Anticipating a Swarm

The last time we checked the hive at Clarence Brown's, it was clear the bees have decided to swarm. But, like the time before, they have built the swarm cells in a way that is not going to make it possible to split the hive. My strategy is to ready a new hive and then to either catch the swarm if Clarence sees them.

I spent the day cleaning an old hive body. I scraped the insides to clean out bugs and propolis. I scrubbed the insides with a mixture of diluted chlorine bleach then hosed it out. It needed a new coat of paint. It's not my favorite hive body, but it's the only one I have left. Brushy Mountain is out of stock for hive bodies and bottom boards. I put it next to the other hive at Clarence's.



I have a Plan B if Clarence doesn't catch sight of the swarm when it leaves the hive or see it when it land on its temporary perch. I had checked out Brushy Mountain, but they are way behind on shipping and couldn't guarantee that I would get a trap and lure in time. There were other bee supply outfits in Florida and Minnesota, but the cost was going to just be too much.

I starting thinking and came to the conclusion that a swarm trap is just a box where bees would feel comfortable. Doug Greene had bought some pheromone lure for swarms, so I bought a vial off him.
Evidently the way this works is you just put the lure in the box. You don't uncork it. At least that's what the instructions I read online said. I'll take them at the word.

I put the vial in a cardboard nuc box with six frames in it. (I cross-wired some frames I got from Doug Shaw this morning.) Clarence and I discussed where to put the nuc box. It is waxed and would probably repel water, but I would just as soon keep it dry; rain is forecast for the next week and I'll be out of town attending a conference. We ended up putting it in his wood shed. It is rather close to the existing hives, but they may find it easy enough. If we spot them in a tree on in a bush, we will use the nuc box to catch them. At least that's the plan. Things never go as you anticipate.

Woops

So, the guys who know told me. My strange species of bee were my own drones. There were just so many of them! I'd never seen anything like it before. Not afraid to be embarrassed or admit my mistakes. Woops!

Blue Hive Under Attack

The blue hive is under attack!

I noticed yesterday that there were larger bees going into and out of the blue hive. I checked it again today and got stung away from the hive. The bees are definitely still not happy. This is the one that we just requeened. It has plenty of honey, but also has the weakest defenses. The yellow hive next to it has no honey to speak of and is much stronger with an active queen.

I got some old queen excluder from Doug Shaw, who bought some from someone going out of the business. It is old and metal, so it has little practical value (we both like the newer plastic type much better). He was willing to sacrifice it for me to see if it would work keeping the other species out.

I put it up, sticking it to the front of the hive with old wax. It is definitely working keeping the invaders out. (The hive body that has the excluder on it is yellow, but this is the blue hive.) The invaders are dark and have no stripes. You can see in the photo that they are much larger than the honeybees from the hive.

Tomato Transplants

I was reading Brett Markham's Mini-Farming this morning. I got the book from the library because the librarian was just bringing it out to put a brand new copy on the shelf. I realized that the tomatoes that I have not yet got into the garden (because my new raised beds are not finished, which is because kids are costing us money for school and an upcoming marriage) are suffering from nutrient deficiencies. Specifically, the underside of the leaves are purple which suggests a lack of phosphorus. So, my morning task was to get the remaining tomatoes into larger pots.

I'm writing this just so I can remember what I did. I'm not sure this will work well, but I intend to learn from everything I do. My goal was to get the seedlings into pots that had high quality soil, planted deeply enough to encourage root growth from the stem.

I used left over plastic pots and filled each with composted horse manure and brought them to the garden where the other tomatoes are planted. The manure is well composted.

I added a handful of 10-10-10 and a handful of dolomitic limestone. I put the mixture into the garden bed and mixed it with about an equal about of soil. My goal with this step was to mix the compost, soil, fertilizer and lime so that the soil in the pot would be more or less just like the soil they will ultimately end up in.

This had some added benefits as I saw it.

First, because I used soil in front of each of my 18 tomato plants, rotating around the raised bed with each plant, I was able to examine each. Some are still small. Others are growing pretty nicely now. One even had a flower. I picked off suckers. Second, I was able to do a little bit of weeding. Because of all the rain lately, those stray grass and weed seeds are starting to sprout. Third, because I added a full pot of compost, mixed it, and then pulled out a pot full of mixture, the raised bed benefited with a little added fertilizer, lime, and compost.

