On very warm or humid days I see a bunch of bees at the front of the hive fanning like crazy. On bad days the bees leave the hive and crawl all over the front. This is due to an increase in heat and humidity inside the hive.

If you see lots of bees on the front of the hive, pull out the mite board on the bottom to let more air into the hive. If you see the hive building up propolis at the hive entrance you can put the bottom board back. Bees need to be warm and have their own methods for keeping the hive at the right temperature. They are good at it, but you need to watch for signs that they are uncomfortable and help them if you can.

When I added the last supers I put a one cent piece at the corners of the bottom deep and this made a slight gap between the bottom and the first super. The bees can use this to gap to control the ventilation in the hive. If it is too cold they will close the gap. A penny is thin and the bees can easily close the gap. If the hive is too warm they can open the hole up again. A penny is as cheap as you can get for a useful tool and is thinner than a wooden matchstick, which is usually recommended.

If you are in a hotter climate you might make similar gaps between all the supers.

Take the pennies out in the fall. The bees will regulate the temperature naturally by fanning when they need to, and they will need to conserve their heat when the temperature starts to fall.

I finally got around to putting on the deep supers today.

I bought a bee suit from Dadant – much cheaper than anywhere else I tried. I fired up the smoker using pine straw from my white pines and there was no trouble at all. I was worried about swarms back in May and so I bought medium supers and put one on each of the hives. They don’t tell you when you buy a beginner’s “complete” hive that it you really need two deep supers. I put a queen excluder in and put the other two medium supers on the top as honey supers. When I looked in early June there was not much in the supers.

I started feeding the hives after the kids damaged them and it looked like the sun would never come out. Martha has recovered and Connie, the hive that was less damaged is doing well. All three hives have some honey in the top super. It is mostly from my sugar, though, so I am not harvesting it.

Connie and Ethel each have a medium super below the queen excluder which is so full of honey that it was hard to lift. The top supers had some honey in Connie and was nearly full in Ethel.

Martha had lots of honey in the super over the hive. I had not added a honey super to Martha.

I added a deep over the base hive in all three. These have ten new frames, so they bees will need lots of sugar for the next few weeks. They need sugar to draw the comb in the new frames. They will not draw comb this time of year without sugar.

I left the super below the queen excluder in each hive. They will have two deeps and a medium to make it through the winter. I put a honey super on each hive and two in Ethel. Ethel was packed with honey and is my strongest hive.

I will feed them about 10 pounds of sugar for each hive and that should take me into August. I will stop feeding after that and let them make honey out of the late summer flowers. In late September or Early October I will take off the honey supers and any honey in them is mine, even if it is mostly from my sugar.

Since June was a bust in the weather department – it was the wettest June in local history – I’ve been feeding the bees. I have two of the large front feeders and one regular sized feeder that came with the bee starter kit. The large feeders seem to hold about a quart and a half and the smaller feeder about 3/4 quart.

The hives take about three hours to empty a large feeder and then keep on swarming all over it so that I have trouble retrieving it to refill. Even a day later there are lots of bees on the feeders.

I put one of my top feeders on Martha and I put two quarts of sugar syrup in it. I came out the next morning and it was bone dry and full of bees that had somehow worked their way around the barrier and into the feeder.

I put a gallon in another feeder and put it on the hive and I was stung under the arm when a bee sneaked up the back of my jacket and up to my armpit.

Today I ordered the Dadant.com professional bee suit. I am not fooling around any more. I can’t work the hives if I am afraid of being stung.

When I get home tonight I will go out and see if I can sneak in another gallon into Martha. It’s easier to fill a top feeder because if you do it carefully the bees are not really aware that you are doing it.

All of this sugar is being made into comb, I hope. Soon there will enough comb for them to continue on their own. July is not a good month in New York for bees. The bees break even during July, but in August and September the hay fever plants all bloom and the bees do well on these. By then I will have the suit and I will have redesigned the hives with an extra deep and maybe a super or two without being stung. I will feed them for the rest of July and hopefully they will fill out the hives with comb and brood. If it looks like they can make it, I will stop the sugar about half way through August.

In October I will do another week or two of feeding to top off the hives for winter. With luck some bees might live through to next Spring.

This weekend I finished assembling and painting all of my hive bodies and supers. I assembled all the frames and put them in the boxes and my goal was to smoke my hives Sunday night and reorganize the hives.

