We Lost One Of Our Hives.

Homesteading is not easy, nor is it always sunshine and roses like some blogs would have you believe. I feel it is important to share our mistakes and set backs so others can learn from our experiences and realize it is okay to mess up and not get it right the first time or in this case the second. That said I love what we are doing, and can't wait to add more plants and animals to the property.

I realized the traffic in one of our two hives had changed in the amount and nature. I noticed the hive entrance was not being guarded and the amount of bees coming and going had diminished. None of the bees going in the hive had collected pollen and when I looked under the hive I did not see any bees bearding the comb. 

When I opened the hive my suspicions were confirmed. The hive had swarmed. I am not sure if the queen died and they had to raise a new one or they did a split. Whatever happened they had to raise a new queen. Here is what a queen cell looks like. Instead of the uniform hexagons bees normally make, queen cells look more like a mud wasp made them. I found other smaller queen cells around the comb, but I am pretty sure this is the one the new queen emerged from. All the other cells were much smaller than this one, leading me to believe the queen that came out of this cell went around and made sure there were no usurpers in the wings.

This is all that was left in the hive, a handful of dead bees. I have no idea what happened, maybe the hive was stressed and they left after the split. Whatever it was it happened fast. In a normal hive dead bees are cleaned out regularly, so to see so many dead bees left behind makes me scratch my head. All the honey and pollen was completely clean out. I am sure the swarm took most of it and the bees I saw coming and going were robbing what was left. If any bee keepers out there have a theory on what happened please comment down below.

On a happier note, the new comb guides are working much better than the original design I went with. The comb is nice and straight for the most part and no significant cross-combing happened. You can see the comb on the right of this picture was starting to curve a bit into the next bars but that small amount of movement is easy to fix.





 

You can see the new comb design here. I used cove molding with a 90 degree angle to give the bees a more defined guide. I am not as discouraged as I was last year when this happened. Maybe because I lost both my hives last year. But mainly because of a podcast I heard about capturing local swarms and how easy it is. I plan on making a couple swarm traps to use in the spring. In the meantime I am going to focus my energy on keeping our other hive healthy through the winter. I am going to feed them this year, hoping they will make it through. If not, I will try my best to catch a couple locally adapted swarms in the spring.

Well I'll Bee

 I opened up my hives for the first time since I installed the new colonies. They both are doing great. In my previous post on bees I mentioned one of the hives was lost. After seeing no activity in the hive for days, I saw bees coming and going a week after I thought they were gone.

I don't know if a new swarm came in and set up shop or if the original queen managed to keep the hive going and I just didn't notice it. The hive in question is the one that had the dead queen in it when I installed them.

 

 You need to make sure your bees have enough room in the hive or they will go into swarm mentality. In a top bar hive set up you have what are called follower boards. These can be moved left and right in the hive to make the center bigger or smaller. When I opened up the hives they were both almost full of comb.

 The new top bar design I am using this year seems to be way better than the old style. The bees are drawing comb on the triangular edging I added to the bars. I did not see any cross combing. I recommend this style of comb guide over the flat bar with a line of wax in a groove.

 Here are some bees on our oregano flowers. I am not sure if these are our bees but the odds are really good.

This is our wormwood. This picture was taken after Dara gave it a pretty good pruning. This perennial is very hardy and does well in our climate. Wormwood is a insect deterrent and can be used to make a tea that is effective against aphids, caterpillars, flea beetles and moths. Don't use wormwood tea on edible plants.

 One of the best flowers you can plant for bees is Borage. Borage is a continuously flowering plant. The flowers are a beautiful blue and are quite delicious in a salad. 

 Borage is an annual but once you plant it it will come back every year from the seeds it drops. It is a good companion plant for tomatoes. The leaves are edible with a cucumber like flavor. They contain a very small amount of alkaloids that can be harmful in large quantities.

I let a lot of alluim (onion, leeks) plants go to flower throughout the garden. Bees absolutely love the flowers, who am I to argue with bees.