I originally had 24 Marglobe seedlings and 12 Brandywine seedlings. One of my 18 Marglobes that was planted in the raised bed died. I replaced it earlier with another seedling, leaving 5 unplanted Marglobes. One of the Brandywine pots actually had two seedlings growing in it. I plucked one out when I was potting them, but decided to go ahead and put the plucked seedling in a pot. I don't know if it will survive, but if it does, I retain my 18-per-bed system.

Requeening the Hard Way

I woke up at 3:30 this morning thinking about how to do the requeening of the blue hive successfully. I think I eventually went back to sleep because it was 6:30 when I noticed things again. When it was time to get up, I was a bit groggy, but requeening pretty much followed what I had worked out in those sleepless hours.

The first thing on the list was to get frames ready. I had 6 medium super frames ready to go. I made one of my unused supers into a 9-frame; so I had three to do. I fixed up two that had previously been destroyed by wax moths, installing new foundation in each. I had an unused frame that just needed foundation.

I also decided earlier that I needed to replace the brood frames Doug had lent me with frames that had cross wires strengthening the foundation. I had spent a little time in the mornings the past few weeks building frames and putting in the crimp wire. So I just needed to install foundation, which I did.

I came home from work for lunch and Doug Shaw and I followed my plan. Doug and I totally disassembled the blue hive. I poked the little hole needed in the candy of the queen cage and took the least used frame from the original brood box and pushed the cage into the upper part. I took out a frame out of the yellow hive that had brood on it and replaced it with one of the frames I had just built. I added the brood frame to the bottom brood box of the blue hive, next to the frame where the new queen was placed.


Then the fun started. We took out each frame and shook the bees to the ground. The theory Larry Tate told us was that if we had a laying worker bee, she would be too heavy to fly back into the hive. I am pretty sure there wasn't a live queen. The bees had tried everything they could to make a new one, swarm cells and emergency queen cells. But since only drone brood had been laid, unless mother nature was really going to play a trick, they weren't going to become queens. We destroyed those cells.

Then we started the process of putting everything back together. I replaced the frames Doug had lent me with frames that had cross wires in the lower brood box. We packed the upper brood box so that the honey laden frames were in the middle. I added a new super because there was a fair amount of honey already in the old super and added an Imirie shim between them.

About this time, the bees were plenty riled. (I'm sure this is good English!) Kathy, who took the photos, started getting hit from about 20 feet away and ended up running around the garden. (She had no veil or suit on.) That part was fun to watch.

The bees quickly found their home and moved in. I went to visit after work. Things are now settled down.

Queenless Hive

It was a day to go into the hives. Doug Shaw and I went into the hive at Clarence Brown's. The super is pretty much full of honey, so I added another. We checked. There are now at least 4 swarm cells developing. Just like last time, they are in dangerous places with a lot of burr comb built around them. I am just going to let them swarm this time.

I looked at the yellow hive, the one in which we caught the recent swarm. It seems to be doing nicely. The queen is laying and there are already capped brood.


The blue hive on the other hand was just plain nasty. I had to put on gloves. I could only see a little brood and the only thing that was capped were drone cells. I either have a drone laying queen, or a worker turned queen who is laying unfertilized eggs. They have put away a lot of honey, but there was so much in the brood box that there was just a wee little space for any more.


I did this inspection on my own and then called Doug. We called Larry Tate (actually talked to his wife, Jenna) and arranged to get a new queen. Larry suggested shaking all the bees in the hive out on the ground. A laying worker will be too heavy to get back in the hive. We couldn't see a queen.

We also added a new brood box to the bottom. There is no drawn comb, but a new queen will need space and the existing brood box is essentially a super it has so much hone in it.

Small Things

It's that time of the season when you mostly watch and wait. And I haven't done much. So there has been little for me to report about.

My tomatoes are looking weak. I expected them to start growing vigorously once planted in their beds, but they are, generally speaking, just limping along. There are a few that have started to grow a little. Several have started looking very spindly. One was so bad off that I replaced it with a new seedling from the greenhouse. I don't understand the problem. There are a lot of things that I could have done wrong and I have thought extensively about it. I have no answers yet.

The potatoes are, for the most part, doing well. I still pick off Colorado Potato Beetles every day. There are some plants, maybe six or seven of the Yukon Gold, that have not thrived. The Pontiac Red all seem to be doing quite well.

