It's been a long day.

I never want to have to clean a slimed out hive again.  I'm like 80% sure that if there's a next time then I'll just burn the frames and be done with it.  That sucked.  The smell.  The slime.  The gross little larvae crawling around.  No thank you.  I still need to treat the ground with a drench, but I seem to have misplaced the bottle of Gardstar that I had.  And I almost passed out from the heat.

What I ended up doing was pulling the entire slimed out hive off the stand and replacing it with the queen and five frames of brood from the orange hive.  I left them in a single deep box for the time being.  Just like starting a nuc, only a little later in the season than I'd prefer.  I'm hoping that this will do two things.  First, I hope that this will be a strong enough colony in a small enough space to ward off the small hive beetles.  Second, I'm hoping that cutting down the size of the orange hive will make them a little less defensive once they've (hopefully) become queenright.  They definitely remembered me this morning.  Like 10 of them met me at the gate.  I guess that means that my Sunday morning coffee time next to the hives is over for the year.  But the joke's on them because I wore double gloves, jacket, and pants today so none of them were able to get through.  The heat was a bitch though.

I reduced the other hive in the outyard down to a single deep too.  They have a queen, but I didn't see a whole lot in the way of open brood.  Maybe between the dark comb and the bad lighting there's something there that I'm not seeing, but it's not looking good.  If I don't see an improvement next week then I'll pinch the queen and give them a frame of eggs from somewhere, but that will be the last resources I throw at them this year.  This is the second queen that has returned to that hive to only to seemingly quit laying after a week or two.  Add that to the two virgins that never made it back to other hives and it's been a very bad year for queens here.

I ended up doing the OAV treatment on the light green hive first thing this morning.  I'll be taking samples each week for awhile to see what my mite numbers look like after isolation plus OAV.  I really need to peek into the nucs and the white hive in the backyard, but I just didn't have it in me today.  I'll probably regret that.

Lessons Learned

Urban (or suburban in my case) beekeeping comes with it's own set of considerations.  A lot of non-beeks take a NIMBY stance on bees.  And some have good reason to.  Those of us who live in a city need to keep our neighbors in mind when it comes to our bees or we may find that the city will start passing laws against keeping bees (boy, do I know about that one).  I try to do my best to mitigate the hazards that come when bees and people live in close proximity.  I supply them with a close water source.  I position the hives so that there are obstacles that force bees to fly upward before they cross into the neighbor's yards.  I do my best to prevent swarms, though I daresay that is as much for my benefit as theirs.  On that front, I seem to have failed.

I opened up the Auburn hive to peek in on them.  On the half that held the original colony, I found two frames with queen cells.  One of them was sealed.  My brand-new, marked queen was also nowhere in sight.  Based on the age of the youngest brood I was able to find I'd say that they took off about three days ago.  It's totally my fault for not paying enough attention.  I'd been doubting my decision to leave the old queen in place and move the swarm cells during the last split.  I know now that I was right to question that decision.  I won't do that again.

I have been planning to pull a couple of frames of brood off of the orange hive to start a nuc after honey season ends.  I want to go into winter with 5 full colonies and 4 4-over-4 nucs.  If you're interested in my reasoning for this configuration I encourage you to check out some of Michael Palmer's talks regarding his sustainable apiary.  It's good stuff.  So, to make light of a bad situation, I split the two frames from the Auburn hive with queen cells between two nucs and gave them each half of the resources.  I'll have to boost their numbers with frames from other hives (probably the orange hive), but this will give me a bit of a head start.  They are going to require a lot of TLC though.

In other news around the beeyard, the light green hive still has their queen caged.  I did have to cut a few queen cells out of the hive, but not as many as I had expected.  The orange hive got another honey super.  I don't expect them to do much with it this year, but it'll give them something to keep them busy.  In the outyard, the hive on the new stand hasn't done much with their second super, but they are at least starting to draw it out.  The hive on the old stand got a second story to work on.  I suspect that they will need some supplemental feeding once the summer death sets in.

