I have one hive that is doing great. One died last fall, and another hive that does not have enough honey to live through the winter.

I fed the weak hive around Christmas, but I don’t want to open the box since now since the weather here is in the 20s and quite cold. If it warms up on a weekend I will feed again.

The good hive has two deeps and a full medium super. I am thinking of moving over the super to the weak hive.

I gave both hives pollen patties, but neither is eating much.

I am researching places to buy a package or a nuc.

Last spring someone delivered package bees at the Palisades Mall in West Nyack, but I heard about them after the fact. I heard it ws quite a party with all the local beekeepers there waiting at 3 in the morning for the truck. This is not far from where I live. This year I am trying to find out if there will be more.

Last year I got my nucs from Paul at Hivedepot.com (Rhode Island). Paul drove a truck right up to the house in West Nyack, and I had my pick of species. I think he was coming back from a trip to Georgia and he made stops all along the way. I have his phone number and will call him soon. I emailed him, but I don’t think that he checks his email that often. If he is coming through again I will order nucs from him. Paul has very good prices for nucs; about the same as a package from betterbee.

I want to try other races. The Italians went pretty nuts in the summer when the weather was bad and they robbed from each other, which is why I think there is one great hive and the other hives suffered. I tried feeding them, but they were so aggressive that I had trouble getting near the hives without a suit.

You can email me if you are in the lower Hudson valley, New York, Southern, Connecticut, or northern New Jersey, and we can coordinate things. If you know of another run coming through the area with packages or nucs, let me know so I can decide how to go on ordering my next round of bees.

I got a little Flip video camera and I walked out to the bees on Christmas. It was too cold to open the hives.

Christmas Day Bees from Keith Graham on Vimeo.

It is final. She’s gone. All of the activity that I saw happening in Ethel the last few weeks was just robbing by the other hives.

I took the top off and there were no bees (except for a few scavengers) in the frames and all the comb was clean of honey. I should have harvested when I could. It took a few months for all of the bees to die and then the robbers cleaned it out. I thought that there must have been a queen because there were so many bees, even if I didn’t see one.

If the weather is good this weekend I will break up the hive and clean out he dead bees.

Technically I should not reuse any of the hive parts, but my other bees have been all through it cleaning out the honey, so if the other other hives survive, then the hive should be safe for a new package in the spring.

I think that the bees are done for the summer and will not be foraging much. We’ve been down near freezing a few nights and will have a good killing frost any day now. I think this is a week earlier than usual.

I have to figure the best way to feed the bees this fall to help them make it through the winter. I have reducers on the entrances to keep the cold air out. I pushed in the bottom boards all the way, but I am wondering if there isn’t a better way to keep drafts out of the bottom of the hives. I have heard of piling leaves around the hives. I might get some mulch and pile it up covering the base of the hives. (I have them on three layers of bricks to raise them up off the ground.)

I will buy a roll of roofer’s felt paper and wrap this around the hives, using a staple hammer. I have seen this method over and over again in posts as the best way to insulate the hives. If you put too much insulation on the hives they suffocate or they get too humid. The roofer’s felt keeps the wind off, but it is not water tight and air circulates under the felt, since you don’t wrap it tight. You have to be careful not to cover the bottom opening and also not cover the top. The top board has a notch so that acts as a vent for humid air, but is small enough to keep from chilling the bees.

I want to make a porch roof for each hive to keep snow from piling up over the entrance and suffocating the bees. It will be a small board that I can screw into the bottom hive body that will overhang the entrance.

Ethel is not dead. I poured some sugar slush on the top board last week and the last time I checked there were dozens of bees cleaning it up. The bees look young. I saw some activity over the weekend when it was a little warmer. There were lots of bees going in and out and I saw lots of dead bees on the ground. I think that the younger bees are cleaning out the dead.

Ethel had some kind of event back in July and may now be recovered a little. I think that there may not be much honey reserves and I will have to put the top feeder back on. I don’t want to keep the feeder on all winter, but they I am sure that they did no foraging for all of August and September. I first noticed that the hive was relatively inactive in early August, so if she had died, all of the bees would be dead by now, but when I lift the lid she seems to be full of young healthy bees.

I don’t like taking the hives apart, and I think it is now too cold to inspect the lower boxes. I could not help them if there was something wrong and I could only hurt them by exposing them to 40 degree winds.

Last time I wrote that I was putting in a bee escape in the Ethel hive. I have been concerned about Ethel’s viability. (I put the escape in correctly with the diamond side down.)

I just don’t know what to think anymore.

The Bee escape was a bust. I went back a few days later and took out the escape. The top super, still full of honey, was still full of bees. The escape was clogged with dead bees. There is obviously something wrong inside of Ethel.

The top super is still chock full of bees. I took out the queen excluder. Every time I take the lid off, the area above the top board has many actively moving bees. I can see down through the hole that the top super has lots of active bees.