The onions are growing well. I haven't seen them start to bulb yet, but I have a month left to go.

I started turning the compost. I have added a significant amount of water to keep the composting going. In two of the three bins at least, that seems to be helping.

I transplanted three of the cucumber plants I started from seed into a strawberry patch where strawberry plants hadn't made it. The strawberries are starting to develop. I am plucking off any flowers I see until they get well established.

Full Barrels

We got over an inch of rain. The barrels are now full.

About 3/8"

We finally got a somewhat decent rain last night. Nice thunder, too.

It is hard for me to measure without a specifically designed rain gauge, but I estimated about 3/8" based on what was in the container I set out on the deck.

It yielded about 95 gallons in the rain barrels. I figure 1 inch on the measuring stick equals roughly 10 gallons in the system and I got about 9 1/2" more in the barrels. I am still trying to figure the efficiency out, but it appears that roof catchment area results in about a 250:1 benefit, 250 gallons for 1 inch of rain. Basically, a little still yields a lot. The barrels are not yet full.

The plus on this bit of rain is that I can take Sunday off from having to water the garden. I like that.

Lament

Today was a day to see the hives. It started well, but unfortunately ended badly. I don't mind documenting my failures. This was one.

The hive at Clarence Brown's was crowded and had a swarm cell two weeks ago Sunday when we looked at it. My goal today was to verify that the swarm cell had a queen larva and get ready to split the hive tomorrow if that was the case.


Doug Shaw and I opened the hive as we had been instructed by lifting up the super from the back to view the swarm cell. Unfortunately, the bees had put so much wax between the brood box and the super, that when we lifted the super, we ripped the swarm cell apart. I was doing the lifting, Doug was doing the looking and he could immediately see that the new queen had been dislodged. You can see how much burr comb there was in the photo above.


The new queen would not survive. Sudden, irreversible. A catastrophe. The only solution would have been to not have inspected and to have let the hive swarm. But, that isn't a preferred option and not one we could have reasonably anticipated. I saw that there was a lot of burr comb when we examined two weeks ago, but I didn't put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Now I am just sad. It is like having a death in the family.

Perhaps they will start another swarm cell. The hive is still crowded, but there is a queen excluder between the two supers. If they stay together, I expect a lot of hone from that hive.

The other hives are fine. There is evidently a queen laying in the blue hive, but she is producing a lot of drones.


I am not sure what she is up to. I hope she can actually lay fertilized eggs. There is a lot of honey and pollen in the brood frames, so I hope she actually has room to lay eggs as well. Time will tell. For now, they are a happy hive, even if they are slightly odd.

I added a super and more syrup to the yellow hive. The queen in that hive is laying nicely, but it is the weakest hive right now.


I am still just very sad to have lost the baby queen.

Non Compost Mentis

I have been mixing my compost. This now consists of moving the compost in one bin to an empty one next to it. The first bin wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. It had that compost smell to it, suggesting that some composting was going on. It also had begun to look darker than the leaf color of the shredded leaves.

This morning, I started moving the second bin. It was dry. It was very light gray. It had no compost odor to it. It was just sitting and not doing its job.

I poured about 20 gallons of water into the second bin and about 10 into the first bin. I suspect lack of moisture is the cause of nothing happening. It's been too dry. I had to use water from the well to do it; my rain water is too precious.

Water Consumption

Just to check how much water I need, I watered what I currently have planted (6 raised beds) as I normally do. I also filled up the container I use to water things in the greenhouse. I remeasured the water in the barrel. It was down 2" from where I left it yesterday. If today was normal, I use about 20 gallons a day to keep things going. It means I need more than a trace to keep up with my watering needs.

It didn't rain yesterday like forecast.

Trace of Rain

It's been an unusual spring weather wise. We had extremely warm temperatures in March and April. We had a lot of water early, but we haven't had much lately.

I use water barrels made of recycled plastic by a man in Vermont to collect water from the roof of our house to use when I water the garden. There are 8 water barrels. Each in theory holds about 45 gallons. The "in theory" part rests on a couple of assumptions, which I know are not precisely true. Each will hold 45 gallons, but I am not sure if that is measured with or without the overflow spout each has.


