Spring Is Here…maybe

Exciting news! all 4 hives survived the blah Vancouver winter. several inches of snow for a day or 2, and temperatures dipping to a mild -2 or so. March has been  rainy and there have been very few times when i could get into the hives and check out what is going on.This winter I treated the hives with Oxcalic acid vapor the same way as last years treatment. You can read all about it here- Things I did this winter while waiting for the bees – Part 2  There was a small amount of varroa on the drop boards, perhaps meaning that the earlier Formic Treatment  in the fall had worked.  This year the hives at home and the hives at Still Creek Community Garden got moisture quilts and country quilt wraps, as they had proved themselves last winter in the post-Making A Winter Quilt For The Bees 

March 10th, pollen patties were placed in the hives as the colonies seemed to be building and activity in all the hives was quite busy.

Busy Bees

A week later when i went to check the patties they was 1/2 of each of the 1 pound patties left and in the blue hive (at home) the bees were busy making burr comb on the top of the frames. I had left the eke on the top to make room for the patties but they probably didn’t need the extra space.

Next post: Building a 4 Compartment Queen Mating Box

Mite-away treatment

Here is what is happening as of Sept 22/2012 in my Hives.  I decided to treat my hives going into the winter with Mite Away II Strips.  These are Formic Acid soaked pads that release the vapor and kills the dreaded varroa mite. There is supposed to be a slight kill of the bees but this 7 day treatment is supposed to kill the mite in the capped cell.  I opened up the 2 hives in the Garden and put the pads in with no problems. I was wearing a vapor mask and using heavy duty protective gloves as the formic is very toxic (what do the bees think!!!) I treated 2 of the 3 hives at home but when i opened the last hive there were no bees!  I did find the queen wandering around with a few attendants.  Fearing that my hive might have succumbed to AFB i quickly closed the hive up and sealed it to prevent robbing. I have called the regional inspector but am still waiting on a call back.I hope it is not AFB as that could be devastating to the other colonys if it has infected them.

I check the mite boards below the screened bottom boards on the hives in the garden and this is what i saw on the 2nd day from what I think is one of the strongest colonies of them all

MITES

Here are all the boards after 1 week of treatment

Yellow hive at Still Creek

Blue hive at garden

Brown hive at home

Blue hive at home

So you can notice that each hive has quite a difference in the amount of mite drop. I was quite worried that the treatment was going to affect the bees but by the last day of treatment when i removed the dry formic pads the bees were coming and going like before.

Bees after treatment

All in all I think that the treatment is successful. This week I will be checking in to see if the queen has started laying again as the weather here as been amazing! Monday October 8th it was 20 Celcius, hot enough for shorts and t-shirts outside. Still no word on when the bee inspector will be coming so I still don’t know what to do with the empty hive.

On another totally side note, I grew quinoa this year and from one 11 foot row in the garden I managed to harvest about 1 kilo of quinoa! At close to 9 feet tall these plants were beautiful and easy to care for. Give them a try if you can

Quinoa harvest

Nuclear wax?

So I pulled of the honey supers from the 2 hives at the community garden and on one of the hives there was 1 super full of this crazy yellow wax. I have seen lots of wax but never this color before. The other hive has none of this wax at all. Any one know what this might be from?
It looks a bit green in these shots

East Van Bees hits the big times!

Well maybe not big time.  Long time friend Scotty Macdonald interviewed me a little while ago and wrote this piece for a skateboard website.

Check it out here:

 

 

Summer picture post

Man I have been busy this summer!   The bees are still getting the loving they so deserve even after trying to kill me while defending their home.  I’m not going to say much but just post a few pics and give you a note form of what has happened with the bees so far this spring/summer

1 Hive at home swarmed twice caught one of the swarms but they didn’t stay

both hives were queenless for a long time due to rainy weather but somehow they managed to collect a lot of honey as there was no brood to deal with

caught a swarm near the community garden and brought it home

Turns out the swarm was from one the hives from the community garden

Still Creek Garden hives

as of today I have 5 hives total and all have laying queens and there is a possibility of getting some honey from 2 of them. the other 3 should be able to rebuild so they can survive the winter.

I did manage to get a bit of honey from a few frames that the bees wont need

Early Season Harvest

Here is pic of a wonderful flower in the garden. Not sure what it is.

flower

Better post soon!  Have a great summer everyone

Missing Queens

Its been a while since I last posted and it isn’t because there isn’t anything happening with the hives or I have given up on the bees.  Life can just get way to busy sometimes and although there are 24 hours in the day it feel more like half that.

