As can sometimes happen at this time of year,  one of the urban hives produced a number of swarms which also means a parade of new queens have been hatched over the last few weeks.

Unfortunately, the latest queen wasn't laying and when beekeeper-in-charge, Cam, sought her out to see what was wrong, it was apparent that she hadn't mated. A virgin queen is to be expected not long after the old queen has swarmed but having given her a couple of weeks it became obvious that this queen had something wrong with her and needed to be replaced.

Had there been fresh brood in the hive Cam would merely have had to dispose of the queen and the hive would have produced an emergency queen. Unfortunately, weeks without a viable breeder meant that we would have to intervene.

It is easy enough to purchase mated queens and they get shipped to us in the mail, however, with plentiful swarms and a shortage of spare hive boxes and frames, it was decided to boost the endangered colony by introducing not just a queen but an entire hive. Effectively, we were reinstating one of the hive's previous queens and her bees.

Merging colonies is a tricky business. The queenless colony is apt to kill the introduced queen as an interloper and the bees will fight if you just throw them together. However, time for the queen's scent to permeate the hive will familiarise the bees with her. Separating the two colonies using newspaper is an old but very effective trick and one we've successfully used before.

By the time the two sets of bees have eaten through the newspaper, both colonies will accept the queen and become a single hive.

Andrew and Cam demonstrate how this is done in video.

One of the things we’re often asked is how much it costs to buy a hive or set one up. The answer to that isn’t as simple as a figure or a range of dollar values because the hive itself isn’t actually where all the costs reside.

That being said, we do encourage more households to keep bees in the backyard. Bees in the neighbourhood can do so much good and commercial beekeepers are more inclined to place hives on farmland and remote areas where they can keep several hives together for efficiency. Bee populations in urban areas are significantly depleted and a single hive doesn’t require much space. A mature hive can introduce upwards of 50,000 bees into the area and service a radius of three kilometres or more.

So if you’re thinking of becoming a hobbyist beekeeper then these are the start-up costs to consider:

• A beesuit or equivalent protective equipment. We recommend the modern all-in-one overalls rather than half suits and complicated veils. You’ll feel far more confident all sealed in. New, these can be purchased for $80NZD on TradeMe but beware of the quality e.g. plastic zips, and from official suppliers between $130 and $190, depending on colour and style. Children’s beesuits are also available.
• Leather gloves: unless you’re around bees all the time and build up tolerance, you should wear gloves. It is inevitable when lifting frames and boxes that you will squash a bee or two every time you work the bees. Fabric and rubber gloves will not be sufficient. Leather is best, long sleeved. We prefer the vented variety because you get very hot in the midday summer sun. Anywhere from $25 to $40NZD per pair.
• A hive tool for working with the bees. That propolis is super-sticky and separating the boxes and prising out frames requires specialist equipment. If you’re only getting one, be sure to get the ‘J’ type variety with the hook. $12 to $22NZD depending on style and construction.
• A smoker - at some stage you will annoy the bees either because you’re inspecting the brood chambers or stealing their honey. $20 to $100NZD depending on size. You’ll also need a supply of sacking to smoke the hive, it calms the hive but don’t over do it. Less is best.

In New Zealand it is also a legal requirement to register and regularly inspect your hives. Although registration itself is free, a small fee is charged per apiary site to help fund the National American Foulbrood Pest Management Strategy Agency. We keep bees in five locations and therefore pay for five apiary sites. You are given a unique registration number which must be displayed at each apiary, on at least one hive. You also require annual American Foulbrood inspections and the subsequent submission of a summary of the inspection.

If you’re only looking after a single hive, then we suggest borrowing or hiring an extractor and related equipment when it’s time to harvest. If you have more than a couple, it may be worthwhile buying your own equipment which adds to costs and storage as appropriate.

Beekeeping has consumables: each year you will need to inspect your equipment and replace perished frames, boxes, floors and lids. You also need to treat for varroa mite pre and post season.

Finally we get to the cost of buying the bees themselves. I checked prices today and you can acquire a small starter nuc for $320NZD but this doesn’t include any actual hive equipment except around five frames. A ‘ready to go box’ kit can be purchased for around $150ND. To buy a more mature hive complete with bees, boxes, frames, floor, lid and roof can be around $650NZD.

Andrew working his way through the second honey super.
Excitingly, all the frames are capped!

Although we have over twenty hives in various locations around Canterbury, one in particular is my favourite and has been claimed as Mia's personal hive. The queen is named for my ex-boss, Benesia and is one of the healthiest, if not the healthiest, of all our hives.