I've connected the barrels with a hose network. My assumption that each holds 45 gallons also assumes that each is exactly the same height. Because the water flows to and from each via the hose system, if one is higher than another, it will have less water because the water in each is the same height from the earth. This means that the one that is set highest, in my case, the one that gathers the water from the drain spout (on the left), has the least water. The one set lowest to the ground has the most water. I've tried to more or less get them all on the same level.

I've been using water regularly for weeks. I don't usually make much of a point of watching how much water there is. However, because of the long period without rain, I decided to look. I used a walking stick Jason made, set it inside the barrel, and marked where the water was.

It is supposed to rain today, but I didn't expect any yesterday. I was surprised that there was actually a trace recorded. It was probably less than 1/8", maybe only 1/16". This morning I thought I would check it out to see if that trace added anything.

I calculate that the water level rose about 1-5/8" from just that little sprinkle. With about 1-1/4 gallon per inch per barrel, that means the trace of rain added about 16 gallons to my barrels. It's not great. I calculated based on my gallons per inch estimating formula that I have about 200 gallons left. I am not up to the 350 or 360 gallons that I am theoretically capable of storing, but I like the idea that the water gathering system works well enough to benefit from just a wee bit of rain. I look forward to a real rain. Perhaps there will be one today.

There are places out west, like Utah, where it is illegal to capture water from your roof. I'm sure there must be a reason for such a silly law. I'm glad I live where it is perfectly legal to capture water this way.

Colorado Potato Beetle

I'm just keeping track of pests on this entry. The only thing I have seen so far this year are Colorado Potato Beetles. They are slow, but they do spawn.

I caught a number of them early and even found where they had laid their eggs on the bottom side of leaves.


My solution, because I only have two raised beds devoted to potatoes is to squash them. It takes daily vigilance and the tolerance of messy fingers. So far they haven't done all that much damage.

First Round of Tomatoes

I finally had enough gumption to clean out all of the weeds that had grown in the tomato bed. I expect them (the weeds) to have gone to seed, so I will have to watch this bed in the future and kill anything that sprouts. It cleaned up easily with just the bow rake. I spread dolomite lime and 10-10-10 on the area and used the fork to mix it in. I want to avoid blossom rot. Dolomite is different than the hydrated lime I have used in the past, so I hope it works.

The tomato plants I started from seed were finally large enough to transplant. I planted them in peat pots, which are supposed to be capable of being directly planted in the garden, but I didn't trust it. I took each of the pots off.

My goal this year is to lose none to cut worms. I read that you can use plastic drinking straws as cut worm guards. I cut up straws from McDonalds (cut into quarters lengthwise and slit up one side) to place one around each stem. I buried the straw about half an inch below the soil, so there was at least an inch above the soil.

Today was a very windy day; not perfect to plant in. Too windy to go sailing.

I used the same spacing as I used on the strawberries; plants are 15.5" apart, 9 per row, 2 rows, spaced 15.5" apart as well. This spacing just works for the raised beds when you have 18 plants to put into a 4' x 12' area. This is a little less dense than I planted last year.

Today's planting was only of Marglobe. I still have 18 plants left to plant, 6 more Marglobe and 12 Brandywine. I can't plant them until I get dirt into the new raised bed boxes, which I can't do until I get all the boxes finished. (I get my soil from Oak Ridge Shrubbery and they deliver 4 yards at a time, enough when mixed with roughly equal amounts of compost for 3 full raised beds.)

We (Jason, Hayley, and I) did finish the second of the three new boxes today. One more to go before I order soil. We may be able to get the last one built next weekend.

Strawberries and More

I planted the remaining strawberry plants, the Ozarks. I have plenty of wood left over from my failed cold frames, so I cut a piece 15.5" as a spacer and used that instead of the tape measure to separate plants. I used a line to ensure straight rows.


There are other tasks that I am finding I need to take care of almost daily. I have been turning the compost piles. There are three and a half compost bins that now have a mixture of new manure and leaves. The bins are warm to hot. I realized yesterday that they were rather dry, so I poured 2-3 gallons of water in each. I am in an almost daily routine of moving part or all of a bin into its empty or nearly empty neighbor. I hope the frequent mixing and added moisture will have a tangible pay off. There is heat, it just needs to do its job a bit better than it has so far.

