Baby Bee and a Second Super

What started out as a quick and simple trip to the hive quickly turned into a full Becky-Get-Your-Hat hive inspection.  I just wanted to check the level of sugar syrup in their feeder, but imagine my surprise when I found that the bees had started building "chimney wax" over the top bars of their frames.  Being that they still had about three outer frames left to draw out in the brood box, I wasn't expecting them to begin expanding upward yet.  Although there were still a few half empty frames, and the colony still seems small, I quickly realized that it was time to put on a second super.

I put on my hat and gloves and got to work.  I decided to do a quick check for beetles again, and it was during this check that I got my second surprise.  I was able to see my first baby bee trying to emerge from its cell in the brood comb.  It was really exciting to watch her chewing through the wax cap.  I'm posting a short video of myself and my partner Stewart totally geeking out to this.

Oh, and happily, I didn't find any beetles.

The beginning of "chimney comb"

Honey, pollen, and larva - all looking good.

The super clean "chimney" comb.

Look for this cell in the video below.  It's a baby bee chewing through its wax brood cap.

The Beetles - and I don't mean Paul, John, or Ringo

Hive beetles.  Tiny, annoying, indestructible hive beetles.  Today during my routine hive inspection I found three of them along the bottom board.  I was able to smash two and flick one into oblivion (I hope).

rAWr!

Being that my colony is still small (this Sunday marks three weeks since I installed them) I went ahead and placed an order for a product called Beetle Jail.  The Beetle Jail installs on the top bar of the hive frame, and I picked this type of trap because it seemed to be the easiest for me to handle while working the hive alone.  If you research traps on the internet, you'll find that there is some heated debate over the Beetle Jail trap versus the AJ Beetle Eater trap.  Both are top bar traps, but the AJ Beetle Eater requires more vegetable oil (the beetles fall into it and drown) and some reports said it was messy and harder to manipulate.  On the other hand, the most frequent con to the Beetle Jail trap that I saw was that the bees sometimes fill its openings with propolis.  This should be fairly easy to remedy with a quick cleaning during regular hive checks.  I'm hoping that since I caught the beetles relatively early, they won't be much of a problem. I want to keep my hive as "organic" as possible so non-chemical problem solvers are my preferred choice.

Additionally, I ordered a constructed hive top feeder with floats today.  The girls seem to LOVE inside feeding, so this new piece will make it easier for me to refill their feed without really disturbing them.

Much to my chagrin, the weather will be cold again over the next few days, however, I was at least able to refill their current feeder.

Beyond that, the bees were still working to draw out the outer brood frames with wax, the inner capped brood seemed to be progressing normally, and the workers have been storing pollen like mad.  I also noted a few cells on the outer frames now have eggs in them, so that is very promising.

The eggs are the "rice grain" items that appear in the bottom of the cell.

Baby bees!

What a difference a few days can make!  We didn't get the rain showers called for this weekend, and the dry days seem to have given my colony the break they needed to go out and get some business done.

Yesterday my mom stopped down and was interested in seeing the colony so I suited up and took her out to break down the hive.  Much to my delight, there was a beautiful pattern of brood, pollen, and light colored honey on the inner brood frames!  Additionally, the bees were busy drawing comb on the outer brood frames, which signaled to me that Catherine the Great has no intention of slowing down now that she's in prime production.  I also noticed some "fanning"by the workers to distribute the queen's pheromones (known as queen substance).  This is good because it keeps the colony happy and workers fanning it can signal that the queen has had a successful mating flight ... which means, BABIES (and sequentially more respect from the colony)!

Look at all the pollen surrounding the brood!!

This photo has it all: capped brood, larva, nurse bees, pollen legs ... whew!

A closer view of larva in the upper right corner.

"Woman, what do you think you're doing? Get over here and pet me!"

After seeing how busy the bees have been, I had a good laugh at myself for being so worried.  As seen above, they are doing just fine and seemingly thriving.  Silly me!

She's not dynamite with a laser beam ...

... but my colony seems to like her well enough.  Yes, I'm using lyrics of a Queen song to refer to my queen bee Catherine the (not so) Great.  Yesterday we had a break in the cold and rainy weather, so I was able to get out to my hive and inspect for brood again.

The good news is that a few nurse bees were actively tending to larva and there was some capped brood present.

The bad news is that my colony still remains small, and my queen's laying pattern looks a lot like this Jackson Pollock painting.

That is to say, my queen is practicing interpretative laying.  Rather than a neat pattern of brood cells evenly laid across a frame, there are a few cells on the front, a few cells on the back, a few cells in the middle, and seemingly for good measure, a cell or two waaaaaay far away from any of the other cells.  As far as I can tell, the colony is not building supersedure queen cells, but I'm beginning to worry that Catherine the Great may be a drone laying queen.  In simple terms, a drone laying queen is one that due to the bad weather (or other factors) was unable to take the normal "mating flights" in which she gathers drone sperm to fertilize her eggs (and thus produce female worker bees).

I hope I'm wrong though.  I've read where new queens in new hives can sometimes be very random in their laying pattern (or lay drones only) for the first month or so.  The capped brood was in its early stage, and no tell tale "puffiness" of a drone cell was present yet. Since our forecast calls for more storms over the weekend, it will be several days before I can get out to check the frames again.  Perhaps Mother Nature will be nice and only give us a very brief shower.  While a drone laying queen may be a potential obstacle, to their credit, the colony is drawing out some really nice wax comb.

One final item of interest from my inspection is that the sugar-water feeder that I moved into the hive a few days ago was EMPTY.  I'm talking picked-up-their-plate-and-licked-it-clean empty.  Apparently an inside feeder is the way to go.  Perhaps this will encourage the girls to be more active.  Assuredly, I noticed several worker bees returning with lots of pollen on their legs!

Two bees "dancing" to communicate the location of a good pollen source.

Just hanging out in the morning sun.

Worker bees returning with two types of pollen.

First, the center bee returns with a lighter colored pollen.

Next, another bee returns with darker pollen.

Still Lazy

"Girls, when are you going to get moving?"  I found myself asking that question often today as I checked the hive for brood.  We had cool weather again (a high of 53 degrees) and a hard rain yesterday.  Even though I waited until the afternoon to go out and open the hive, my bees were still just balled up being lazy.  They seem to be drawing out beeswax, which is a good sign, but apparently not much more beyond that.  Compared to Coyote's colony, they seem very, very, very small and sleepy.

My main goal of checking the hive today was to verify that my queen had begun to lay brood.  It wasn't very sunny, so I had a hard time actually seeing any larva.  However, I do believe I saw a few in the frame nearest to the middle (where I had installed the queen cage).  It also appeared that the few larva present had jelly surrounding them, however, there were too few larva present to see any sort of laying pattern.  In light of the bad weather we've been having, it doesn't surprise me that the queen seems slow to mate.  The hive isn't acting as if they've rejected her, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that she wasn't eaten by a bird or something over the last few days.

While out working the hive, I also decided to do a little equipment rearranging to encourage the colony to stay strong.  Chiefly, I placed their supplemental feeder directly inside the of the hive.  Previously, it had fit into part of the entrance reducer, but the bees still had to exit the hive in order to obtain sugar syrup.  I wanted to make sure they were able to access high quality food despite all of these stormy days.  The bees also seem to be continuing to eat the pollen patty, so I'm taking this as a good sign.

It appears that I'm stuck waiting on warmer weather before any real excitement happens.  In the mean time, I plan to continue rereading several of my favorite bee books (and taking a nap or two myself).