Bee Log #86

A beekeeper in Akron, Ohio wrote and asked about our business model and said that he was interested in doing something similar in his city. I realized as I wrote my reply that my husband and I had learned a lot about city beekeeping in the few years that we have been involved. My reply to that beekeeper is below.

Dear ******,
I am glad to hear that you are interested in city beekeeping. We have 35 hives in about 10 locations including 2 nearby farms. We have found that the amount of driving involved really cuts into our profits. It is difficult to break even. I would suggest that you concentrate on one area of your city for beehives. It also helps if you can keep 4 to 10 hives in any one location. Check with city ordinances for the number of hives that can be kept in any single location.

Security is a prime concern on vacant lots. You will need some kind of protection from vandalism like a big cyclone fence or video surveillance. Swarms are a neighborhood event and can be very scary for those who do not know what is happening. Neighborhood education can really help with that.

Be really careful about selecting a queen breeder. Aggressiveness in bees is a genetic issue and the queen source can make a big difference. Don't get bees from Texas. Use a trusted source. You want gentle bees in the city. Re-queen any hives that show highly aggressive tendencies.

Before you get lots of hives, consider how you will market your honey. When we got 4 hives, we suddenly had far more honey than we knew what to do with. At that point, we started selling honey once a week at a local farmers' market. You could do that or you could sell from your front yard if the city allows it or you could market to local organic type groceries. We like the direct contact with customers and the profits we can get from direct sales. All our honey sells rapidly and we usually sell out before Christmas.

We use a 6 frame radial extractor from Maxant (based in Massachusetts) with a motor drive. This small extractor keeps up ok for now. We use a hot knife to uncap the frames. We bottle by hand from food grade plastic buckets with a honey gate. If you do not have an extractor, check with your local beekeeping club. They may have one you can rent.

We have kept bees for about 6 years. We started when our daughter studied bees for a college course and she thought we might like the hobby. We started selling honey 5 years ago. Our business really started taking off last summer when we found people coming to our small farmers' market just for our honey. We do not make a whole lot of money at this because the expenses are too great but we have a whole lot of fun and meet some great people.

Bee Log 65: September 5, 2011

Her Majesty was not deposed. The throne is still in the hands (wings?) of the nasty grumpy queen. We hunted all down through the hive-all 6 boxes and 60 frames of angry buzzing bees trying to find her. Then we went back up the whole six boxes looking again. We did not find her. We put the hive back together but took enough honey and empty frames out that there are now only 4 boxes. We will have to try again soon.

Bee Log 64: August 30, 2011

I am not happy today. This is the result of 3 bee stings to the face through my bee vale. I am puffed up like a chipmunk trying to stash seeds. I guess this goes with the beekeeping territory but I wish I did not respond so spectacularly.

We have a grumpy hive. This is usually due to genetics so the cure is to re-queen. That means that we have to go through 6 medium bee boxes (westerns) and find the queen. We are not using queen excluders this year so the queen, bless her non-heart blood system, could be anywhere in the tall,populous hive. That means really upsetting the bees to find her.

Last night we moved the hive after dusk from the host yard to a more remote location. We tried to secure all entrances immediately but the bees poured out a poorly secured top entrance. Then the front entrance plug came part way out. So we loaded a hive that had nasty bees crawling all over the surface. My husband got it in the ankles and wrists and I got it in the face each time my vale brushed the skin. We brushed the bees off of each other, got in the truck with our bee suits on and drove to the remote site. Unloading was as unpleasant as loading but at least we were alone and did not have to worry about the residents. Husband took a few more hits on the ankles. Boy those bees love his black fuzzy socks.

We stopped at a grocery store after all was over and I tried to find meat tenderizer made from papaya. I found some but it had salt in it and that did not sound too good so I bought a ripe papaya. When I got home, I cut off a piece and rubbed it all over my face concentrating on the sting sites. I also took Benedryl and ibuprofen and went to bed with an ice pack. I think the papaya helped.

