My journey as a newbee - to be continued

[Balubabalu]

I’m doing the “small split” for two reasons:

First it’s more of a learning experience - what to check for when selecting the brood frame, how to prepare the new box, etc. and see how it develops over the next days/weeks.

Second only removing a single brood frame does not disturb the existing colony at all. While I’ve learned that you can take more frames, it will reduce their number a lot more and with only one colony (until the split works ;-)). So I am trying to avoid that.

I am not sure why you’d want more queens in the split hive? They’d hatch at similar times wouldn’t they?

[Eva]

Expanding a little on Jeff’s comment about natural selection, the more resources you have to work with the more choices you have for a successful outcome. For the bees, that’s a strong, well-mated queen. Here’s a good article that discusses research findings on the types of requeening scenarios that explains this in much more detail:

The bees know best

[JeffH]

The more queens the nuc makes, the better the chances we have of getting a stronger queen. The strongest, most vigorous queen, in theory should be the victor. Then she mates with the drones that can fly the highest and fastest to catch her. It’s all about the genes.

Splitting during springtime is my way of attempting to stop a colony from swarming. That’s the time that a colony needs to have 3 or more frames of brood removed from it, in order to prevent swarming. Of course, it all depends on the strength of the colony & what the bees are foraging on.

[Balubabalu]

Hey Eva, thanks for the link and JeffH for the explanation.

I did contact my tutor Dr. Pia Aumeier who has been studying bees for decades and asked her why she only suggests to take one strong brood frame. She said that it’s a splitting method that has been studied scientifically for 25 years now and it works.

She told me that on a single frame the workers will raise less queens, but still 4 or 5 for them to select from. It seems to be better to do more splits with single brood frames over a period of time than taking away three frames at once, because losing a third of their brood in one go will irritate the bees a lot and will result in a smaller honey harvest too. And yes, she confirmed that of course you will have prevented any swarming by doing so.

They have also researched taking multiple brood frames from different colonies (in a study over 4 years with 150 beekeepers and 3000 colonies), but those did not result in stronger colonies or better queens. Especially since the bees will reduce their numbers towards winter again anyway.

But - what you get with more frames is more Varroa too.

As a beginner what I get from this is - as it’s quite common with beekeeping - there are a lot of different opinions and you can’t do things “the right way”, because the bees will do what they want anyway.

[JeffH]

You’re welcome Balu. You’re doing the right thing by asking questions. All I can suggest is to put into practice what you believe is the correct way to go with your own bees, & go from there. We all live in different micro climates, so therefore what works for me may not work for you, & vise versa. Same thing goes for @Eva

As you transition to an experienced beekeeper, you will develop your own strategy. By that time, even if you move to a different climate, you will have an understanding of what to do differently, based on how your bees are performing.

In your last line, “the bees will do what they want anyway”. In the majority of cases, with experience, we can second guess what the bees are likely to want to do, so therefore we can take what we think is appropriate action.

[Balubabalu]

It has been a few eventful weeks. Some days after our last discussion I noticed no more fresh brood and had my coworker help me check if I’m just missing anything. He confirmed my suspicion that I might have lost my queen.

But we noticed multiple closed queen cups and hoped they already started raising a new queen. 2-3 weeks later those cells were gone and nothing seemed to have changed :-(.

To check we did what we call “Weiselprobe” here in Germany. I think the English term is “queenlessness test” where you take a frame with young brood from another colony and add it to the hive. If they start building queen cells from the fresh eggs and larvae, you can be quite sure that the colony has no queen. Mine did so immediately.

My guess is that the new queen did not come back from the mating flight and the colony was now hoplessly queenless. Currently I am waiting if a queen from the added brood will survive.

This waiting is a little nerve wrecking. The local keepers tell me to leave the colony alone for four weeks, because that’s how long the queen will take to hatch, become mature and go on her mating flight and if you disturb her majesty early, you might hurt here before she can do so or she flies away without being able to find back…

Since they already have been without queen for quite some time I am also not sure if workers get anxious and start laying drone brood on their own as last resort. My hope is that adding the fresh brood reset their timer?

Either way, today I found a lot of them hanging out on the front porch which is a behaviour I had not seen before.

I do think it is some form of bearding, since we are having pretty warm and very humid temperatures. But since the Flow Hive has such a nice balcony, they just sit around there instead of collecting on the face of the boxes.

[Dawn_SD]

A frame of BIAS (brood in all stages) is a good way to help suppress laying workers. Waiting 3 to 4 weeks is also a good idea.

Looking at your photo, I would guess that those are juvenile bees washboarding. I would need a video to be sure, but if they are kind of rocking back and forth a bit, that is typical of washboarding. They are like bored teenagers with nothing useful to do in the hive, so they go outside and do something useless to burn off excess energy!

[JeffH]

Well done Balu. I love that term you use, Weiselprobe,
Take on board what the locals say about not opening the hive for 4 weeks after identifying emergency queen cells. That’s what I do, and I don’t stress about it.

One thing you could do to boost the population is to give the colony another frame of brood during that first week.

If the new queen fails, simply repeat the process. There is a 1 in 6 or 7 chances that the new queen will fail. If that happens, be aware that that’s what happens in the natural world.

[Balubabalu]

Since they kept doing the same thing the last few days, I did record a video. And at first it just looks like the landing pad is chaotically crowded, but if you look at individual bees, you can see them do the washboarding motion you mentioned.

Bees Washboarding?

Another beekeeper said that if they are out in numbers, all fanning their Nasonov gland, they might try to help a queen bee find back from her mating flight. But this doesn’t look like that., And just in case you want to learn another German beekeeping word - we call them doing the peromone fanning “sterzeln” :).

