It has been cold in Georgia and the bees have not been building up as fast as expected. The West Nyack Mall bee delivery is now scheduled for the wee hours of April 9th.

As I understand it, the bee packages are made at large apiaries  from vacuuming out bee hives, taking a bunch of bees from each hive, but leaving the queen and the half the bees behind. The early Spring in Georgia means that the hives have been building up for a month or more before the hives are vacuumed. If there is bad weather, the brood will be late and everyone will have to wait in order to get enough bees.

Queen breeders provide the queens, and the schedule of starting the queens and mating them has to be coordinated with the making of the Bee Packages.

The bees are added to a shoebox sized mesh box with a can of sugar syrup and the queen cage. It takes about 16 to 20 hours to get from Georgia to the NY area, depending on conditions and traffic. I understand last year the 3AM shipment didn’t arrive until 10AM. If the truck loads at Georgia 6AM and all goes well, the bees will arrive as scheduled. If there is a line and the truck isn’t loaded right away then all bets are off.

I am bringing a pillow with me when I go to pick up the bees.

My two hives, Martha and Connie, continue to do well. I have fed them thick syrup again, about 1/2 gallon each, since they knocked off the first half gallon in less than a week.

This whole feeding in March thing is questionable. I fed Martha just because I felt the hive was in jeopardy. Then I fed Connie as well. I wonder if it is a good idea to feed the hives in the late Winter – early Spring?

It has consistently been above 50 degrees F in the daytime here. The bees are waking up and cleaning out the hive. The outlook shows that the temperature will rise above 50 for the next 10 days. Feeding sugar water when the temperature is cold is not good because the bees have trouble evaporating the water to make honey and will be stressed. The humidity has been low and the temperature in the hive is perhaps warm enough so this may not be a problem.

Italian bees will start building up in the early spring if you feed them, and this is my goal. I want the weaker Martha hive to be ready for the spring nectar flow and I want the stronger Connie hive to be productive. I have in the back of my mind to split the Connie hive.

The buds pop here at the end of March. The pussy willows are already popping, and I see skunk cabbage sprouting up. These are early sources of nectar. The bees will be flying about, if it is warm enough, in two or three weeks. I am hoping that that is when the brood emerges so they can take advantage of the early flow.

A good backyard Beekeeper has a few good hives. A bad beekeeper has as many as he can get. I want to have eventually five or six hives and be able to sell a split hive once or twice a year.

I will have two hives from last year, and I think they will produce as much as 100 pounds of honey that I can sell for 4 or 5 dollars a pound. This will go a good ways towards paying for all the wood I’ve bought.

I will have two packages in April. If they do well, they may give me some honey in late summer, but I doubt it.

I might have a split off of Connie that might, or might not have enough honey to harvest in the late summer.

I will be able to sell one of the hives next year, if they all survive the winter. With the wood and the hive I should get maybe $300. This would be about $150 worth of wood and frames and $100 worth of bees, but together in an established hive it would be worth more.

I ordered frames and wood so I would have a small extra hive ready for a split or a swarm capture this spring. There is always hope.

I’ve been going over to www.beesource.com and trying to read some of the threads. BeeSource is incredibly  busy and it is impossible to keep up on much of it. One good thing there are separate forums for beginners and pros, so the professional beekeepers won’t belittle the newbies like they do on some of the mail groups.

If you want to see what is happening on BeeSource there is a link to
view latest posts that automagically shows postings in real time. I have this bookmarked and I watch it when I have nothing else to do.

This is way too much information – it is like trying to drink from a fire hose.

The temperature went up above 50F today and the bees were all out an about and making noise. I put the wooden Brushy Mountain Bee Farm feeders on top of both hives, but I left the spacer in place because there was still a lot of pollen patties that were half eaten. I’ll take them off next week.

The good news is that when I opened up Martha, there were lots of very active bees. I thought that she would be dead. She only had the one hive body of honey to make it through the winter and I thought that it was mostly empty from being robbed.

I took this video:

Bee Hive March 6, 2010 from Keith Graham on Vimeo.

As you can see there is lots of buzzing around and it might be the other hive robbing what is left, but I tend to think it is mostly Martha waking up from her long winter sleep.

Both hives have about a quart and a half of sugar water (about 3 pounds of sugar each). I will mix up some more and feed them during the week if I have time. The top feeders hold a gallon or more each.

I took a video of Connie, the healthy hive. (For some reason I called her Ethel in the video. Ethel is the hive that died last fall.)

Bee Hive on March 6, 2010 from Keith Graham on Vimeo.

Each year the bee farms in Georgia announce the earliest possible date for bee shipments. Each year the date is delayed because of weather.

The first weather related bee delay has been announced.

My bee packages are now due to arrive in West Nyack on April 2nd, 2010.

AZApiaries.com » Package Bee & Nuc Delivery Dates.

Less than a mile from my house lives anthroposophist and Master Beekeeper Ron Breland. Ron has some wild looking beehives. Bees don’t naturally prefer squared boxes with regular frames, and Ron is experimenting with a some alternative beehive styles. The truth is that bees evolved to live in hollow tree trunks or natural cavities in cliffs. The hives that I use are convenient for me, and not the bees. They bees, though, seem to like them well enough and thrive, but they might do as well in one of Ron’s hives or a hollow tree.

The video here is a little new age whifty for my tastes, and in my conversations with Ron he comes across more reasoned and thoughtful than he seems here.

I will be using my store bought hives again this year and I hope the weather is better and the bees thrive. I want to spend some time and perhaps, with experience, I can go Ron one better with an interesting hive design. I like the sculptural and architectural aspects of his hives and I think I might find a practical, but interesting approach to the same problem.

