• Tag Archives parent colony
  • Jax

    Lughnasa                                     Waxing Back to School Moon

    After a nap, I headed out again, the second of three busy days.  This time I went to Jax, a return to the 1950’s with dark wood paneling, a lovely buffet table and Jean-Marie’s jax-matchbookmilestone birthday.  Happy Birthday, Jean-Marie matchbooks, the whole Jax touch.  I met Jean-Marie’s daughters and spent a good bit of time chatting with her oldest who until recently was a graduate student under Marla Spivak, the bee goddess of the UofM.  She and Jim of Nature’s Nectar, whom I saw later, convinced me to try and keep my old parent colony.

    The elegance of the Jax setting made for a dignified tone.  Other docents came in and I spoke with Joannie Platz, Toni de Lafour, Marilyn Smith and a few others.  I saw Allison as I left.  She has a very fashionable red knee brace.

    A long drive out to Stillwater to Nature’s Nectar to pick up Apiguard, Fumigilin-B, shims, hive stands and corks.  Jim’s a knowledgeable guy and easy to talk to.  He gave me some good advice about the parent colony.  He requeens every year, so the need to eliminate the old parent colony is not so high.  With tests and assays I should be able to keep on top of the mites and other diseases, too.

    The drive back from Stillwater was in pouring rain; the first time I’ve driven in really heavy rain this year.  Back home now and dry.

    Tomorrow is the docent lunch at noon, then the UTS event at 6:00 PM.


  • Yeah, Mon

    Beltane                                            Waning Flower Moon

    Good bee news on two fronts.  In colony 2, the child colony, I inserted the queen using the slow release method, a piece of marshmallow covering her escape route which she and her new family will eat away over the next few hours.  Hopefully, this slow entry of her pheromones into the colony will encourage this colony to accept a strange queen.  In colony 3, the one begun from the 2 pound package a bit over a week ago, I checked the frames today and found larvae.  That means the queen survived my clumsy introduction of her using the quick release method, basically shake her out on a frame and then close up the hive.

    At the moment, then, I have the parent colony with two honey supers on, the child colony, the division, with a new queen, and a third colony with its new life here under way complete with a laying queen.  The parent colony should produce a good honey flow this summer.  The child colony may produce a bit of honey but its primary job is to become a colony strong enough for division next spring.  That is also the task of colony 3.  The goal is to have two parent colonies next spring and two child colonies.  If I can maintain those numbers, we should have a lot of honey, some to give as gifts and some to sell at the farmer’s market.

    I added my second copper top when I put in the new queen.  Soon I’ll order a copper top for the parent colony and next spring I’ll add the fourth one.  With the polyurethaned hive boxes and  honey supers, the copper tops will make our bee yard an aesthetic addition to the place.

    Earlier today I attended a docent luncheon for Michele Yates, leaving for York, Pennsylvania on June 20th or so.  Allison’s place sits near 50th and France.  Her neighbor’s house has a Sotheby’s real estate sign.  That kind of neighborhood.  Her backyard has stone landscaping and orderly plantings all in vigorous growth.  She has a gracious home and entertains with elan.

    Carreen Heegaard told the story of her 1988 honeymoon, nicely timed to coincide with Hurricane Gilbert.  She and her new husband Eric had chosen Jamaica as a destination because the prices were very reasonable.  They spent the first night of their Jamaican vacation in Peewee’s Bar, perched high above the ocean, Peewee’s being one of the few nearby buildings that had concrete walls.  She described the sound of nails popping out as the train-sounding winds peeled back the corrugated roof exposing all those huddled under a long table to the pounding surf and rain.

    The highlight of her story, which had many, involved their trip to the grocery store after Gilbert had passed.  In Carreen’s  words, “There we were, a Minnesotan (Eric) and a Canadian (Carreen), standing in line with a grocery cart while the store was being looted.”  Says so much about cultural variance.


  • Getting Things Ready

    Beltane                                       Waning Flower Moon

    After checking the parent colony with the queen excluder in, I found larvae in the top hive box.  That’s evidence of the queen.  That meant I shifted the middle hive box over to the new foundation and bottom board.  A syrup feeder pail went on top of the new, child colony.  This calms everything down and allows for a peaceful slow release of the queen tomorrow.  Leaving the queen excluder on the hive box in which I discovered larvae, I put two honey supers on it and replaced the inner cover and the telescoping outer cover.  The parent colony now has two hive boxes, one with a queen and brood, plus the other, lower box, which will get reversed on top in 7-10 days.