It is overcast and threatening rain today so we will not attempt any search for the nasty queen today.

Bee Log 63: August 20, 2011

Yes! We have honey! It has been so cold this spring and summer in Seattle that I did not think that we would ever get honey. The bees have been packing it in. We took our first honey August 1 and got another harvest this last week. The result is honey to sell at the Phinney Farmers' Market on Friday evenings from 3pm to 7pm.

Our honey is tasty and unique. We are selling most of the honey by hive location. For instance, we have had a nice lot of honey from 98103, 98119 and 98125 so we sell that honey by zip code. We can only guess at the source of the honey because we know what was blooming before the harvest. I know blackberry is one of the components of the current honey as well as Linden trees and clover. Japanese knot weed will be next along with the little yellow dandelion things (I think a wild aster) currently blooming in yards around us. Each group of hives produces a unique taste. Honey is a bit like wine as each harvest has an individual taste.

We have been busy with our bees. 25 hives has us working about 2-3 days a week this time of year. Some of the hives are more productive than others. And the production in an individual hive varies through the season.

Come see us at the market if you live in Seattle. Phinney Farmers' Market is a smaller, family friendly market with a great selection of fruit and produce and a wonderful set of vendors.

Bee Log 62: July 26, 2011

Honey bee working a leek that has gone to flower


A full frame of honey that is almost ready. Note the whiter area along the top of the frame. That honey has a thin wax cap across the top indicating that the bees have decided that it has been sufficiently dehydrated. We take frames of honey from the bees when they are at least 80% capped. Go bees go!


A family, visiting from California, is watching my husband work a hive in our back yard. We love to educate people about bees when we get a chance.


I got stung on the leg two days ago. My body over-reacts to bee venom. So far treatment has consisted of ice, Benadryl, hydro-cortisone cream, and ibuprofen. I looked up some folk remedies and tried a few but I think I was too late for them to have any effect. Ice seems to give the most relief.

This has been a most frustrating summer for beekeepers and presumably for the bees. We have had cool overcast day after cool overcast day. I look at the weather across the nation and see the temperatures in many parts of the country hovering around a humid 95 to 100 degrees and am thankful I don't have to brave that but on the other hand, it does make beekeeping difficult when the bees can't get out to the flowers that I know are blooming. Our bees are finally able to bring in nectar in excess of their needs. We are seeing a lot of uncapped honey that we hope will be ready sometime this week of next week. The bees put a thin coat of wax over the cells of honey when they are dehydrated enough so the honey doesn't ferment.


We hope to be at the Phinney Farmers' Market on the first Friday in August.

Bee Log 61: July 4, 2011

These seven hives are at the Urban Horticulture Center on the University of Washington campus. The hive on the far right is the swarm hive that was featured in the previous blog. It is coming right along. The hive on the far left is the hive that swarmed. We know this because it ended up without a viable queen. The old queen flies off with the swarm. The remaining hive is left with queen cells (pupa cases) about to hatch another queen. That new queen must go around and kill the other queens about to hatch. If she misses one, then there is often a secondary swarm with an unmated queen. We did have a second swarm at that site so it could be that the hive ended up without a queen. Our last inspection of the far left hive showed that there were no eggs, no larva and no brood (pupa cases). That means no active queen.

Our options were to purchase a queen for $25 to $30, let nature take its course and possibly loose a strong hive with a lot of bees or combine that hive with another hive. We chose this last option combining the hive with a swarm that we caught at one of our host homes. We know that swarm had a queen because of the behavior of the bees as we captured the swarm.

To combine hives, we use the newspaper method. A sheet of newspaper is placed on top of the hive without a queen or with a queen we want to depose. Slits are made in the paper and the hive addition is placed on top. The bees set to work chewing up the paper giving them enough time to adjust to the new queen. If there are two queen, they fight for their throne with (we hope) the strongest, healthiest queen winning.

