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

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.