I wanted to raise the Martha hive a few inches so that there would be more air circulating from the bottom. I wanted to add a deep hive body to all the hives so that they would have more room to store honey for the winter. I wanted to put a queen excluder on Martha and a honey super on top so that when she moved up I might get honey. I wanted to take pictures.

Well, things did not go as planned. Around 8pm on Sunday I got everything together, suited up and went back to the hives.

I lifted Martha up and put some scrap lumber under the hive so that she would get better air circulation, but the hive shifted a little and one side is not where I want it, but I did not notice at the time. The hive is fine, but I’d like to reposition the scrap pieces if I can.

I smoked her (and myself) before I started, but Martha is a little skittish. I lifted the top and there was no comb on the medium super that I put over the hive body. In spite of all the feeding and good thoughts, Martha has not moved out of the hive body. Remember that Martha was a weak nuc that I bought late in the season. She has been violated by kids with rocks and I have moved her to a new location. She looks healthy enough with new brood. and yesterday, in good weather, workers are returning heavy with pollen. I guess she just has a ways to go in order to catch up.

I went to Ethel, next. Ethel is my middle hive as far as strength. She did not increase as much as Connie in the Spring. She was late moving up into the medium super. I smoked her and lifted the top and there was no comb on the super above the queen excluder. I was all set to steal a frame of honey to see what it was like, but there was nothing there. The medium super just under the excluder was full of bees and comb.

I decided that I did not want to rearrange Ethel if she hadn’t moved up to the honey super. I will let her go at her own pace. About this time one of Ethel’s bees stung me on the top of the foot through the leather sneaker. Another bee got under the veil somehow and started buzzing around my face.

I backed off from the hives and got my bee hat off and released the bee without getting stung. I got all of my tools and boxes and frames back to the house and put out the smoker. I found the camera on the ground on the side of the path back to the hives. I could not have taken pictures even if things went well.

I don’t have good luck inspecting the hives. I invariably get stung. It must be my attitude. My attitude gets a little worse every time a bee stings me.

I never got to Connie, my strongest hive. I have to get to her, perhaps on July 4th. Connie is the only hive, as things are now, which is likely to make it though the winter. I have to get the deep box onto her so that she will make some comb and take advantage of the late summer flowers. The hives don’t seem interested in making new comb, even though I am feeding them large amounts of sugar. I have read that after the spring build up, bees don’t like making new comb. Perhaps the hives have all the comb that they are going to get.

It looks like the weather is finally breaking. I have been feeding my bees sugar syrup and they have been taking a pound or more of sugar per hive per day. They cluster on the feeders even after they are empty, making it hard to get at them for refilling. For the last month it has rained every day with only a few hours of sunlight each week. My bees have missed the main nectar flow of the season.

It has been 17 days since my hives were attacked by kids. Martha, the most damaged, has settle down. The bees no longer dive bomb me when I come close to the hive. I am guessing that there is now a new queen and that she has had or will have a mating run. I have no way of knowing, though, as I did not want to smoke the hive after all of the damage already done. If there is a new queen, I don’t want to upset the hive.

I will open Martha on Sunday and see how she is doing. If there is no brood, I will rob a few frames from one of the other hives. Perhaps they can make a queen if I give them a frame with eggs, but my hopes are not high.

I have yet to assemble and paint the hive bodies that I bought because I am working on my new deck on weekends. I will buy some paint tonight and with luck I will be able to combine my hive checks with a new hive body on each hive, moving the bottom one to the second story. This will provide plenty of room for winter stores if the sun ever comes out again.

I should take some pictures, but I am always too busy to stop and take a picture. Erica was stung in the foot a few days ago, so I doubt she would want to get close enough to take pictures.

Moving the Martha hive to a new location is harder than it seems. Bees memorize the location of the hive so that the workers who leave the moved hive return to the old location of the hive. I have been moving them back every night, but they don’t learn.

Martha, the hive that was trashed, may have lost the queen as it is behaving badly. The bees are acting upset and buzz me when I go near the hive. I do not know how long the frames were exposed to the weather and I am hoping that there were some viable eggs that might make it to queen.

I have been giving them sugar at the hive, and I have set up a community feeder. The rain here has been awful and the bees have not been able to get out and take advantage of the spring nectar flow. I think they are all doing poorly. I will not be getting any honey this summer, I think. Since I am feeding them this late in the season, the honey made from the sugar water will not be good.