You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do

Today's work was really about correcting issues discovered yesterday.  I started in the outyard.  I compressed the hive in the old stand (I really gotta come up with a better name) down to one story.  I don't love doing it that way because I had to handle the frame with the queen cells and move them from the top story to the bottom story and given my luck with queens this year I'm not confident about that.  Also, all of the frames in the bottom story are now drawn out which would normally signal the need for a second box.  They can't swarm without a queen, but I left two queen cells in it, an heir and a spare you might say.  There is still some capped brood there, so there will be some empty cells in the coming weeks.  I ended up taking off 7 frames of untouched foundation and 2 frames that had started to be drawn out with a little nectar and 1 frame that was drawn out, but empty.  The population of the hive is smaller than I'd like, so I think that the smaller area to defend is a good thing.  I haven't seen much in the way of SHB this season, but I did see about 6 in that hive today.  I think that next week (hopefully) when the new equipment comes in that I'll give them their second story back, but will give them a frame of brood to boost their numbers.

The point of pulling those frames was to give the Auburn nuc in the backyard room to expand.  They were boiling over with bees yesterday and were just days from swarming.  I found three queen cells.  One had an egg and another is on it's way to being sealed.  I separated the queen cells from what I hoped was a frame with a queen on it.  I didn't see the queen, but guessed based on their behavior.  I went back and checked today and finally found the queen.  Marked queens make life easier, but yellow isn't the easiest mark to find.  Anyway, I had guessed right yesterday and the queen was in the old half and the queen cells were in the new half.  As I'm sitting here typing this out, I'm wondering if I should have switched the sides in order to give the queenless half the foragers.  Oh well.  It happens.  Dogs' gonna bark, birds' gonna fly, I'm going to make stupid beekeeping mistakes.  It might be for the best anyway since that will probably be the hive that I rob a frame of brood from for the outyard Hive 2.  Anyway, I gave each half a second story and four frames of foundation.  The queenless half did get the frames that were drawn out with nectar since it will be a few days before the foragers start flying.  I'm saving the empty drawn comb for Nuc 1 when I release the queen on Wednesday.

Whew!

Have you ever had one of those days where you ask yourself "why the heck do I do this again?"

In the outyard, the hive in the old stand had 6 sealed queen cells, so queenlessness is confirmed.  I'm still at a loss as to what happened and why it doesn't even look like they attempted to raise a new queen.  Maybe she was poorly mated and by the time they realized it there were no suitable eggs.  I would expect to see a lot of drone comb in that case, and I'm not really seeing that.  Requeening has been my Achilles heel this season.

The hive in the new stand has lots and lots of bees.  They're really working on the super that I gave them last week.  What I gave them last week was the super frames from last year that didn't get fully capped.  I kept them in the freezer over the winter and gave them back to the bees last week.  I was afraid that the moisture from the thawing super might be a problem, but they look okay.  I'm not sure how much they've actually done vs. how much was already there, but I went ahead and gave them and empty super because the one they have is pretty full already and I'm seeing a bit of white wax on the bottom of the inner cover.

Now, on to the backyard.  I didn't open up the white hive.  If the last requeening worked then I wouldn't expect her to have started laying just yet.  I'll give her a few more days before I go in and start disturbing things.  The orange hive is going nuts.  They've drawn out 6-7 frames in the super, including some of the frames with starter strips.  They may need another super sooner rather than later.  The light green hive is drawing comb out faster now.  I didn't think they would need a super this year, but I might have been wrong.  I did notice at least one case of DWV in the hive, so that doesn't make me happy.  I'll start OAV treatment next week when I do the green nuc.

Speaking of the green nuc, the queen is still caged and still alive.  I'll release her on Wednesday and treat with OAV on the following Tuesday.  There is one patch of capped brood in her jail cell and some that will be emerging shortly.  The hive is starting to get honeybound.  They need at least one frame of foundation to play with.

Now we come to the Auburn hive.  I didn't check on them last week.  I should have.  It is bursting at the seams with bees.   I found 3 swarm cells in various stages.  One with an egg and one that's only a day or so from being capped.  They were definitely getting ready to swarm.  I moved all of the swarm cells into one half of the box and left the rest of the frames in the original half.  I'm hoping that the queen is in the half that doesn't have the queen cells.  I didn't see her, but made a guess based on the bees' attitude.  I'm going to go in and dig through a little deeper tomorrow.  I was trying to beat out the rain today.  I took the top story off, but really need to add it back on ASAP.