Queen Benesia and her colony is one of two hives that are sited just outside our bedroom window and many an hour has been occupied by watching the bees busily working while we eat breakfast in bed.

One of the capped honey frames before the bees are brushed
off. The whitish colour is the wax that covers each full cell to
keep the honey in.

As an urban hive, the honey flow is both long and very fruitful with magnolia and cherry blossoms in early spring to daffodils then roses as we head into summer. Even in late autumn and early winter there is still a wide range of blossoms to occupy the bees.

It's important therefore to harvest the honey from the hive a couple of times a year. Today, all three honey boxes were full to bursting with only one frame out of twenty-seven that wasn't fully capped. Thankfully we'd already extracted honey from some of the hives located in Lincoln. The "wets", frames from which honey has already been extracted, were switched with the boxes we took off the hive today. The bees will clean up the emptied frames and reuse the cells for their honey production and storage.

Before collecting the honey.

The hive beside her, Queen Melissa, swarmed back in October. As a newly established colony they're still building up the honey store and there were no frames quite ready to take off today.

Benesia's hive, on the right of the photos, had one full height and one three quarter height brood boxes each with ten frames where the queen can lay eggs. It was topped with three full-height supers each with nine frames.

After collecting the honey.
We added one more honey
super after this photo was taken.

Once finished collecting the honey we loaded one full height and one three quarter height wet supers to replace the honey boxes. After I took the post collection photo we decided to add another full height super. This is to keep the bees busy for the next few months before we carry out autumn inspection, treatment and preparations for wintering over.

Twenty-six frames of honey will return us around 65 kilograms of honey. Not bad for one hive!

It was over 30 degrees Celsius yesterday and the hive outside our bedroom was certainly feeling the heat. The bees were outside the hive clustered into a couple of beards. I took the opportunity to get up close and personal with them. They were pretty docile and I got close without bothering to suit up. Enjoy.

One of our girls is visiting and was duly regaled with bee stories by her papa. She wanted to name one of the queens Beyoncé. As it happens, we did some hive inspections over the weekend. One of the hives had a prolific breeder, with excellent and healthy pattern. We actually managed to spot the queen and capture some video. She's a real beauty. And to this bee, we have given the name Beyoncé. So Maddy, this one's for you!

Two of our hives are currently being used as part of a pollination study at Lincoln University. So these hives, located at the Bio-husbandry Unit, have pollen catchers installed. Looking at the pollen, there's a surprising and pleasing variety of colours: shades of orange, yellow, brown and purple. Up close, the pollen almost look like lollies.

Over the weekend we inspected a few of the hives, wanting to ensure that they had plenty of space for honey store whilst the weather is warm and the stream of bees still prodigious. A few needed an additional super (honey box). We took  the opportunity to video the bees in slo-mo, using an iPhone 5S, going in and out of the hive. See if you can spot the different coloured pollen on their legs.

The honey run is on so Andrew enlists our friend Lei to help with some hive inspections and checking for frames that are ready to extract.

Andrew and Leon find the queen during a routine hive check.

It's also time for the drone to go. Watch as this worker bee pesters the drone.

The bees in the backyard are at it again. This time, we had time to catch some video of the action as the bees ramp up to a swarm and then gather on the cherry blossom tree across the road.

We went out to feed a couple of the Hororata hives today and I decided to finally setup the 'apiaries' and 'hives' on our Beetight account. The Beetight system includes a QR code for each hive so that the handy app on the iOS or Android device can auto-magically pull up the right hive for inspection.

Okay, so this may be more useful when there are closer to 1000 than 10 hives but it was still fun to use the iPad for the inspection.

Unfortunately Beetight is an online only system (no local version sync) so for this usage it's much better to use the iPad rather than the Iconia because it has 3G. The middle of an orchard or paddock is slightly difficult for wireless.

Hive 8 was still very unfriendly today and I ended up with yet another bee-sting, this time on my jaw! *LoL*

The plan

A few weeks ago we purchased four hives from Wainui and transported them in the dead of night to Hororata. A check of the hives found them all to be healthy but one was queen-less. The option of letting the bees breed a new queen was discussed but it was concluded that it was a safer bet to introduce a new package (purchased) queen.

The enclosure containing the queen
is small plastic box with gaps to let
air through and allow her scent to
permeate the hive.

