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.

It's turned into a beautiful spring day outside and the bees are enjoying the sunshine and the supply of dandelions. Our lawn is in need of a mow so is providing plenty of pollen and nectar producing flora at present.

This up close and personal video of a honey bee is worth watching in high-res. See as her proboscis (tongue) flick out as she gathers her honey-making supplies.

The bees from our urban hives have a fairly cushy life given the close and plentiful supply of flowers all through the year.

It's spring in the south which means that flowers are in bloom and bees are busy collecting nectar and pollen. On a walk to our local café over the weekend, we spotted some of our girls busy on the neighbourhood flora.

We managed to catch one industrious worker in slow motion. She'd obviously been busy for a while with large orange polyps on her legs.

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.

Last (southern) spring I happily demonstrated how docile a bee swarm is with a video of me stroking the swarm. This year, I decided to go a little further and actually stick a hand in. As it turns out, taking a selfie video of oneself  negotiating a buzzing mass is a little difficult so I repeated the experience a few times, hence the second video where a helpful assistant held my iPhone.

Not quite at the being covered all over with a suit made of bees stage yet. But hey, who knows?!!

And peeps, next time you're surrounded by 10,000 or more flying bees or notice a mass hanging off a tree just realise they're not out to get you; they're just looking for a new home and until they have one to protect, they're not interested in guarding their honey and brood from you. And maybe don't squish any: that's asking for trouble.

Mia

 

 

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.

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.

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.