This is April 24, 15 days after the bee packages were installed. The new hives, Ethel II and Justine, have calmed down a lot, but I am still being stung when I take the top off to feed them. I’ve never had this problem before.

Martha and Connie are strong. Martha, the Russian hive, is doing very well. I am still amazed that such a small ball of bees in February is a full hive in April. Connie, the hybrid Russian Italian is going like gangbusters and will want to swarm soon.

Here are the vids.

Ethel II and Justine.

Martha.

Connie.

I want honey this year and that means extracting honey. You can make chunk honey and let it drain or you can use a spinner. The advantage of a spinner is that the comb is kept mostly intact.

Comb takes as much as 10 time more sugar to make than it takes to make honey (one source says 17 times as much sugar). A pound of comb could have been 10 pounds of honey, so it make sense to preserve the comb as much as possible in order to return it the hive. The bees will then fill up the old comb rather than have to draw new comb at the expense of making honey. Reuse of comb means more honey.

The chunk honey method is to just chop up and mash the comb and set it in a colander and let the honey drain out. Then you can process the beeswax. You then filter the honey and you are done. You do this if you can’t afford a honey extractor.

Spinning requires a honey extractor. The cheapest extractors cost around $200. There is a guy who is making a spinner that you attach to a drill that can spin a couple of frames, but he charges $140 for his.

I have been planning my do-it-yourself extractor based on a few old magazine articles and I think that I can do it for under $50.

What you need for a honey extractor is a clean garbage can. Rubbermaid has a good variety at the local Home Depot. You need a central rod that you can drive with an ordinary drill (think 1/4 inch threaded rod). You need a base to keep the rod from cutting through the bottom of the garbage can (think galvanized pipe fittings). You need a brace at the top to keep the thing steady and then you need a way to attach the frames to the the rod so that they are held out from the center when they spin. It should be easy to flip the frames so that you can do both sides without taking the thing apart. I am thinking about using galvanized strapping for braces and holding the frames, but I am not sure it will be stiff enough. I will have to experiment with that part of it.

Stay tuned. I am going to start buying the parts this weekend. Maybe by next week I will have the first prototype working.

It has been a week since I installed my packages.

It has been cooler here – 40s in the evenings and maybe 60 during the day. It is going to rain for the next few days.

It is not yet bee weather. The hardwood trees are all blooming and the apple and other fruit trees look like they will start soon, but for the next couple of weeks I have to feed my bees, especially the new bees.

Connie stung me badly many times when I opened her up the other day. My ankles are swollen where I was stung through the socks and my wrist is so swollen that I still can’t put my watch on. She is a very successful hive and I don’t believe she needs feeding. I see many bees entering her with pollen. I figure that I can save some stings if I don’t feed her.

Martha, the very dark Russian hive, is doing well with foraging for pollen, in spite of the cooler weather. I will feed her because she seems to be the gentlest of my hives and I would like her to succeed. The Russians manage the population in the hive better than Italians, but the flip side is that when the nectar starts to flow they might not have built up a good population, yet. I have to be careful because another trait of Russians is they will swarm easily. I was thinking about splitting Connie, but I may have to preemptively split Martha if she spikes in population too quickly. Feed or not to feed? It is a difficult decision.

My real concern is the two new hives. They are named Ethel II and Justine. These are the new packages. They seem very very aggressive. I am concerned that it means that the queens were rejected or died and now these hives are queenless. Bees are not happy without a queen and act be more aggressive.

I fed them yesterday and when I cracked the top feeder a little, they buzzed out at me in defense, and I was stung on the top of the head. Now I have a headache.

The two new hives both have some bees returning with pollen, but only one bee every 20 seconds or so. This gives me concern. Perhaps it is because they have a low population. It will take three weeks or so before any brood hatches. I installed them on the 9th and assuming the queen was released shortly after there should be a spike in population during the first week of May. If the hives are queen right and successful I should know by May 15th.

I am reluctant to open the hives to inspect them, though. Each time I get stung it is worse. When I was stung in the throat I had to take a Sudafed because I had trouble breathing. I have started to worry about being stung. When I started, a sting hurt a little and then it went away. Now I swell up and the pain remains for three or four days.