In the last 3 days, we have answered 4 swarm calls. We love getting these swarms as thay helps make up for all the hives we lost last winter. One swarm was a puny little thing and we combined it with a larger swarm.

We are starting to add honey supers to out hives. Any hive that you see in the above picture with 4 boxes has a honey super. We are hoping to have honey to sell by July 22. That is our target date for starting with the Phinney Farmers' Market. Finally the weather is looking like summer with days in the mid 70's and blackberry blossoms galore.

Bee Log 60: June 15, 2011

This is our Seattle Urban Honey logo on a sign at the farmers' market last summer. Our bees are not yet producing honey that we can take this summer. This might delay the July 1 date that we had hoped would be the debut of this season's honey.


Our bees are hungry. The blackberry bushes are just about to bloom as are the locust trees but they must be waiting for a nice day before they open. The maple and chestnut are finished blooming. The weather is still pretty cool with clouds, wind and some rain so the bees are stuck at home a good bit of the time. We looked through all of the hives last weekend and found that they all needed feeding because they were in danger of starvation. The population is booming in all hives so lack of feed is not a good thing. We did not have honey supers on any hives except the one surviving hive from last summer(in a yard in Bellevue).

We decided that since that hive is so populous and because it really needs feed that we would take this time to make a three way split. (You can't feed bees when there is a danger that the syrup might get stored as honey for human consumption. That is one of the ways that beekeepers cheat.) The bees were filling 4 western sized (medium)boxes. A fifth honey super (honey storage box) was pretty much untouched by the bees. We bought 2 new queens from Corky Luster Of Ballard Honey. We went through the hive and found the old queen in the third box from the bottom. She is big and beautiful. We set her aside along with a box full of bees and brood. She was going to go back on the old hive site. The rest of the hive was split into two roughly equal boxes of brood and bees. There was NO HONEY to divide up. Each box of bees got a second almost empty box on top and a feeder full of 2 gallons of sugar water (1:1 this time of year). The two new hives got a new queen inserted in a little screened box with a hard candy plug. By the time the bees eat the candy plug, they should be used to the new queen's scent. The queen will get fed through the screen.

The owner of the property had been asking for more bees. He had 4 hives last year, 3 of which died so he is happy to see more hives. This split will limit the honey that we could have gotten from such a vigorous hive but at the same time we were worried about the lack of honey and starvation. We should get three good hives and maybe some honey.

Bee Log 59: June 11, 2011

We caught a swarm on Thursday evening. The swarm was from our own bees at the Urban Horticulture Center. I did not think of getting my camera out until we had bumped the swarm into a 5 gallon bucket and poured the bees into a waiting hive. Here the bees on the inner cover of the hive are scent fanning, rears in the air and wings going like mad, to call the rest of the bees to the hive. The queen is inside the hive and the rest of the bees in the swarm are being informed of her whereabouts.



This picture was taken about 5 to 10 minutes after the first picture. Notice that almost all the bees are aiming toward the hole in the top of the inner cover.



It takes time to hive a swarm. We spent about 45 minutes to an hour waiting for the bees to march into their new home.



Almost all the bees are in the hive now. It is time to put the cover on the hive and to place the hive where we want it. The old queen will be in the hive with the swarm. The hive where the swarm originated will be raising a new queen. She will hatch within about 5 days. The new queen will then need a 70 degree day to get out to mate.


Bees in a bird house:

This cute little bird house belongs to friends of mine, J&B. It fell out of the tree where it was hanging and B went to pick it up and was quite surprised (understatement) when bees came pouring out. In general, we do not handle bees for people other than honey bee swarms but for close friends with bees in a bird house we do make exceptions. We were in a time crunch because we needed to be at a high school graduation so my husband with his bee suit on popped the whole bird house into an empty bee hive and left the hive sitting in J&B's yard so the rest of the bees could find their home that evening. My husband described the bees as fat and fuzzy. He knew they were not honey bees but did not have time or leisure for further identification.