Very little activity happens at the entrance. I have an entrance reducer set to the wide feeder slot so that bees can defend the entrance better. For a while I saw bees dragging out yellow jackets in a life and death struggle, but there is close to zero activity at the entrance now.

I have a yellow jacket trap near the hive. I was worried that it would kill bees as well, but it quickly filled with yellow jackets and no bees. There are no yellow jackets around at all now. If you get a yellow jacket trap, get the $10 or $15 one. The cheap $5 one did nothing.

It has been well over two months since I noticed that Ethel was slowing down. She was once the most active hive and the only one to move up to more than one super. I am suspicious that she was a victim of her own success. I fed the hives when the it was raining almost every day and I think that Ethel put away too much honey, becoming “honey bound”. What happens is that all the comb has honey and there is no room for the queen to lay eggs for brood. A couple of months later the population starts to drop very fast.

I was watching just now and I saw a worker bee loaded with pollen enter the hive. That is supposed to be a sign that the colony is viable. I saw a queen cell surrounded by bees when I put in the bee escape, and it seemed empty when I took out the bee escape. Could it be that the hive is still working?

It is nearly October. There is less than a month for the bees to gather pollen and get ready for winter. I don’t know how their population changes at this time of year. I read that the brood from October is a different kind of worker that is able to make it through the whole winter. The weather here has started to cool, maybe the queen will be laying eggs for workers that will overwinter. If this is true then maybe Ethel will have a chance.

I am thinking about an October feeding, which is supposed to be thick sugar, possibly with some medicine in it so that the hives will make medicated honey for the winter. I am not enthusiastic about putting medicine in the sugar, and I will have to ponder this.

Since the Ethel hive does not seem to be viable I decided to get the honey.

Since there are still a bunch of bees in her, I went out with a bee escape. This is one of those double triangle ones that create a one way maze. I took out the top super that was empty and lifted the super with the honey. When I took off the queen excluder there were a bunch of bees clumped around a queen cell right at the top of the frames. I put the bee escape on and put the honey super on top of that.

I don’t have high hopes for the hive living even if the queen survives. I will go out in an hour or so to see how the bee escape worked (I am worried that it is on upside down).

I have decided that the queen in the Ethel hive died a month or so ago. The bee population is dropping fast and there is no activity of workers bringing back pollen, in fact no activity at all. I will try to get the honey out soon. There is no sense trying to save it this close to the end of the season. I will buy a package for this box and any hive that doesn’t make it through the winter.

Connie went nuts about the time I took these videos. I made the mistake of wearing a black t-shirt and was stung four times in the back and shoulder. I went back later with a white shirt and found what looks like a dead queen. I think that Connie re-queened. The swirling bees might have been the mating dance. She is happy now and there are lots of workers bringing back pollen, so I am hoping she is OK.

Martha, the hive that was trashed by kids is going strong. There are lots of bees coming back in so heavy with pollen that they can hardly fly.

The wildflowers are strong, especially goldenrod and ragweed and I understand that the bees like these. I saw queen anne’s lace and lots of fall perennials with bees on them so I hope that they will fill the deeps with honey.

Around the end of september I will start to feed them. I found that by removing the bee guards from the top feeders and pouring in 5 lbs of sugar that bees go crazy over it. I moistened the sugar, but not enough to make it liquid. I understand that you have to be careful in the fall not to make the bees think that there is a nectar flow or they will increase and swarm. The wet sugar keeps this from happening.

Ethel

Connie

Martha

I named my hives after my Mother and Aunts – the Three Hunt Sisters. We all went out to Dnner last night because Ethel was up from Florida. All of them are now in their 80s or early 90s.

Here are Connie, Ethel and Martha.

It has rained here so much in July that I think I may have lost the Ethel hive. Ethel was the only hive that was not disturbed by kids. I have read that one of the greatest threats to hive health is humidity. Perhaps the humidity sickened Ethel. There is very little activity on her front stoop. Only an occasional bee goes in and out. Today, of course, is not a good day for checking because it is raining, but yesterday morning I saw only a lonely bee or two entering or leaving the hive.

I will check inside the hive if it ever stops raining.

By way of contrast, here is a picture of Connie’s entrance:

Lots of activity in Connie, even in the pouring rain. That’s propolis on the left. I think they are trying to close up the entrance way a little.

Martha, the hive that trashed by kids, also shows some activity, although not as much.

Neil Gaiman, the writer of Coraline, keeps bees and every once in a while he writes about it on his blog. He is trying this Bell Jar trick. It is very cool, but I won’t be doing it because I don’t want to stress my bees more than I have to.

I was thinking about making a Plexiglas super for one of my hives so I can look in at them without bothering them. It appears that they don’t really mind the light.

Bees Makes Hive In A Jar