    Tomorrow I’ll check the package colony for larvae a second time.  If they have none, I’ll have to get another queen for them soon.  If there is no queen in the hive, the lack of her pheromones turns on egg laying in the workers, but, since they’re not fertilized they produce only drones.  Once a hive converts to worker egg-laying apparently you have to start over.

    This has been a busy couple of weeks for the bees.  Kate’s been making supers and frames and hive boxes, too.  If the divide and the package colony take, things will calm down for a while until the honey flow ends.  Then, there’s an end of the whole process I haven’t encountered.  Honey.

    Two more bags of composted manure on the leek/sugar pod pea bed, another on the sun trap and a lot of planting.  The herb spiral has the herbs Kate bought Friday at Mickman’s.  I also planted beets, mustard greens, fennel, onions and a pepper plant in the sun trap.  The tomatoes and other peppers will go there, too.  Those two beds, along with the other bed where I have green onions plants along with radicchio, beets from seed and thyme will be our kitchen garden for the growing season.

    Kate did a lot of weeding, including the blueberry patches.  It really makes a difference to have her focused on that aspect of gardening.  She’s also in charge of pruning which has its on rules.

    The leeks, onions, kale, chard, garlic, parsnips, butternut squash, other beets and carrots will also be available during the growing season of course, but most of these will get canned or dried or frozen for the winter.

    I would not like to do the cost accounting on these vegetables and the fruit because the two fences and Ecological gardens have created a lot of sunk costs.  It will take years for them to zero out the costs, more years, I imagine, than we have left in this house.  In our case, of course, that’s not the big point.  The big point is a more sustainable and healthy lifestyle and in that regard the cost accounting has already tilted in our favor.


  • Beesy Morning

    Spring                                         Awakening Moon

    Checked on the bees today.  They needed syrup so I put in two pitchers full.  They also needed another pollen patty. The colony looks healthy.  Lots of bees hard at work.  No stings.  I have a few things to check on in terms of what I need to do now.

    Got all the mechanical detritus out of the soon to be honey house.  Next is a good sweeping and a washing, then organizing a table and the rest of the equipment.

    (honey bee head under an electron microscope)

    General clean up.  Getting ready for spring, which has sprung on us with some surprise.  Bought the seeds for early stuff and I’ll plant the onions tomorrow morning after I plan the rest of the vegetable garden.

    We need rain.  If it fits in your faith tradition, please do a rain dance for us up here in Andover.


  • A Parent Colony, A Divide, And a Package Colony

    Imbolc                             New Moon (Awakening)

    Bees.  Bees.  Bees.  Bees.  I’ve had two 8 hour sessions of nothing but bees.  And more stuff about bees.

    Today I learned about dividing a colony, a successfully wintered colony, which is our situation here.  As Marla Spivak says, “If you’re not sure, just let the bees do it.”  That conforms to my work late last fall with the bees.  Mark, my bee beepackagementor, had a traumatic autumn and we just didn’t get together quite enough.

    Now, though, I understand the next step, which will create a parent colony–the old queen with two hive boxes–and a child colony, which I will treat in the same way I did the current one.  That is, the goal with it will be to get to late fall with three hive boxes with a combination of brood, pollen and honey sufficient to see the child colony through this coming winter.

    (2 lb package of bees)

    Here’s the difficult part.  The parent colony gets no care after the honey flow stops.  This means that its queen will die of old age and since the colony will then have lost its egg layer, the entire colony will die out over the winter.  There’s nothing cruel about this since it follows the essential biology of bees.  That is, queens live around 2  years and the workers 60 days, so the entire colony would die out under any circumstances without a new queen and even if a new queen were added, the bees that would become the new colony under her reign would be entirely new bees.

    There’s a big upside to this for all bees.  We can clean out the old hive bodies and frames, check for disease and virus and if necessary we can burn the old frames and start over.  This means that each bee colony will have a young, prolific queen and each hive will get a complete going over ever other year.  Both of these elements, cleaning and a young, prolific queen increase the colonies capacity to survive and thrive.

    The good news is that the parent colony begins making honey the minute the divide is complete.  Honey supers go on the parent colony right away and they start filling up.  A honey super is about half the size of a deep hive box and honey filled frames are their only result.  A queen excluder is put on the parent colony deep hive boxes, so the queen does not crawl up in the honey supers and start laying eggs, therefore only honey ends up in them.

    In addition to the divide Mark the bee mentor called and said he had an extra package of bees on the way.  I agreed to buy it because I thought my bees were dead.  Since they’re not, taking on another package of bees means we’ll end up with four hives next spring if everything goes well.  At that point, we should be producing some serious honey, possibly enough to sell at farmer’s markets.