After the graduation, we raced back to change clothes and retrieve our hive with unidentified bees. We plugged the entrance to the hive, strapped the hive together, took it home in the back of our pickup and left it there until morning. This morning, we located a place in a tree in our yard for the little bird house, suited up and placed the bird house in the tree.

The bees are a small bumble bee. I am glad that we saved them because we need native pollinators as well as the honey bees. I will try to get a picture of one of the bumble bees.

Bee Log 58: June 4, 2011

The hive on the left is a combination of two weak hives. We piled the one hive on the other with newspaper between. It must have been too late because both hives died. There was plenty of honey. The top box must have weighed 30 pounds or more. The hive on the right is a new hive placed in April. It is doing very well on this first really nice day of the year. The spring has been cold, cold, cold and wet, wet, dreary wet. We are on a swarm list (Puget Sound Beekeepers' Association) and anticipating calls and maybe some excitement!



Yes, a happy hive! (on the right)


A close-up of bees being busy on a really nice early June morning.


Elegy for a dead hive. We had such great hopes for this year but we are down to one surviving hive out of 19 that went into the winter. We did order 18 new boxes of bees which, despite the cold spring, seem to be doing very well. We cleaned most of the equipment that contained the dead hives with the idea that the causative organism for the bee deaths might still be in the hives. We also cleaned out a whole lot of stored honey which at this point is just waste and will go down the drain. I know that we are throwing away potential resources but there is some evidence that bees housed in dead-outs have a high mortality.

Our experiment this summer is placing bees in all new hives and in hives that have been pressure washed and bleached. So far there is no noticeable difference.

Bee Log 57: May 22, 2011

We have a new spot to keep bees. We are so excited to have a spot at the University of Washington Urban Horticulture Center. It is in an out of the way fenced area. I hope these bees do well enough to earn their rent!



Our own bees ready to go in a hive.



One of the members of the Puget Sound Beekeepers invited club members to his place to help install over 100 boxes of bees. Pictured above are some of the boxes waiting to be put in a hive.



We toured the honey house that the beekeeper had built. Notice the bees hanging out on our bee-suits. These bees don't know where they live.


It is hard to keep writing about dead beehives. Finally, I have something to say about nice lively beehives. We got 18 new boxes of bees. This brings out total hives up to 21. Out of 19 hives of bees, 4 survived. Two of those hives were so weak that we put them together as one hive. The queens fight and one queen will remain in that situation.

The new bees are all booming despite the cool weather. It will take a bit of time for them to build up to the place where we can take honey from them. Our first date at the Phinney Farmers' Market is July 1. Last year with a cool May and June we were not able to get to the market until August 1. I sure hope that is not the case this year. Lots of local beekeepers are out of honey. People are asking for it at the farmers' markets and not getting it.

Bee Log 56: April 20, 2011

This is what the bottom board on one of our dead hives looked like. It looks pretty much like the bottom boards of the hives that survive. There are a few dead bees there.



We are getting some new hives ready to receive the new packages of bees that we are expecting.

We went into the winter with 19 live hives. 15 of them have died over the winter. I am not sure that I am such a good beekeeper. What did they die of and when did they die? Only one hive died of starvation. All of the other hives had more then enough stores to see them through the winter. Two hives died in the last two weeks. They seem to be victims of CCD or colony collapse disorder. The bees just disappeared leaving behind a bunch of honey, capped brood and no recently dead bee corpses. Several hives died between February 1 and March 1. It was a nasty cold winter and the bees probably had too small a cluster to begin raising the spring bees needed to replace an elderly population of late winter bees. In those hives we found a softball sized cluster of bees all dead.