While I am not sure of the state of this colony currently, I can report that the two single frame splits a coworker and I did and temporarily moved to the other one’s location managed to produce queens that are now laying eggs. His brood pattern is a lot better than what I am seeing, but I will keep an eye on how it develops. Either way, both of us are quite happy about this success.

[JeffH]

Hi Balu, I’m convinced that washboarding has something to do with the bees cooling the hive during hot weather, after observing bees in my observation hive on a hot day. Bees were also washboarding inside the hive, as well as directional fanning the airflow. They collect & use a lot of water during these periods.

We need to be aware of the timelines of when the mated queens will be returning from mating flights, which could be 2-3 weeks after we introduce the frame of brood.

Thanks for sharing that other word for pheromone fanning.

[Dawn_SD]

That is definitely washboarding! Thank you for the video, it is a beautiful demonstration of the phenomenon. It is probably a good sign that your hive has a lot of healthy young bees, so when you start to get lots of brood, you will have plenty of “house bees” to look after them.

[Balubabalu]

Has it been 1.5 months again already? Well, I was on vacation for a three weeks in between and a coworker looked after the girls. They managed to raise a new queen and she is laying eggs like it’s her job, so the colony is doing quite well.

My split also looks ok. They are not really extending their frames currently, but the main flow is over here in Germany. In fact they were a little low on food, so I gave them a little syrup using a square feeder like this one. It’s capacity is about 1.5 L and it fits under the roof.

With external nectar flow getting low it seems they also started to push out drones. I am not sure if they are from another colony or their own, but you can see them grabbing onto and pulling them from the landing board in this video. Similar fights are happening at my main colony too.

20240708 drones getting pushed out?

There’s more to report, but I will do that in another post in a day or two.

[Balubabalu]

So, it was finally time to do this year’s harvest. Actually I was probably already a little late, because this year seems to have been pretty weird in my area. One of the main nectar flow sources that is used as a marker by beekeepers here finished blooming about a month earlier than usual. Overall this year started to warm up early, just to drop back into temps around 0°-5°C for three weeks and lots of rain. So a lot of the early nectar flow basically did not happen either.

Being a little late also means the girls might have feasted on their storage already, but I’m not doing this for big yields anyway.

I wanted to keep the honey from the different frames individually, so unlike last year where I used a very big glass container, I decided to go a different route and switched to Weck cylinder glasses with 1590 ml capacity. This will not be enough if the frames are filled to the brim, but they are easier to handle than the big one and worked fine for this year’s harvest.

You can also see a little addon I’ve used to keep bees, wasp and other particles out. It’s basically a drain sieve that fits perfectly on the glass. But since I decided to do the harvest a little after sunset, not a lot of them robbers were around anyway which made it a lot calmer. It was also a lot easier than fiddling with transparent film like I did last year.

The main thing I make sure to remember is to not open a full frame at once, but in four or five steps. The goal is to not plug the tube, but have a little room to let air into the channel. Even doing so there were small puddles of honey in the bottom tray after.

In total I got about 9 kg of honey out of my hive this year.

While draining one frame I had noticed I had caught a bee in one of the cells. Since some people complain that the FH will kill bees this way, I decided to just close the first few cells back up again and watch how the bee reacted.

20240719 225336~2

I didn’t keep her in frame properly, but you can see her just crawl back out. She probably didn’t like it, but she seemed fine. [Yes, there were fireworks in my area during filming.]

[Eva]

@Balubabalu

drain sieve that fits perfectly

Best tip I’ve heard all season
Adding a few to my kit ASAP!

[Balubabalu]

It’s been a few weeks, but things have been slowing down a lot now that my girls switched to winter mode.

I did Varroa treatment by evaporating formic acid using two different systems early September. But you don’t do that just because it’s time to do so. To decide whether or not it is necessary, you you clean the Multifunctional Tray and count the Varroa mites that dropped into it after three days. Then you divide the count by three and if it’s more than 5 per day for a young colony / split or more than 10 for a strong colony you treat them.

In our area, there are rules of thumbs to multiply that number by 150 for July and August, 300 for September and October and 500 for November and December to get an estimation on the total number of Varroa mites.

To check if the treatment was successful, you then clean and count the dead mites in the tray again. After three days, it should be more than 20% and after 12-14 days at least 90% of the calculated total number of mites.

One of the systems is called “Liebig Dispenser” here in Germany, named after the guy that invented it. It has a mechanism where the formic acid slowly drops into a reservoir and gets picked up by some kind of blotting paper to be evaporated. As long as the reservoir is still filled it stops the flow like it does with those upside down bottle feeders.

This image shows two of them used in an “emergency configuration”. Formic acid needs temperatures between 10°C and 30°C and low humidity to evaporate. Since it can get quite cold in Germany and we are only allowed to use 60% formic acid (unlike the rest of Europe that can use 85% which evaporates better) you can use two and add a candle to increase the temperature inside the treating chamber a little. The mesh is used to keep the bees from trying to extinguish the candle.

The other system I tried works similar, but different ;-). It is called Nassenheider Professional. This one slowly wicks the formic acid out of the bottle and drops it onto a very big fleece. This automatically adjusts the evaporation depending on the temperature. If it’s too cold, the formic acid spreads more on the fleece and the bigger area allows for more evaporation.

The main difference is that the Liebig Dispenser might not result in a high enough concentration of formic acid vapors if the acid does not evaporate properly, while the Nassenheider might collect a lot of formic acid in the fleece during cold times (night) and then evaporates all of it once the sun shines on the hive, resulting in a too high concentration of vapor.

I don’t have enough experience with either to decide which one is the better solution. But I did like the handling of the Nassenheider more. Also the “automatic adjustment” by increasing the evaporative area seems like a nice solution.

So much for today :-).