The onions are growing well. They have filled out quite nicely, although it is too early to see how the bulbs will do. I learned last year that a certain proportion will start to flower and there isn't anything I can do about it. Overall, the number doing that is quite small so far. I don't see any difference in the onions where I mixed the 10-10-10 fertilizer in and those where I just sprinkled it on top of the ground.

The Yukon Gold potatoes are up and doing fine. The Pontiac Reds are also now sprouted. I need to get out and pick weeds and start pushing dirt around the stems of the Pontiac Reds. They are the most neglected bed right now.

The Hard Rule

If it's hard, you're doing it wrong.

I've taught my boys that there is only one exception to this rule.

Jeff and I went sailing today and had a hard time of it. It was nice and windy, perhaps a bit too windy for a first day of sailing a new boat. There were things we clearly hadn't figured out. So we got out on the lake, didn't get the sail up before we pushed up (a mistake), and then had a hard time even trying to get it up as we drifted with the wind a good half mile from the dock.

At one point I started to paddle, but made absolutely no progress against the wind.

So, I gave Jeff the tiller and started to get the sail up and we started to move with a bit more control. Finally, I muscled the sail all the way up, but the bottom part of the luff wouldn't go in the runner on the mast. Still if it was all the way up, we got good wind and we were able to quite successfully tack back to the dock.

I kept thinking, "If it is hard, I must be doing it wrong." But then the only course was to do things the hard way.

So, I analyzed the situation over night. What were my mistakes? Obviously, there should be some pretty clear ones. I made some decisions. First, it isn't a mistake to jump in and try to do something and then fail miserably. It reminds me of Captain Ron's line, "We'll find out on the ocean. Anything's gonna happen, it's gonna happen out there."

Second, you can learn a lot once you know you've made a mistake. For starters, because the sail wouldn't stay up, I knew I must have attached it wrong. Yup. Did it completely wrong. Then the Seamanship book makes it pretty clear that you get the sail up while still roped to the doc.

Which is all to say that, whatever we start to do, we will do it wrong, it will be hard, but paying attention to mistakes will lead you to answers. Captain Ron said it one way. The Japanese have a kotowaza I always liked: しっぱいはせいこうのもといなり (Shippai was seiko no moto). The quote at the beginning of my dissertation by Francis Bacon put it another: Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. I guess I am sticking by that one.

Hive Inspections

Doug Shaw and I went into our hives. We looked at the two in my yard on Friday. The goal of looking in the yellow hive was to see if the bees have drawn comb so the queen could start laying. (I only had two frames of drawn comb when I captured the swarm.) Not much had been drawn. I gave them a whole load of syrup in the top frame to help them get started. The queen seemed active although I didn't see any eggs or larvae yet.

The purpose for looking in the blue hive was to see if we could see the new queen or evidence of the queen laying. We didn't see either. However, this hive continues to be very active at bringing in pollen and was very calm, not disturbed at all by the invasion. I took off the top feeder because the comb was well drawn. Doug was going to Brushy Mountain Bee Farm Saturday to get supplies. I asked him to pick up a replacement queen if he could, but they had none. I guess I need to wait and revisit the hive. It is still possible that there is a new queen there. She may not yet have mated or may have just begun laying eggs, which would be hard to see at this date (less than a week out from the swarm). If worse does come to worse, we can always find a freshly laid frame from some other hive and transplant it. They could make their own queen, although we would lose a lot of the spring nectar flow. The only other thing we did was move the honey laden frames in the brood box to the outside. In case there is a queen, it will help keep her from moving up to the super.

Today I went in to the hive at Clarence Brown's. Wow, this hive has grown significantly since I saw it last. The queen had moved up into the super and had laid prodigiously. The hive was pretty crowded and there were brood cells in between the brood box and the super. Many of these got ripped open when I inspected the frames in the super. (Sorry small animals.) There was a swarm cell, but it appeared empty (not filled yet, but clearly not a break out cell.) I am of the opinion that this hive will swarm in the near future, but without a larva in the swarm cell, I wasn't ready to split it. I warned Clarence to be on the lookout. This hive came back from being weak at the end of the winter. The queen has done a really good job of building the colony. I added a super, separated from the rest with a queen excluder. (I put it on like Kurt Brower does, sideways. Evidently this allows the workers to get up to the top easier but generally keeps the queen out because she won't go to the edges of the hive.)

No hive had much honey yet. Mostly, they had just stored around the brood areas.