What will we do differently? We did not treat for either varroa mites or trachea mites last fall. We need to do both. There are some new non-pesticide treatments out that show some promise. One is based on hops and one on formic acid. We have started with the hops treatment. We are also feeding sugar water and pollen substitute. It remains colder than normal in Seattle and the bees are just not getting out much. They need to raise brood this time of year and they must have pollen or pollen substitute for protein.

We hived 8 new packages of bees over the last weekend. We are trying an experiment based on the hypothesis that winter dead-outs are largely caused by a disease or diseases. We placed 4 of the new boxes of bees on frames that had held honey last summer. 4 boxes were placed on new plastic frames painted with a bit of bee's wax from our own hives. We are following the work of Craig Cella of Loganton, PA who described an experiment in the April 2011 American Bee Journal. Any boxes, bases or lids that were reused were dipped in a 10% bleach solution before the bees came. Our test will be a count of the blank cells in the brood nest. A 20 X 20 cell area is marked out and then the empty cells counted. We are curious whether the reused honey super frames will affect the brood.

Beekeepers have been putting new bees on old drawn out frames for many years. Bees seem to like old comb. This gives the bees a head start because they can get right down to the business of raising a family without having to build the house first. Recently, there seems to be some evidence that diseases or something bad for the bees is harbored in the old comb. It is known that the wax is a sponge for pesticides and that the accumulation of pesticides is bad for the bees. Some disease like American foul brood bacteria spores are known to stay on the wax and infected subsequent hives (such hives must be burned). This is not American foul brood. It is not known what causes CCD but putting bees in hives that have died increases mortality. Perhaps our small experiment can help determine if the honey supers are also harboring an agent causing poor brood numbers.

We enter spring a bit chastened by our loss. We feel responsible. We do want to be able to produce honey for the farmers' market. There are 10 more packages of bees coming. That will give us a total of 22 hives placed in 10 locations around the north end of Seattle.

Bee Log 55; March 8, 2011

Nosema Infected Hive

The hive pictured above is alive after a long and cold (for Seattle) winter. The bees have not been able to get out for a long time and on the first day nice enough to fly made the mess that you see on the front of the hive. Bee poop. The ground around the hives is also littered with yellow and brown spots. I do not know if this is normal because I have never seen so much spotting on the front of the hive before. The bees could have nosema or the bees could have just needed to get out and go. I need a microscope. I need to learn how to diagnose bee diseases or find someone who can. I need to learn to dissect a bee.

Many of our hives have died between the end of January and the beginning of March. We put granulated sugar on top of the inner cover for emergency feed when we took a peek in January but evidently that measure was not enough. We have 7 surviving hives out of 19 at the start of the winter. Ouch! Half of those hive deaths occurred this last month. I understand that this is the new normal in beekeeping. Bees are just not very robust. I do think that we closed down the hives for the winter too late last fall and we did not treat for any of the bee diseases. Our beekeeping needs to end by early September not early October. I don't know what out bees died of so I do not know what diseases to treat for. I imaging that treating for varroa mites would not have hurt the bees. There are some new safe treatments on the market and I need to investigate to see if they are compatible with our low tech, no pesticide philosophy.

Bee Log 54: February 24, 2011

So here we are loading up our pick-up with new bee gear. We have ordered 10 packages of bees and parts for 8 new hives. Some of the bees will be for beehives that are dead and some to increase the number of our hives from 19 to about 26. Some of the hives will go at the Urban Horticulture Center at the University of Washington and some will go on some new sites at private homes. We are still looking for at least one more bee placement site.

February has been too cold for the bees to get much flying time. Last year must have been a bit warmer because I remember them flying a bit. We put a little granulated sugar under the lid on top of the inner cover hoping to give the bees a bit of nutrition in case they are running out of food.

Bee Log 49: October 14, 2010

Our hives are in 8 back yards around the north end of Seattle. This is one group. We plan to expand to another 3 backyards next spring.


Another group of hives.