This was duly done. Queens purchased for re-queening come in little containers with a few bees to keep them company. The plastic enclosure has a door for egress which is blocked off with food in sufficient quantity that it would take the bees a few days to eat through. This container is attached to a frame within the hive and during the time it takes for the bees to eat their way through, the queen's scent permeates the hive so that they accept her as their queen when she is free (and don't kill her instead). It should take no more than about five days for this to happen.

The result

The hive looked populous and doesn't
appear to have suffered badly from
time without a queen.

Evidence of new brood within a healthy
hive.

On Monday we decided to use the warm evening temperatures to open up the hive and see how the introduced queen was doing. We found a happy hive and an empty enclosure. There was evidence of fresh brood so our new queen had been prodigious since her escape. Having evidence that the hive was now breeding we decided not to take out each frame to find the queen.

And other stuff...

Bees cooling outside the hive.

Whilst we were there we completed some work on the hives. One of the hives had become very hot and looked as if it was about to run out of spare frames in which to store honey. The bees to combat this had started cooling honey by attaching themselves to the outside of the hive. We decided to place an additional box on the top of the hive to allow them space to grow and introduced a scalloped lid which not only allows a  second egress point, it also allows venting and moisture to escape... a good idea since we don't want mold to develop in the hive.

We also introduced an 3/4 box on the top of the hive with the new queen as the it was fairly productive.

The final configuration: the furthest
hive is down to one brood box whilst
two of the ex-Wainui hives have
inherited its boxes.

At the other end of the scale one of the less-established hives was struggling. We found brood but didn't spot the queen. The brood didn't look overly healthy and the theory is that both the location and the two top boxes were making it hard for the low number of bees to maintain the correct temperature within the hive. It is from this particular hive that we removed the two boxes added to the healthier hives.

Activity in this nuc had been
decreasing over the last week.

We've been worried about the nuc we brought back from Hororata: one of the two hives being established in our own backyard and Andrew's Christmas present. We'd managed to get one of the two hives well established by introducing brood from one of the ex-Wainui hives providing that hive with the strong, dark bees that we purchased a few weeks ago. The blue hive has been showing healthy signs of growth and productivity.

We'd been reading a little on hive equalisation and how to carry out a bee exchange to move bees from one hive to another by swapping their positions. Apparently, bees returning to a hive which is not their own are not considered a threat so long as they are carrying pollen, nectar or water.

The plan

It took a little while for the bees to even
out the production line after the exchange
giving us a chance to capture some nice pics.

The plan we agreed on was to carry this out on the nuc and hive at Hawkswood Place. This was a slightly complex activity as we not only had to move the established hive (hive 1) to the left, we were creating a new hive (hive 2) to house the contents of the nuc where the hive 1 was previously located. We also agreed to check for the presence of the queen in both hives and to place a pink, not blue box, as the lower brood box on each hive, which meant moving hive 1's contents frame by frame to another box.

The result

Hive 1 relocated to the left
and the nuc established as
hive 2 on the right after the
exchange.

We managed to carry out the exchange in less than fifteen minutes on Saturday and successfully found a healthy looking queen in each hive. We carried out the operation in the middle of the day (about 1PM) so that temperatures were warm enough not to affect the brood. As there were a number of bees out and about foraging, this also meant that a good number would be returning from hive 1 to hive 2.

Bees from hive 1 busy eating up the
feed: wax and honey scrapings from
the last honey extraction.

Distressingly, it looks like the temperatures in the nuc had fallen below 30 degrees, testament to the fact that there were insufficient bees to keep the brood warm. Much of the brood in hive 2 looked in poor health. We were tempted to introduce brood from the Croziers Road hives but are leaving the hive for a week to see if larger bee numbers will obviate the need for more hive rescue attempts.

By Sunday afternoon, hive 2 had
cleaned up all their special feed. Early
signs are for a healthy hive and
successful exchange.

As of Sunday evening both hives looked in good health and both were busy with foraging bees returning heavy with pollen and nectar. To help the bees settle after the disruption, on Saturday afternoon we fed them some scrapings from the last honey extraction and by Sunday afternoon hive 2 had cleaned up all the wax and honey and hive 1 was busy doing the same.

The Christchurch Hobbyist Beekeepers
Club meet monthly and more
experienced members take
you through a number of
topics from how to spot different
hive issues to how to re-queen
a hive.

If you're keen to setup as a hobbyist beekeeper you may be wondering how to get started. After all, it's all well and good to have boxes and queen excluders but you actually need some bees! The best advice if you're interested is to sign up with your local bee club. The bee club is a great source of information, advice and, of course, bee enthusiasts who can sell you package beehives.