I am getting frustrated by the bitchyness of my bees. I know some of it is my fault. I should have been better protected and used smoke when I did my inspection.  I will open up the bees again on May 1st to see what I can see. I still want to take the super off of Connie and harvest the honey.

I opened up the two new hives. There are lots of bees and lots of new comb. I could not find one of the queen cages – it must have fallen all the way down. I did not use smoke and the bees were agitated. There was a large lump of bees and I think they might have been huddling against the queen cage. I will wait a while before looking for the cage. There’s not much I can do anyway.

I pulled the mini-super out of the Connie hive. The bees were very upset with me. This is the hybrid Italian-Russian hive and it was very upset and there were a huge number of bees. I thought it would be over fast, but I was wrong. I should have used smoke.

I will always use smoke from now on with the hives. I was stung a dozen times today and I hurt!

I am 6 ft 3in and the bee suite, although being XL is not extra long and they bees stung me many times through my socks.

I think I will ignore the bees for a while. The next step is add a queen excluder and super on each hive, but I will wait until the memory of pain goes away.

I have installed my new “Survivor Italians”. They are pooping all over the front of the hive and I am now a little worried about nosema. I hope they settle down and get their digestive tracks back to normal.

I am a little concerned about the races of my bees. I say races because the bright gold Italians that I just received show that my existing boxes are anything other than Italian.

When I first got my nucs last year, the bees were all golden yellow, but after a few months they darkened up. I was concerned that I had changed race, but I also thought that the older bees might be darker than the young ones. For a long time I had some dark bees and some lighter bees.

My hives each swarmed last year. So there was some mating going on, but with whom?

Now, looking at my old bees compared to my new bees, I am pretty sure that the was a Russian drone somewhere along the line and either my original queens or one of her successors had some Russian sperm stored away.

Martha is much darker than Connie who is much darker than my new hives (Ethel and Justine).

Here is Connie:

Here is Martha:

And here is one of the new bees from Justine:

It’s had to get a closeup of the bees, but I think you can see how dark Martha is. You can also see that Connie is darker than Justine, although has more in common.

Justine’s bees are smaller than with Connie or Martha, too, but that could be that I’ve been feeding Connie and Martha a gallon a week for the past month. The new hives have gone through 6 quarts each in two days, so they should be fat, too. I hope that the nosema is not too bad (you can see the poop in the last picture).

I got up this morning and it was damp and cold. The last few days had been warm and yesterday it was in the 80s, but it rained last night like a son-of-a-gun and the temperature dropped into the 40s. I left the bees in the back of the truck (it has a cap). I put an old blanket over the packages so that they would not suffer greatly in the cold, since they were used to warmer nights in Georgia. I was careful that they had some ventilation, though. I did not want them to suffocate.

In the YouTube videos the beekeepers don’t wear gloves or veils and in one he remarks that he did not get any stings. Don’t believe them. The bees were agitated even as I took out the queen, and I ran back to get a veil and gloves.

I set up the hives for the bees and removed some frames. I put pollen patties in each hive, taking off the paper on one side and pressing them into an empty frame, and stripping some paper off the exposed side. I filled up 1/2 gallon containers with sugar syrup, and set up the top feeders so I could put them on and fill them.

I pried off the wood that was stapled on the top of the package and found that the queen was in a unexpected kind of queen cage. It had a disk of sheet metal stapled on the end instead of a cork to hold in the queen. I pried off the disk and punched a hole in the bee candy with a finishing nail. The queen looked well, although she was unmarked. There were a few bees in with her, I guess to help keep her warm and to help her escape.

There was no ribbon or tab on the queen cage so I set it down on top of the frames of the bottom super. I set the hives up as two deeps. I know it is a lot of room, for a package, but it seemed that they could ball up in the top deep and keep warm, so I thought it was a good idea.

The can of sugar was not even starting to empty so I am guessing that the bees were in the package less than 24 hours by the time I got them. This is good as it stresses the bees less, but bad because they haven’t had time to get used to the queen. I hope that they don’t kill the queen if she gets out early.