The temperature went up into the mid 40s F and since I was off for president’s day, I decided to feed Martha some pollen substitute. I have a few slabs in the freezer. Martha and Connie had dead bees outside their front doors, which I expect is from mid winter cleaning.

I opened Martha and quickly set the pollen patty over the frames near where they were clustered. There was a visible mass of bees just below the top of the frames and they were moving. As I put the top back on, one slow moving girl came out of the hive to challenge me. I hope she made it back in as I quickly as I left.

By the way, yesterday, February 14, was my Aunt Connie’s 92nd birthday. Happy birthday Aunt Connie. (My granddfather was reading a book when she was born in which the heroine was named Consuela. He liked the name, but he pronounced it Con-Sue-Ella.)

I ordered two 3 pound bee packages that will arrive some time on March 25th. They are coming up in a truck from Georgia. We’ll all be waiting for him in the parking lot of the Palisades Mall. The price is good ($80 each). I spoke to Adam Fuller of AZ Apiaries on the phone and he seems like a good guy.

If you want bees, order NOW because the truck is almost full.

It was very warm for January 18 and the sun was out. I went back to see the bees. I mispoke, there is 2 quarts, not gallons in the little super.

Bees on January 18, 2010 from Keith Graham on Vimeo.

About a year ago I decided that would be the year that I started keeping bees. I have not had a good time of it and I am going into the new year with only one hive out of the three that I started with. I harvested no honey. I spent hundreds of dollars and I am in the position where I must spend more to continue.

I had no beekeeping contacts or anyone nearby with whom I could discuss beekeeping. There are no clubs in this area. I met a local beekeeper, but he seemed skeptical that I was of the right stuff to be a beekeeper, and although I may have misjudged him, he seemed reluctant to get involved with my project. I later met someone local who has been keeping bees for a while, but she seemed to be as hit or miss about things as I was.

I read as much as I could, and I watched dozens of YouTube videos and then plunged in.

Mistake #1. I signed up for a bee package from Betterbee. This is not a bad idea, but Betterbee is about three hours drive, one way. They scheduled the bee pickup for a Saturday, which worked for me because I cannot take a day off from work. They then delayed it two weeks and the pickup was scheduled for a Thursday. I could take off an hour or two from work, but I could not take a day off to get the bees so I had to cancel (I lost my deposit). Betterbee was late in getting the bees, and then I had to search for an alternative, which made things later still.

Betterbee caused me to lose a month of good bee weather. I started late and the bees suffered. This year I will join with a bunch of local beekeepers I’ve heard about, and get packages from a truck that comes up from Georgia making local stops, or else I’ll get some nucs from my Rhode Island contact if he makes a Georgia run this year.

Mistake #2. I did not buy enough woodware. I bought a “complete” package including hive, frames, bee hat, smoker and an instructional CD. I thought the single hive body was all I needed to get started. I fed my bees in the beginning and they prospered and multiplied quickly. The bees swarmed several times in May and early June. I ordered new deep hive bodies and supers from Brushy Mountain, but they took almost a month to get them to me, because of the May rush. In the meantime, I had lost time.

The bees should have been building out comb and filling up supers with honey instead they were swarming out into the wild where they surely died eventually. By the time I got the wood and put it on the hives they were done making comb and they never moved up into the supers. Only one hive made any progress (at the expense of the other hives).

Mistake #3. I put the hives too far from the house, where they could not be seen. My wife did not want bees anywhere near the house and would not let me put them where they could be seen from the windows. I put them in the back, where they could be seen by neighborhood juvenile delinquents. Kids knocked over two of the hives and one was exposed for almost a whole day before I got home from work. I fixed the hive as best I could and moved it 100 feet closer to the house, but the bees kept returning to the old location and many died.

I will reposition any new hives closer to the house and I have a camera that I will hook up to the internet to keep an eye on them.

Mistake #4. I was not careful when I added new deep boxes to one of the hives and I think I killed the queen. I added a new deep to a hive that was just one hive body and a super. This was in late June when Brushy Mountain finally sent me the three deep supers that I ordered. I found the medium supers on eBay and ordered five which arrived quickly in May, but the frames did not arrive for three weeks. I wanted to keep the medium super on top and move the deep underneath it. I lifted the medium and set it next to the hive and put the deep on, and then put the super on top. I came back and I found a clump of bees on the ground next to the hive, and I realized that I had knocked the queen out of the super and not returned her to the hive. As carefully as I could I scooped up the clump of bees with a piece of cardboard and shook it back into the hive, but I guess the queen was gone or dead by then. The hive was dead, but I didn’t know it until a couple of months later when the last of the bees died. They did not make a new queen.

Mistake #5. I did not harvest any honey. My bees did not do well, but each hive filled up at least one medium super with honey. All summer and through the Fall there was more rain than sun and the bees did poorly. I did not want to take their honey. They did not fill out their deeps with comb and, although I fed them, they did not put too much honey away. Only the first batch of medium supers that I put on in May were full of  honey.

I should have taken that honey. The bees, if they were going to survive, needed much more honey than the one super. I could have sold the honey, used it as gifts, and had some proof that I had actually accomplished anything. As it was, alien bees came in the fall and cleaned out the dead hive and the weak hive, robbing all the honey. My beekeeping neighbor, about a half a mile away, must have had a good year at the expense of my hives. Next year I am taking the honey in June and to sell it at $5 a bear from the driveway. This will at least help pay for any new packages that I will have to buy in 2011.

Summary. I made lots of stupid mistakes. This was mostly because I did not know anyone who was willing to give advice to me. All the books that I read assumed a certain level of previous knowledge that I did not have. I will make similar stupid mistakes again this year, but I hope to have a better luck this time.