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.

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.