I will have to smoke and open the Martha hive soon enough and see if there is any brood, but I don’t want to upset her, especially if they are making a queen. I have also bought some deep boxes and I want to put a deep box on the bottom of all of my hives. This way I can move the bees up to the second story and create more room for them. They can, if they want, move down slowly to the bottom box. This will make plenty of room for the summer and fall and I hope they will be able to collect enough honey in the two deeps to make it though the winter.

I have five medium supers that I have not put on the hives, but it since the weather is so bad it is not likely the bees would move into them. There are one or two supers on each hive and as of two weeks ago they had moved into lower one, but the top supers of all the hives were still empty.

I wish that things had gone better. I would have liked to have at least a jar or two of honey this year, but having the weather so bad and the vandalism, the bees will have to struggle just to live through the winter.

I ordered a hive kit when things were going better. I wanted to be prepared in case one of the hives swarmed. I don’t think that I will get to use it this year.

I found that there are a dozen or so beekeepers in Rockland and that they all know each other. This spring they collected at the Mall at 3 o’clock in the morning, and met a truck that drove up from Georgia with packages. Next year I may need to get several packages, so it is good I found out about this. I don’t know who coordinated this, but I am trying to find out.

The NY beekeepers ball is at South Street Seaport on Monday, June 22.

Erica expressed interest. It might be fun.

I bought this camera from Buy.com. It is a weather resistant camera that comes with 100 feet of cable. It has infrared lights so it will work at night. Pretty good for $28. The box is sitting in the doorway and I haven’t opened it, yet.

I don’t think that 100 feet will make it back to the bees from the computer in the cellar, but I can maybe add some more cable. I am not sure if I have to also string electric. My brother Ward says that he bought one at Harbor Freight that uses a hacked RJ11 cable with two of the wires carrying power. I could, I guess,get an RJ11 extension cable ($1.49 cents at the 99 cent store), although the signal might degrade if I stretch it too far. I’ll find out when I open the box.

I might have to make a shelter for the camera. It says weather resistant, which means that rain might destroy it.

This camera is made to plug into a vcr or monitor so I have to find an adapter that can turn it into a web cam. I want to able check bees from work or my desk. I also want to use the motion detector software to capture a series of images if anything moves so I will have some idea of who is hurting my bees.

I have not been happy with webcam software in the past. They did not seem to work well when I tried to create a cat cam. This camera might wind up as a bird cam or back door cam if I can’t get it back to the bees.

Last night I tried again to rescue some of Martha’s abandoned bees. There was a fist sized knot at the entrance to the nuc so I put a piece of cardboard over the front of the nuc and carried it to the hive. I then set it facing the front of the hive.

I went out an hour later and the clump of bees was gone – into the permanent hive, I hope. I brought the mostly empty nuc (there are half a dozen adventurous girls inside the nuc) back to the Martha’s original location. There are still some very mad bees guarding the old location. I set the nuc down and I hope the girls will settle down and take shelter for the night.

It rained like crazy tonight and any bee that did not find shelter has to be dead. I will move the nuc one last time from the old location to the hive and anybody who wants to stay behind is lost.

As you remember, the Martha hive was broken and dumped by neighborhood kids. I put it back together and moved her closer to the house where Erica and I could watch her.

I came out the next morning after moving Martha about 100 feet away and I found some poor lost stragglers huddled around the stone foundation. Some were clinging to a stick so I carried that back and set it in front of the hive. Later there were no bees on it so I am guessing that they made it back home.

There were a few hundred left huddled under the foundation pieces, and I felt bad. Erica suggested that I put the Nuc box there, but at first I didn’t think this would help. The temperature was in the 50s and it was going to rain so I brought out the plastic nuc box and put a feeder full of sugar syrup next to it last night about 7pm. Before long the bees were entering the nuc attracted by the familiar smells and they were feeding at the sugar.

It rained like crazy last night with thunder and lightning. I went out this morning in the rain and there was no sign of bees anywhere at any of the three hives, but I could see some bees at the entrance to the nuc.. The sugar was half gone, around a pint or more, that I think the bees drank.

Tonight I will close up the entrance to the nuc, walk it down to the new location and open it facing the hive. I hope that in the morning, if any of the stragglers have survived, that they will be welcomed back to the colony. The stragglers are only a small percentage of the colony, but I feel bad. They were so badly mistreated by the evil neighborhood kids and they looked so cold and lonely. I wanted to help the hive in any way that I could.