I have fully recovered from my almost deadly encounter with anaphylaxis and feel like the blame should be put on me not the bees as i wasn’t really prepared when I was near the hive.  3 days after coming home from the hospital one of the hives decided it was time to swarm, or as Phillip from MUDSONGS.ORG  so eloquently puts it  “they formed a splinter colony“

Swarm in a new box

My wife and I managed to capture the swarm and place it in a hive box but  when I returned from work the next day all but a handful of bees had disappeared and the box was empty. A small clump of bees were still in the tree and as my wife shook her head in worry I climbed up on my van and caught the remaining bees in a diaper bucket taped to an old curtain rod.

Bee Wrangler

I then tried a paper combine with those bees  and the remaining bees that were still in the original hive that swarmed. After 4 days I checked to see if they had combined and perhaps because there was so few bees in both boxes they hadn’t even chewed one hole in the paper. I left the top entrance open for the top box and the bottom for the bottom box in hopes that after we had returned from a trip to Vancouver Island they might combine after the new queen had hatched.

2nd swarm in same tree

Monday May 21 we returned to find a note on our door from a neighbor that said, “May 19th- Your bees have left their hive and are in our tree. You can come and capture them and their queen if you’d like”   I put on my suit and went out in the light rain (it had been raining for a few days) and attempted to capture the swarm, now in 3 distinct bunches, hanging in the tree. They were not as high as the previous swarms so it was not as hard to get them into the diaper bucket on pole contraption. I got the first bunch and put it in the Nuc box. The 2 remaining bunches were placed in the 2nd Nuc box and they managed to all walk across to the one with the queen in it.

2 nucs1 queen

As it stands now I have felt that I am a upstanding member of the “Bad Beekeepers Club” 

The hives at the community garden are doing well but that could change at any moment.  I guess that my first year beekeeping was a lot of luck and this year is payback and more like real beekeeping.  At home there are now 2 hives that are queenless due to the fact it wont stop raining so more than likely the virgin queens had no chance to get out and mate before they got to old to be viable. I have taken some frames of brood/eggs from the 2 hives at the garden and added then to the 2 hives in the hopes that they will create a queen cell and if the weather cooperates a queen.  I am feeling a bit discouraged but am hopefull the bees will know what to do.

Queenless?

Deadly Hobbys and Swarms

After work it is my usual routine to go look out my bedroom window and see what the hives are doing before getting dinner or heading out to a little league baseball game with my son and wife. Today I was planning on letting my wife put a honey super on the brown hive as I had a feeling that they needed the room. When I looked out the window I saw a familiar site of a very large swarm hanging up in the same tree that the previous swarms had landed in.   We had been pretty diligent in hive inspections and had done a pre-swarm split with the Blue hive and opened the Brown hives’ brood nest in put in empty frames with starter strips in the hopes of slowing or stopping the swarm urge until we could give them more room or do the split. Originally we were planning on doing the inspection/split on Saturday but something came up, something crazy.

swarm

I was tired Thursday evening so instead of going to a little league game I stayed home. Sometimes I like to go up on the roof and just watch the bees do their thing. Not sure why but this is very relaxing for me.  I headed up and noticed the outer lid on the blue hive (the queenless one) was off kilter so reached over and adjusted it.  A few bees started to buzz my face so I turned around and lowered my head while walking away from the back of the hive. Suddenly a bee gave up her life as it left its stinger in my eyelid. I had been stung before while working on the hives. On my hands, arms, leg and once on the crack on my posterior!  I have never had more than a local reaction and was only concerned that my eye was now going to swell up.  Inside the house grabbing an ice pack  I noticed my ears were getting warm and my skin was turning red. I don’t have allergys  so had never felt this feeling of wanting to scratch the insides of my incredibly itchy eardrums. There was no thought in my head that I was suffering from anaphylactic shock as my breathing was fine.  Calling my wife to let her know  was probably the best thing I did that evening. I wasn’t doing to bad and told here i would call if it got worse. I never called but in her amazing ability to know if things are not ok she called and I asked her to come home from the game down the street.

By the time she arrived about 5-10 minutes later I had vomited twice and then proceeded to pass out on the kitchen floor. 911 was called, I came to and for some reason had to go into the bathroom where I passed out again. The paramedics  arrived shortly after, they couldn’t read my blood pressure and gave me a shot of Epinephrine to get it going.  Seems that the common preconception about anaphylactic shock is that it affects your breathing. It might but it also can affect your blood pressure causing death. I spent the next 7 hours at the hospital because of the possibility of returning symptoms.  Probably one of the scariest moments of my life lying on the floor wondering what the hell was going on.

If you are deciding to take up beekeeping or are a beekeeper already don’t think because you never had a bad reaction to a sting that you won’t.  Carry or have an EpiPen auto epinephrine injector close by. Don’t wait to call for assistance if you feel at all not normal.  It might save your life.

More on the swarm in the next post, and a very public thank you to my wife for letting me continue to keep bees (she must really love me!)