Spring 2012 - strange bee behavior

It's finally summery warm and the bees seem to be loving it. This morning, I took out the tar paper from inside the hive at Beck's house on Bethel street. I had put the paper into the hives to partition off empty space, so that the comb would stay warmer. Towards the end of the day today, they were forming a beard on the hive porch as if they were scheming to swarm. It might be the heat. The tar paper had some comb built on it and they also built comb on the vent bar, which I moved all the way to the back. They were running out of space. Hopefully the additional quarters will keep them from splitting off.

 At my house, the bees were also acting strangely. They suddenly all flew out of the hive at once. I was trying to pull out the bottom board and it was stuck. I went into the shop to get some tools and when I came out, the bees were pouring out of the hive like a bee tornado. It looked like all of the bees came out and there were a lot of them. There was a cloud of bees up in the sky.

My neighbor told me that he saw them do the same thing earlier in the day. No idea what's going on...This is not swarming behavior as far as I know. They flew around for a short time and then came back in.

Extracting Wax From Old Honeycomb

I was dreading this process because I read about how messy it is, but it wasn't that bad at all.

This weekend, I finally decided to do something with that bucket of old honeycomb that was sitting in my shed. Here are the tools that came in handy:

1. 3 gal aluminum pot ($5 at a garage sale)
2. ladle ($2.50 thrift store)
3. 3 gallon plastic bucket (free from the back of a restaurant)
4. 3 gal. paint strainer cloth ($2.50 hardware store)
(I also got a plastic sieve, but ended up not needing it because the paint strainer cloth does the job just fine)

I filled the large aluminum pot half way with hot water and brought to a boil. Then I added all of the honey comb. I then waited until all of the wax melted. A lot of dark brown stuff came floating to the top. That's slumgum. It's good for compost and also for starting fires or using in a wood fueled camping stove.

Then I took my operation outside to avoid making a mess in the kitchen. On a level spot in the back yard, I stretched the paint strainer cloth over the plastic bucket and poured the whole mess through the paint strainer. Then I tied off the paint strainer and hung it up over the bucket to drain.

It took hours for the mixture to cool off, but in the end a beautiful golden 1" layer of bees wax hardened on top of the brown water beneath. I lifted the wax out and set on newspaper to dry. The leftover water went in the garden (bees are attracted to the water because it smells like honey. So cover it up if you plan to let it sit outside, otherwise bees will drown in it).

Bees and Honey

Honey from my bees

Honey Harvest

my bees died, but i harvested a lot of honey. see the pics here.

filling up, originally uploaded by from here

Collecting honey!

Harvested my first honey a few weeks ago. Extracted honey from the comb by pushing it through a sieve. It wasn't the easiest way to do it. Here's a really great idea on how to separate the honey from the wax.

Learning from the Bees

They arrive
They came in these boxes. Dave drove them up from California. 350 orders of bees. Each order is a box of 3 lbs or about 1200 bees, including one queen. That's about 420,000 bees that Dave escorted north. One box is enough to start a hive. But starting two hives is better, in case one hive becomes weak. The time to start new hives is in spring.

The queen comes in a queen cage. To get her out, we replace the cork with queen candy. By the time the bees eat through the candy, they are used to the queen's pheromones and won't kill her.


The queen rules the house...sort of
One time in her life, the queen mates with about 10 drones. She arrives sperm filled from that adventure. That is the only time that she mates and the sperm lasts 2-3 years. When the sperm is gone, the worker bees kill her. Meanwhile, after arriving in a box with stranger bees, as the only egg layer she will soon become surrounded by her own offspiring since the worker bees die off every few weeks.

The queen lays her eggs in the center of each cell. You can see the tiny eggs in the image below. She fertilizes some eggs with the sperm and they turn into female worker bees. Some eggs, she leaves unfertilized or haploid. They become the male drones.

The drones' only task is to mate with a queen bee. After mating, the drone's endophalus falls off and he dies.


The queen is reared by nurture not nature. She is born out of a regular larva and becomes a queen because of special treatment. When the bees want to leave the hive, they make a peanut shaped queen cell around one of the larvae.

Nurse bees feed special royal jelly to that lucky maggot and she grows into a royalty (royal jelly is not as tasty as you would expect, it tastes kind of like yogurt). That privileged rearing makes the queen grow longer than other bees. My queen was inked with blue paint for easy spotting.

If the bees start making a queen cell when their colony is still new, the cell must be removed - cut off with a knife. If you leave the cell on the comb, the hive will swarm. The old queen will leave with her bees. This is how I got to taste royal jelly. Cut off the cell and pop in your mouth. That's how the beekeepers do it.

They must have enough food
Soon after the queen lays the eggs, they hatch and turn into larvae. The bees must get enough food to feed their brood and themselves to get enough energy for work. They store pollen and honey in the combs. Usually the brood is in the center of the comb and the outer edges are filled with honey and pollen.

Since the bees in the top bar hives must build their own combs, they need extra energy. If it rains and stays cold for too long after they arrive, they may starve. You will notice that their honey supply in the combs is very low or gone. You can feed them sugar syrup 1:1 ratio of sugar to water or 2:1 if they really start to starve and you find dead larvae in front of the hive. When the bees are desperate, they may eat their own larvae (like Saturn). This happened to my bees. In the picture below, the dead larvae that I found seem to have their heads chewed off.

To make it easy for them to get to some food in the rain, you can mount a jar of syrup on the front of the hive, like this:

This is an emergency, so you can also give them some honey inside the hive and for some protein, you can feed them pollen.
Spinkle it on the landing strip in front of the entrance. They will roll it into the hive or rub in it to collect it onto their bodies, mix with nectar and place into pollen sacs on their legs for transport.


Bees can be pirates
Putting the syrup jar in front of the hive, may encourage robbing behavior and the stronger hive will steal all of the honey from the weaker hive. This happened to my hives too. I noticed clusters of bees fighting in front of a hive entrance and then saw a steady stream of bees flying back and forth from the weaker hive to the stronger one.

To fix this, we switched the hives by putting the weaker hive where the stronger hive stood and vise versa. Then the thieves "returned" with food to the weaker hive which now stood in place of their old hive. They didn't notice, because they know their home by location. Since they were carrying food, the weaker hive took them in and the bees didn't fight. We also took one honey filled and one brood filled comb from the strong hive and placed it in the weak hive. Two empty combs from the weak hive went into the strong hive. This equalized the hives and stopped the robbing.

I removed the syrup jar from the front of the hive and put it inside the weak hive instead. To help the bees defend the strong hive that was now in the robbed hive location, the entrance was covered with a piece of wood, leaving only an inch or so of the opening. I then had to check both hives to make sure that the queens were still in their homes and have not been killed by the pirates. The bees were very aggravated when I opened the hive and I should have been paying attention.

You have to pay attention
I have been trying not to wear protection. I find looking at the bees, without protection, meditative because I really have to be relaxed and stay tuned to their mood. If they get aggravated, I freeze for a while. The only times that I got stung was when I accidentally grabbed a bee with my hand or kneeled on one. This time, the bees were aggravated after the stress of being robbed. They were in a defensive mode. I was tired from work and was too impatient to be careful. I held up a comb to peer at the queen and ignored the warning buzzing. Protecting her queen and honey, a guard bee went right for my eye. It hurt.

a smoker helps to calm them and

sometimes a veil is a good idea.