My husband with a beautiful frame of capped honey. We were taking off the supers (top honey storage units on a hive) from this hive and getting the last of the honey for this year. The bees will still keep gathering honey on nice days but they get to keep it for their winter stores. Also, we wanted to get all of the supers off before the ivy started to bloom as the ivy honey doesn't taste or smell good.

The season is over. The supers have come off of the hives and the bees are being fed sugar water to make sure that they have enough stores for the winter. The last of the honey has been taken and extracted. This season has been a poor one due to the rainy, wet weather. We averaged about 25 pounds of honey per hive with some hives producing much more and others having no surplus honey at all.

I am already looking forward to next year's harvest. I have learned that I love the honey that is produced when the linden trees are in bloom. We have also discovered that we have a lot of linden trees in our vicinity. I know that I don't like ivy honey AT ALL. Ivy is blooming right now and the bees can have that honey for themselves for the winter. I am glad that ivy doesn't bloom when other important, tasty flowers are blooming. If you smell ivy flowers, that is just the way that ivy honey tastes! Yuck.

We loved being at the Phinney Farmers' market. We loved meeting people from the community and educating them about bees and honey. Thank you customers and supporters. I will go make sugar water so we can keep feeding the bees so they have lots of food for the winter.

Bee Log 46: August 31, 2010

Wild Aster by Green Lake
Good bee food


Mimosa Tree
Attractive to bees


Japanese Knotweed
Very invasive, non-native species but the bees love it. The honey is very dark.


Drone larva on a white plate that were disected out of some brood comb that was culled from a hive. The black spots are varroa mites that were on the brood.

The last time that we went into the hives to collect honey (August 23), we did not find as much honey as we expected. Evidently, there was not a whole lot for the bees to eat after the linden trees stopped blooming and before the Japanese knot weed started to bloom.

We are selling honey at the Phinney Farmers' Market and the Bothell Farmers' Market along with selling to neighbors and friends. The honey supply is ok but not abundant. We hope for some nice weather on Thursday Sept. 2 when we will start to look in the hives again for some more honey to harvest.

School starts soon and my husband and I get back to our day jobs as teachers.

Bee Log 41: June 10, 2010

In early April, we moved a mature hive to a yard in Bellevue just before the cherry trees were in bloom. That hive got really mean and aggressive and had to be requeened about a month ago. Aggression in bees is a matter of genetics and the queen is the mother of all of the bees in a hive. Aggressive bees are dangerous to have around. Yesterday we got into that formerly mean hive and found a brood box (lower part of the hive), full of eggs and larva. A bee lives for about 6 weeks in the summer so there were still some aggressive guard bees in the hive but nothing like the buzzing attacks we experienced in mid May. Then, the guard bees would follow us away from the hive. We had to walk into the deep shade and wait for them to leave us alone before we could take our bee suits off. On this visit, no bees followed us as we left the hive.

We also saw honey in that hive!!!! The bees have one super (upper part of the hive where the surplus honey is stored) almost full of honey and capped. Capping is the final step in honey production for the bee. It is a thin coat of wax over the ripe honey.

I am so glad to see honey. We have worked through some problems this spring that we have never had before. I started to wonder if the bees would store a surplus that we could take. This spring, we have seen drone laying workers, drone laying queens, queens missing in action and queens with mean genetics along with swarms that left behind hives with new queens that couldn't mate because it was too cold and rainy.

We are thrilled and thankful that the requeening of the mean hive went so well. The two hives in our own yard that we requeened in April seem to be building up a good population but aren't storing surplus honey yet. We requeened 5 more hives almost a week ago and the new queens should be out of their cages now and starting to lay eggs. There is a candy plug in the queen cage that the workers eat through to let the new queen out. The bees need to be introduced to new royalty slowly or they will kill the new monarch.

I will try to get some more pictures so you can see the things that I am describing.

