Newbees

We’re still such “newbees” at beekeeping it’s hard to tell if we’re doing anything right.

Our hive swarmed this year. I knew they were going to from the moment we first opened the hive this spring. There were bees overflowing the frames and I knew they’d been crowded–even though it hadn’t been long since the last time we checked on them.

Once they swarmed we got into the hive and removed all the queen cells except for one to avoid any afterswarms. But then the one queen cell we saved never hatched. But it’s possible there’s a queen because there were many open queen cells when we removed them all (though I don’t know if they were still uncapped or already hatched?). The weather had been rainy off and on the week before, so it’s possible the swarm didn’t leave as early as they wanted to and so a new queen hatched before they left and we got in.

So either our hive is queen-less because they are very grumpy and we don’t see any eggs. Or our hive has a new queen and they are suppressing her laying because the workers are filling the brood box with honey instead, and we saw workers bringing in more pollen which is a sign that the new queen is established–and there are tons of bees.

So we really don’t know what to do. We could order a queen. But we don’t want to spend the money if there’s already a queen there. Or we could just let the colony die off. (This is not cruel in any way. The bees just live out their normal life-cycle as workers, and they simply are not replaced as they normally would be by the queen’s laying.) This would save us from spending money on a queen, and allow us to take our bee boxes with us when we move next year. Otherwise we will have to try and sell our colony to someone here before we leave. But we would probably do so at a loss and have to pay more to replace the materials wherever we get settled.

Give me a sign bees!

(I feel like this pollen arrangement is some sort of code I’m supposed to figure out–and if only I could I’d know the answer to my questions. Maybe if I just had an i-phone I could snap a picture of it with that code-reader app, and it would tell me. . . )

We pulled out two frames of honey and put two empty ones in (because I’m not sure if I want to order another super for honey this year based on the above-explained dilemma).  We had two extra frames to go in though because I read this year about putting only nine frames into a ten-frame super.  This encourages the bees to build the comb extending out just a bit farther from the frame, making it easier to cut the cappings off for using an extractor.

This method definitely worked–the comb extends quite a bit out form the frame.

Only problem is, I spread the frames apart after they’d already started  filling it with honey, so they didn’t go back and extend those cells, they only extended the new cells.  Which made for some really funny-looking honeycomb.  And the opposite frame of comb fit next to it like a puzzle.

We decided to try cutting out some of the comb for fun.  We use plastic foundation, but we were able to cut into the comb and scoop out some comb with a flat metal server.  It was interesting to eat the honey that way–the little boys weren’t too sure about it.

The rest of the comb we just scraped out, crushed through a straining bag, and funneled straight into jars.  It was a very messy venture, but effective nonetheless.

We got a quart of honey from each side of the frames!  Harvesting those two full frames gave us basically as much honey as our whole first harvest last fall.  And there are still 16 frames left in the supers, and hopefully they’ll fill the two more we put out there.

I’m not quite sure what I’m doing with the bees, but I sure am impressed by their work!