I then dumped the bees into the frames, banging it and knocking the bees out. This is when the bees got upset with me. There were a good bunch of bees that refused to leave the package so I set it upright with the opening facing the entrance and I hope that they smell that new hive smell and get a move on it before they die of exposure.

I covered the hive with the top feeder, inner lid and cover, and I went on the the second hive.

The second package went the same way, but I was more aggressive about getting the bees out of the package and it upset them quite a bit. There were also many more bees in the second package and had to shovel them into the opening between the frames. The bees did not like this and I was stung several times.

When I got back to the house I had a dozen or so stragglers on me and Erica brushed them off. One stung her and she was not pleased. She is not a bee girl. Two bees managed to hitch hike right into the dining room and I had to catch them and release them outside.

One of the stings was in my throat and my throat began to swell. I had to go to work, so I took the next bus and about 15 minutes into a one hour trip my throat began to close up making it hard to breath. I remained calm and it did not get much worse. It was scary, but I was never in danger. I could always breath, although it was uncomfortable. I got into work and took a sudafed, and I felt better in a few minutes. I never reacted badly to bee stings before, but this sting was was on my throat. The next time I go to the doctor I will get a prescription for an epipen, just in case.

I will leave the hives alone for a few days. If it is warm early next week, I will open the hives and check the cage. You are supposed to leave them alone for a few days. Some sites say 5 days and some say 3 days.

It’s two in the morning and raining like crazy. I have two packages of bees in the back of the truck. I’ll install them in the morning as soon as the rain lets up a bit.

Here are some pictures of beeks in the rain.

3AM Friday morning – about 21 hours from now – I will be picking up my bees.

Bees are coming early this Friday morning by truck to the Palisades Mall.

I painted the hive boxes over the weekend and set up the empty hives in the old Ethel location. I decided to make them a side-by-side apiary style setup. I see this in the websites where all the hives are together and facing the same way. Originally, I wanted to keep my hives segregated. I had the idea that the less interaction they had, the better they would be as far as sharing disease, etc. I am less sure now that it makes a difference and it may be that the bees share their population between two queens this way. The hives will be identical, so bees might return to the wrong hive and not even care since they are so close together.

Martha, the weaker hive, was nice and active. I fed her early last week and yesterday she was almost done with the half gallon .

Connie is amazingly active with a cloud of bees in front of the hive. I fed her yesterday with a half a gallon, although I am not sure that she needs it. Connie and Martha have lots of returning bees with yellow, orange and red pollen.

Both hives were flying about and bumping me, and when I opened the top they starting coming out and landing on my face and hands. I was not stung, but I am not comfortable with the situation so I closed them as soon as I could. I was not wearing anything special. I sometimes wear a panama hat when I open the hives to keep bees out of my hair, but I broke all the rules yesterday and wore dark clothes, and that and my dark hair challenged the bees.

Tonight, if I have time, I will put on the bee suit and do a proper inspection.

I want to verify that Martha is laying brood and has a queen, if I can find it.

I want to see how full Connie is. I have not been able to take off the mini super that I used for baggie feeding over the winter. Each time I open the top there are too many bees swirling around to do more than close her right up again.

I need to take Connie apart and see she is doing for honey and brood. If there is too much honey in the bottom deep I will take out the honey at the edges, move the frames over to make room in the center  and try swapping in some empty frames in the middle. If she is “honey bound”, so full of honey that the queen has no room for eggs, then she will start making swarm cells. I want to hold Connie off from swarming a while. I need her to want to swarm in early May so I can split her then.

Connie has a medium super on her that I left from last year because it was full of capped honey. I was going to move it over to Martha, but when I opened the hive last Fall, they were all balled up in the super (I had neglected to put in the queen excluder). I would like to take that super off and put in a queen excluder. If the Super has brood (I don’t think this is likely) I will move her over to Martha. If it has capped  honey, I will harvest it. If it empty or has uncapped honey and no brood, I’ll just put the super back, but over a queen excluder.

Last year I did not worry about being stung, but this year I am more skittish. I worry too much.