Bee Log 40: June 7, 2010

This is the year of the queen installation. We bought 5 queens at Beez Neez on Saturday and installed them all. I think the problem is that the weather has been too cold for the queens to get out and mate. It needs to be 70 degrees at least. We have not had many days that warm this spring. In some hives, the bees are even having trouble bringing in enough feed for their young. We have had one swarm in the last month that I know about. I suspect another. We split one hive that had a brood box of 3 deeps and was only producing drones. The swarm that I collected was without a fertile queen. If the new queen developing in hive from which the swarm issued does not get out to mate within a certain time period, the hive will not have eggs or larva.

This is not a good bee year. March was so warm that the bees swarmed. We put supers on our hives in March. April and May have been cold and rainy. With supers on the hives, we have not been able to feed the bees. The bees that we started this year in yards around Seattle are doing well because we have been feeding them.

We are getting concerned that we will not have honey for the market on July 2. This is the date that we are supposed to start selling. We will see. The blackberry flow is just starting in Seattle and that could yield significant honey if the weather cooperates. The black locust trees are blooming now and the lavender is starting to bloom.

I am starting to sound like my farmer grandfather!!! He made a living on 120 rock strewn acres in northeastern Iowa. He raised hogs, corn, soy beans, oats, hay and dairy cattle. There were always worries about the weather, the prices or bacteria counts in the milk. Pay days were few and far between. He couldn't count on pay days even happening.

Bee Log 39; May 19, 2010

Swarm Capture Bucket


Beehive with Swarm



I captured a swarm today. No, this video is NOT me. It was my inspiration and what I wish I had looked like. Thank you Jeff McMullan for your excellent footage of a very experienced beekeeper.

I had seen this video on Youtube and had a similar situation developing at my house. The bees landed in a pear tree on the alley about 4 houses down the block. I was home alone so it was up to me or wait. Bad weather was forecast so I chose to act. I taped a 5 gallon paint bucket to the bottom of a 12 foot pruning pole with duct tape (see photo). I prepared a box to receive the bees complete with bottom and top. I practiced getting near the swarm but not hitting them. I practiced dumping the bees in the box from the ladder. I prayed and then I bumped the bucket as hard as I could up under the swarm. I did not anticipate the weight of the swarm. I must have had 5 pounds of bees. It took me a few seconds to readjust to the weight and get the bees safely out of the tree. I dumped the bees in the waiting hive and put the lid on askew and sat down to wait (see photo). There were still a significant number of bees in the tree. I was worried that I did not get the queen. I waited. The bees started fanning at all open points on the hive. Bees started filling the air. I could not tell if the bees were headed out or in the hive. I waited. The bees were going in!

About this time I talked to a neighbor, Tony, who was taking out his garbage. I explained what was happening as there were still a lot of bees in the air. It is a bit alarming to see a swarm.

I waited for about an hour until most of the bees were in the hive. Then, I put a strap around the hive and pulled it home on a dolly. I hope they like their new home!

Bee Log 38: May 13, 2010

This video was taken by Theo while we are going through the hive we placed in his yard.

Bee Log 37: May 13, 2010

I deposed a queen today. We had one bad tempered hive placed with Mike as host. This is the hive of bees that stung me on the nose and cheek two weeks ago. I was worried about their aggressiveness after that event. The bees had followed me well away from the hive area and got the second sting in. Well, they did the same thing to Mike two days ago. He was mowing well away from the hive area and we walked toward him after we finished our examination of the hive. We must have brought the guard bees with us intent on stinging because two of them got him. We still had our bee veils on.

Today when we left the hive area we walked away from the house and homeowner and waited until the guard bees stopped flying around us before we walked back to the house (it is a big yard). They were following us and it took a few minutes of patience to get them to forget about us.

This kind of nasty temperament is not what we want when we place bees in someones yard. Genetics determines temperament so we decided to requeen. We are thankful to have found her majesty on the fifth frame that we examined. So it was off with her head and tomorrow we will place a new queen on the throne. It will take a few weeks for the new queens genetics to take over but if the hive accepts her, this should help.