home. You can't see it in the video, but our assistant beekeeper (my dad) used a yard stick to smash the wasps nest. She hasn't been back since!

The final bit of bad news was the fact that two of the screws holding the roof and mouse board together actually broke. So we need to take that apart and put new screws on. Thankfully my dad had a box of these screws lying around, which we used to fix it all up. These short deck screws are actually what I was looking for in the first place when we built the hive. I just never found them. If you decide to take it upon yourself to build a hive at some point DEFINITELY use these short deck screws and not the generic zinc plated wood screws.

Thanks for reading! After much beating around the bush, here's the video...

06-30-13

So, I was back out at my parents' house the day after we cleaned all the ants out. Guess what? More ants!! Figured out we didn't put the petroleum jelly/cinnamon mixture on the straps holding our hive together and that's where the ants were crawling in and out. Here's another short video explaining everything.

Inspection 16 days after installation. Probably the last big manipulation for a while.

5-27-13
Well, here's the most intensive hive inspection/maintenance we've performed yet and, quite possibly, the most intensive we'll get all summer. Warre advocated for minimal hive inspection/maintenance, and that's probably what shoot for here on out. Honestly, that's one thing I appreciate about Warre's design. I don't have to constantly be running out to make sure everything is going okay. In fact, as you'll see in this video, we have a bit of cross combing starting in the top box (more on that after the video), but with this design, you really manipulate boxes, not individual combs, so I'm really not going to worry about it that much. Plus, with the observation window built into each box we've made so far, we can at least observe them a little bit that way. It's unlikely we'll move or inspect any more comb until we harvest an entire box at the end of the summer (hopefully!) or next year (more likely).

So, as you can see in the video, there was a bit of cross combing. Here's a picture that shows it in a little more detail. The dashed line is likely the first comb they built and is dead center. Everything to the right and left, as you can see, is shifted toward that bar. There's an empty space on the right that I'm not sure what the bees will do with now and a little bit of cross-combing on the left as you can see in the circle.

Here's some close ups of the cross-combing and the emptey space.

5-29-13
So after the video was taken (on a Monday) I went home and respaced the bars in the box that used to house the jar feeder. I ended up putting nine bars in (which I have seen on some webpages/discussion boards before, see Warre Top Bar Spacing and Bar Spacing on a Warre Hive) because that's what it appears the bees were trying to do. I'll just oblige them, right? Give the bees what they want! I came back on Wednesday, switched out the empty bottom box for the new box with the nine bars, and we'll see what they do now.

In doing this, I also changed how I had the bars spaced and secured. In the pictures above you can see I used a 1 inch wire nail that, more or less, acts as a pin to keep the bar in place (I drilled the hole it rests in larger than the nail so it just slips in and out). This was rather difficult to measure and drill all the holes, plus you can't change it once it's done, and I've already lost a bunch of nails. While researching the whole Warre bar spacing question, I discovered this amazing blog Bee Crazy which had an ingenious approach to bar spacing. As you can see in the following picture, Sam just screwed a small spacer screw to the side of each top bar. By screwing them futher in or out, you can adjust the distance between the bars. Brilliant! Oh, and FYI, Sam is in Canada and has used Kenyan Top Bar Hives and now Warre Hives. Yay for more information on keeping top bar bees in cold climates!

Lighting our smoker for the first time and our first beehive inspection 05-15-13

After soccer on last Wednesday, we stopped by Grandpa's to check on our bees for the first time. We passed our first test (lighting the smoker and getting it to stay lit) and were surprised by how active the bees have been. Whoever came up with the phrase "busy as a bee" wasn't joking! Look at how much they've accomplished in just four days!

In addition to what you can see in the video, check out the picture below. I wasn't sure how much foraging they'd be doing with Minnesota's late spring, but the bees have already found flowers and are bringing in pollen. We saw bees with yellow, orange, and white pollen.

Again, sorry about the picture quality, but in this picture you can see a little more of the comb coming down from the top bars. You can also see from the lines where the bees are, in other words, where there's more comb coming down that you can't see.

Pretty amazing work for only four days in a late spring!

Bee Day Videos 05-11-13

Well, I finally figured out how to use Windows Live Movie Maker to edit these clips together. Here's the video of our first ever experience with live honey bees. I'll pretty much let it speak for itself. Just be warned, however, the videographer was a eight year old boy. It is, at times, shaky. And, at others, not even pointing in the right direction. Still, I think it captured the day quite well, and I can watch it over and over again just as enthralled as when I was actually there with the bees.

More videos coming soon. Here's the first...