So, what makes this day so difficult?  I was not expecting to have to split the Auburn nuc and I'm completely out of deep frames.  In fact, the orange hive only has 9 frames in the top brood box.  I'm also down to 2 spare supers.  I need 9 deep frames immediately and would like to have another 8 on hand to fill the green nuc's other half when that time comes.  No problem I thought.  There is a bee supply shop about an hour from my house that I can always swing by in case of emergency.  So, I packed up the kiddo, picked up my mom to ride with us (because the kiddo wanted Maw-Maw), and off we went.  We made it two blocks before the sensor panel lit up on the Jeep.  The back passenger side tire is low.  It's been low for a few days.  My husband plugged a hole from a nail a few days ago and added air, but I thought he just hadn't added enough to bring it up to spec.  The front passenger side is now also low.  Really, really low.  So, around the block and back home we go.  Bust out the bucket of soapy water and sure enough there is a nail in the front tire.  And one in the back tire.  By this time, its already 4:00 so there's no way we're going to make it to the shop before they close, the tire shops are already closed, and the last resort of Wal-Mart is going to have to order my tires so we're definitely not going anywhere.  And then the rain started.  Ugh.

Well, that changes things....Part 2

Sometimes the beehaving gods smile down on you.  Today was one of those days.  The outyard hive has finally gained enough population that I don't feel like complete crap for splitting them.  The queen and half the resources were placed on a new stand right next to the old stand.  One thing I did try to do was give the queenright half some empty comb so she has somewhere to lay and give the queenless half most of the eggs and young larvae.  At very least, the queenright half will need another deep when it comes in, but I've ordered enough for all of them to have double deeps.

So, the tally is as follows:  There are now two outyard hives, both in a single deep box.  The backyard has one nuc, one single deep that will be a nuc, two single deep hives, and a double deep hive.  Once all of the new equipment comes in and gets painted, I'll figure out how to name them to keep them straight.

Well, that changes things...Part 1

So, Thursday night my city council passed a new package of animal ordinances.  In between outlawing tethering dogs and requiring registration of your cat they passed an ordinance that says that beehives must be kept 300' from the property line.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you need more room to have bees than to have horses (only 100' required).  They basically looked at a nearby city and copied their asinine ban verbatim.  This was passed without discussion or input from any beekeepers in the city.  Luckily, hives that are already established when the ordinance goes into effect will be grandfathered in and won't be subject to the setbacks.  Even more luckily, the ordinance doesn't go into effect for another week.  So, I took the logical approach of splitting everything I could to get my hive numbers up before the ordinance goes into effect.

Fortunately, in the case of emergency equipment needs, there is a shop about an hour from my house.  Today, I ran over and grabbed enough equipment to cobble together two more hives.  I also lucked out and he had a couple of spare queens.  I took a couple of frames of brood from the white hive and gave them one of the queens.  They are in a full sized hive, but will be moved into half of a resource hive when the order I placed last night comes in.

I decided to split the green hive evenly.  One deep for each half.  This was partly due to their strength and partly due to the fact that I really needed boxes on stands.  This was the bottleneck today because the queen decided that today was the best day ever to play hide-n-seek.  It took close to an hour to find her.  Once I did, she remained on the old stand and the other half of the bees and resources were moved to a new stand and given the other queen.

In other happenings, I'm starting to see foragers coming from the nuc that was split off of the white hive, so that's encouraging.  The holly bush is buzzing with bees and the clover is just barely starting to bloom here and there.  The spiderwort is blooming, but the bees either haven't found it or prefer the holly.

Make Like a Banana and Split

Despite my best attempts at preventing a swarm, I don't think I'm going to be able to do it without splitting.  I took the queen from the white hive and moved her and one other frame of brood into half of the resource hive (have I mentioned that I love that thing?) and added two frames of foundation.  I've heard some debate about my method from other beekeepers, but my theory behind doing it this way was that by removing the queen, the rest of the bees would think that the swarm had already left.  In a couple of days, I'll come back and cull out all but 2 or 3 queen cells to prevent them from swarming with a virgin queen.

For those of you keeping track at home, that makes three hives and a nuc.