Purchasing an established hive

If you want to get right in the midst of it, you can purchase a mature hive. We recently did just that off TradeMe. Mature hives come with a queen and an already productive set of worker bees. If you're even more fortunate (as we were) you'll also have some boxes ready or close to ready for some honey extraction. Moving mature hives is not an easy task and is best done during late evening when temperatures are cooler and the majority of bees have returned to the hive. On any activity where you move hives around you will lose a number of bees.

Starting with a nuc

Example nuc box

A number of beekeepers specialise in breeding queens and this can be a slightly less expensive but perhaps riskier proposition for starting your hive. Essentially you purchase a nuc (alternately pronounce as nuck or nuke, depending to whom you're speaking). A nucleus is a small box complete with frames, a queen and some worker bees. You move the contents of the nuc to your hive and hope that the queen takes to her new abode and begins to lay more eggs, thus growing the number of bees in the hive. We've also taken this approach, purchasing three nucs in recent months. One of the nucs didn't survive but our supplier kindly replaced the failed nuc for free. There are many reasons why a nuc might fail. We have a theory that in our case we were over-enthusiastic in placing the new nuc into the intended destination of our back garden straightaway. This is close to where we purchased the bees. As bees can travel up to a five kilometre radius it isn't altogether unlikely that they tried to return to their original home and of course had no hive to return to. The nucs taken to Hororata (60 kilometres from town) have survived and are beginning to flourish.

Capturing a swarm

  

The bees at Croziers Road swarming
earlier in 2010. As you can see the bees
are making their way into the box.

Finally, you can choose to capture a swarm. Our bee club sends out mailing list messages to let people know where swarms have been located. Most people are keen to get a swarm of bees removed from their property but it's probably best to leave swarm capture to more experienced apiarists. Bees which have swarmed may have left an existing hive so there is the risk that the bees you are acquiring already have some issue, whether they were unhappy with the hive, are experiencing ill-health within the hive or have been driven out by some invader. One of the hives at Croziers Road swarmed earlier this year. The swarm stayed on the property and were recaptured. In this case the hive had produced a second queen and she left with a number of bees to start her own hive. As the queen was a swarming queen, and possibly undesireable, she was replaced soon after. The hive is flourishing still.

Andrew checks each frame as he moves
them from one box to another.
In this case he is looking for the
queen bee who is distinctive
for her long body and bright colour.

Apologies to the more knowledgeable for this rather simplistic explanation.

The physical hive is made up a a number of basic components: large or small you need a floor, a lid, a cover and at least one box with a number of frames inside it. Each frame is made up of a wood surround with wire across on which is supported a wax base. The bees will eventually build a comb on the wax in each frame and fill each hexagonal cell with honey.

The frames in this super box are distended
 with cells full of honey. The cells are
capped with wax (hence the whitish colour)
to stop the honey from flowing out.
This indicates that the honey is fully
processed and ready for extraction.
This capping will be removed or
broken up before each frame is spun
to extract the honey. 

As the hive matures and grows bigger, more boxes, each filled with, in our case, ten frames, is added to the hive structure. At this point a wire mesh is added to separate the queen bee who is significantly larger than the other bees in the hive. The mesh is referred to as a 'queen excluder' and the position of a box above or below the excluder defines whether it is a 'brood' or 'super' box.

A brood box is one to which the queen has access to lay eggs and is therefore useful for growing the hive but not for extraction of honey. Brood boxes are kept at the bottom of the hive. Super boxes are above the excluder (hence the name) and are basically honey boxes which, once filled, can be spun for honey extraction. It's part of the beekeeper's responsibility to balance the growth of a hive for productivity with the amount of extractable honey. Restrict brood space and growth will be limited and the hive will struggle to fill the honey boxes, however having too many bees and not enough space for honey storage means the bees will struggle to maintain the correct temperature within the hive (and bees are temperature sensitive).

Amazingly, a mature, productive hive can have between 30,000 to 60,000 bees so having the right amount of space is important for a healthy hive.

The video on this entry shows Andrew and Derek as they add a new queen to one of the mature Croziers Road hives. Apologies for the children making ringing noises in the background! 

Bees are wonderful, productive, mesmerising creatures who not only provide us with yummy produce in the form of honey, but are also an essential part of the horticultural cycle by pollinating a wide variety of plants. This blog follows our adventures in setting up a number of hives, in a variety of locations as we learn what makes good beekeepers.

The video on this post shows a busy bee on the quest for pollen. See the bright coloured polyps on her legs full of orange pollen.