Experimenting with wax seals.

It is troubled times in our beehive this week. After checking on the girls a couple of weeks ago and finding them happy and busy as bees making honey and babies, we were dismayed to discover that they had shrunk drastically in numbers and had eaten ALL their honey. Every single bar of comb was eerily empty, and there were no babies to be seen. The bees have been acting sort of agitated and lost, and this week I got stung for the first time by our hive. It felt like such a betrayal, since they had been so docile up to this point. The sting was in my finger and I immediately put an onion on it to draw out the venom and applied lavendar oil religiously for 3 days which kept the swelling and itching way down.

After consulting with our beekeeping mentor, Jessie, it appears that we have lost our Queen. We are in talks with several people to figure out how to get a new Queen so late in the season, and I definitely feeling worried about the survival of our hive through the winter. I’m trying not to panic about it because I love the bees so much.

I have been feeding them honey and sugar syrup every day, hoping they won’t starve to death, and Jessie generously gave us a comb with some brood from one of her hives so they will have something to do and can potentially raise their own Queen if worse comes to worst. This is the last month before winter to open up the hives and assist the bees, so we don’t have much time to get them back on their way. Keep your fingers crossed for our ladies!

Checking out hives last weekend with my bee mentor, Jessie, of Brown’s Downtown Bees.

Yesterday I checked on the hive one last time before I head out of town. I wanted to check on the girls and see how they were doing, as well as make sure that the queen was, in fact, still alive - she was. (whew!) You can see in this first picture how the drone (male) bees that have hatched are bigger than the regular lady bees. I figured while the drones are around I should practice picking up bees, which you do by grabbing their wings. It’s easier on drones because they don’t have stingers. Silvia refers to this as an abuse of power, but I’m still not quite brave enough to pick up any of the girls!

I also set out to tackle those darn foreign top bars once again. Since I trimmed them down they seem to be sitting in the hive much better than before, and the air gaps are much smaller…but still present. I am concerned about the bees in winter and the temperature stabilization with these non-fitting and non-sturdy top bars in the hive.

So I saw an opportunity today and grabbed it. I had never wanted to take out these bars before since they were full of brood and the hive needed to build it’s numbers. However, with the exception of a few, all of the babies had hatched and the comb was mostly empty (or so I thought). Since the honeycomb on top was over 90% capped (otherwise it would ferment) I decided that I would do my first mini-honey harvest of the year and snatch out the difficult top bar from the hive.

As I was in the process of harvesting the honey (a fun, messy, gooey process), I noticed activity coming from several of the un-hatched cells. The babies were hatching in front of my eyes!!! It was one of the coolest things I have seen, and I just sat there in awe the entire time as they broke through their cell caps and burst forward into the world (come back tomorrow for pictures!). They were all silvery so I think they may have been hatching prematurely due to the stress of the comb removal. Once they hatched I dropped them back off at the hive and hopefully they will survive.

Trying to put everything to good use and not let anything go to waste on our little backyard farm, Betty and Rosie got a delicious afternoon snack of the un-hatched bee larvae.

Yep, this is really my life.

Today I found a ladybug in my kale. I’m not sure about her prospects for survival since she spent the past 2 days in my refrigerator, but she was moving when I discovered her and she is currently hanging out in my echinacea plant.

I also just rescued a rogue bee that was in my bedroom. Get back outside, ladies!

Today I had an experience checking in on our hive that was both confidence building and unnerving. The first thing I noticed when I opened the hive after not having peeked inside for 2 weeks: HOLY CRAP THERE ARE TONS OF BEES IN HERE. It seems that the first round of babies hatched and the hive is now several times more full of bees than it was a couple weeks ago.

Even so, the girls are still busily making more babies. In this first photograph you can see that there is now both worker bee (female) brood as well as the first drone (male bee) brood that I have seen thus far.

In just 2 months these busy ladies have built up 9 combs of their own and filled them with honey, pollen, and tons of babies. That makes 11 combs total…and the bees only need 12 to get through the winter…the rest is pure profit for us :)

I have been concerned for several weeks about the top bars that we received with the bees (we purchased a nucleus - 2 developed combs and several lbs of bees - from a local beekeeper). The bars were originally designed for a Langstroth hive, but trimmed down to fit our top bar hive, and they have always stuck out a bit and didn’t quite fit in the way they should. The combs are built with plastic guides, as opposed to just building down naturally from the top bar. Regardless, I was just glad that with the lack of rain our girls had something to start with, and they seemed to be doing well despite the drought.

However, whenever I would open the hive there would be bees all over the two foreign top bars, and they seemed agitated that it stuck out and probably let air and impurities leak into the hive…I think they were trying to seal it up with propolis but the gaps were too large. So today I decided that I was going to trim it down and make it fit more snugly so the girls wouldn’t have to stress about their poor architectural situation. The 2 combs in question were full of both honey and brood, and with the ominous lack of rain I was concerned about tempting fate by destroying either food or babies, but was left with little other choice than to trim them down or pull them out entirely.

Cutting through brood is very…gooey. And cutting open some of the more developed brood comb revealed little alien-like half developed bees, which was really interesting and (not gonna lie) made me feel a little creeped out.

By the time I was done trimming the comb I felt pretty exhausted from bending over for so long, I cut my finger somehow in the process, and the bees seemed to be getting agitated. I don’t know if it was from the change of temperature inside the hive with me pulling all the bars out for extended periods of time or just the general disruption of hive life, but I got a terrible sinking feeling when the possibility occurred to me that it could have been that I somehow smashed the queen that set the hive into that agitated state (since I hadn’t consciously thought to locate her before I started my construction work). I am pretty sure that was just me being paranoid, but even so it was a humbling experience remembering how much I still have to learn about beekeeping and the crazy complex world of bees.

Still, the take away from this story is that for anyone who is afraid of bees stinging them while they are just sitting around minding their own business… today I opened up the hive, shook the bees up, turned them sideways, and cut into/killed their babies - and they were STILL as friendly as ever. I think that says a lot about the overall complacent and adaptable nature of bees.

Bees are so cool. They build a comb starting simultaneously in 3 separate places, and somehow miraculously end up combining them together seamlessly, to create one giant, lovely comb.

Busy bees building a new comb and filling it with lovely, shiny honey.

“A flower, for example, doesn’t count the number of bees that come nor does it pump up its smell just when you walk by. Its nature, as is ours, is to expand itself no matter if anyone ever loves you back. … All the things we so desperately think we need from someone else to make us feel good, we actually experience all by ourselves when we give love freely - without any concern that they will love you back. … “I love you —- but it is no concern of yours” means I now know that what I really seek is to love rather than to be loved.”

-John Douillard, Love Unconditionally with Ayurvedic Philosophy

Also: John Douillard, Open Your Heart with Ayurveda
And: Jonathan Franzen, Liking is For Cowards. Go For What Hurts.