Bee Keeping

[short cut sally]

OK Bleeker, how are your girls doing? I know that it's been sunny the past few weeks so I'm posting this to get an update on your hive. I'm interested in GLC's hubby's bees too..
I went into winter with 3 hives in my pen (1 of my dad's and 2 mine) and the Pkgd. bees didn't make it. They never went beyond one brood box, even though they had capped honey, they were sorta soppy in a clump when I scoped them out a couple of days ago. The 2 swarms made it with no problem. They had some capped honey left, so I took the empty frames out and replaced them with the capped honey from the pkgd hive. I left he empty hive open so there has been great robbing going on in it, I'm assuming or hoping it's by my bees.
I shimmed open the cover on all my hives in December with a piece of luann board as to allow more air to circulate (per a suggestion from a keeper in the area, and I never reduced my entrance). I'm not sure that's what kept them going or not, but there was no mold or anything, but still not sure about the pkgd. bees, they were simply not a good batch.
I'm going to order some "nuc" bees here as soon as I can find a ladies number that belongs in our local bee club.
Just was wondering how everyone's girls made out...I know spring's not here yet, and maybe jumping the gun on getting my hope's up for the bee's, but just couldn't help myself to see how they made out.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Hi Sally/Shelly....

Sadly, my one hive did not make it through the winter.

Around December 3, I found the queen dead outside the hive in front of it.
I'll never know what happened, since there has been no sign of disease of any kind, not excessive mites. No indication of CCD either.
Apparently after the queen's death, the hive slowly dwindled and was not able to raise brood to replace the older workers.
Last week I finally disassembled the hive and still could not find any clues as to what went wrong (aside from, obviously, the queen's death). I am forging ahead after my winter mourning period.

Many pounds of wonderful honey and pollen remained stored up and untouched in the frames of the two deeps, so i took that out and wrapped and stored it in my basement so it wouldn't get robbed.
I had the good sense to order two new packages back in January, so I'll have two new colonies to start up the first week of May. I also have an excellent local source of non-treated mite-resistant queens near me, so I'll likely split or do some requeening during the summer. My goal is to have 3 or 4 vigorous hives going into next fall. The odds are not so favorable for winter when you only have one hive.

I have also set up a swarm lure box for the year to do a little feral bee 'fishing'- you never know! Took an old wreck of a deep and baited it with old brood comb frames and lemongrass oil. There are honeybees from *somewhere* checking it out already for the past couple of days, going in and out and and cleaning out any remaining grains of sugar and old honey residue. With some luck I will catch a swarm eventually.

Meanwhile, I've been putting up nesting boxes for the little native bee pollinators too, our local wild blue orchard mason bees:
http://forums.teamestrogen.com/showp...&postcount=381
So it looks like there will indeed be bees flying here this summer, one way or another.

[BeeLady]

Well, I know my two hives made it through the winter. For the first time in two years we have lots of wildflowers and I think we just had our last frost yesterday so the mesquite should be blooming soon. Love that mesquite honey!

I didn't feed all winter but instead left the fall honey on my hives. This far south we can usually harvest twice a year, but I didn't want to be feeding all winter so followed my natural beekeeper book and left honey on.

I believe one of my hives is Africanized. It was pretty testy last summer and fall. Its lid blew off and I veiled up to replace it this morning. Only one bee came after me and didn't even bounce off the veil, so far so good. I haven't requeened this hive so I have to assume that it is Africanized.

I've had my bees for five or six years; have had enough honey to make it through each year but not much for friends/family during our two-year drought. Am SOOOOOOO glad we've had a wet spring; hopefully the rain will give us a brief reprieve and not knock the blooms off until the bees are ready for the next phase.

[short cut sally]

Sorry to hear about your bee's Bleeker. I wonder if she reached her prime, wasn't laying anymore, but would think they would;ve managed to requeen themselves. That's an interesting process in itself. BUT you do have a jump on this year though. I figure if I leave my empty hive open, it will be robbed/cleaned and ready for the next colony to get their feet planted, as like you said, I'm hoping a colony will move in so I don't have to fill it myself. My goal, to have 5 hives, including my dad's single hive. My DH gives the approval too, he's gotta extend my fence and lay more filter fabric and get the stones. He has just as much fun telling about my bees as I do. I could work with the space right now, but it would be cramped and not allow any space between the hives, and would reduce my working range.
I talked to a local bee keeper today, he was set up selling his honey and hoeny cream at a local maple festival. I've never had honey cream, and let me tell you, I grew up on maple cream and this was just as delicious as that. I bought several tubs from him. Yeah, it was that good. Anyways, he went into winter with 12 hives, lost only 1. Another customer was there talking, he went into winter with 3 swarms and didn't lose any, which he said was his first time in years at not losing any. He used to have 15 at one time he said but lost them over the winters. They were all happy as there wasn't much honey made this past year due to all the rain.
Bleeker, I did read about your mason bee boxes. In fact, I had never heard of these, so after reading your little blog about them, I researched. Intersting. Here I thought they were some sort of deformed flying ant or something when I saw them. I had no idea. I asked Dad about them, he'd never heard of them either. So I plan on doing up some boxes and putting them around. So thank you for the information! There is so much more to this site than biking, it's all well rounded bunch of useful information!

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Hi Sally,
When my queen died in beginning of December, replacing her wouldn't have worked anyway because there were no drones for the entire winter approaching, and I'm told a virgin queen can't overwinter 5 months and then successfully make it into May and still be able to go on a mating flight. Plus, by that time all the workers would have long since died of old age and the virgin queen could not have replaced them. It was doomed when my queen died. My only hoope during the winter was that there was a second queen in the hive, but apparently not.

I'm SO glad you've become interested in our native solitary bees.
I recently added a few more cool links to sites about them on my blog post:
http://strumelia.blogspot.com/2010/0...most-here.html
Be sure to explore the German site with all its gorgeous photos of creative 'art' bee houses over in Europe.

[short cut sally]

Bleeker, i was making dinner after I wrote that about the hive making a new queen, I thought to myself, "you (meaning me) idiot"...I KNEW there was no way a new queen would get mated in December, the drones are long booted out and on the verge of dying, and where and how is a new queen going to mate? That was silly talk on my end..sorry.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

This morning I got to watch the hatching of two of my solitary blue orchard mason bees from their cocoons. Miraculously I got a couple of good photos of the event:
http://strumelia.blogspot.com/2010/0...-hatching.html