What A Summer!

Well it's been a long time since I wrote but that's not because there hasn't been anything interesting going on. Between family, work, being president of the Guild, caring for my 9 hives, editing a book and trying to have some fun, I haven't had much time to write. There is so much to tell that I split this entry into two - be sure to see the "Swarm!" entry for some great pictures and a hilarious story.

As I mentioned, I have 9 hives this year, the most I have ever had. Here's the breakdown of the hives and then I will update the status of each -

1. Overwintered hive from last year
2. Hive from Oakland cemetery bees
3. I ordered 4 packages from the Seaborns this spring - two were placed at Woodford Mansion
   and two at Marathon Farm.
4. I bought one nuc from Don Sausser in Delaware.
5. I caught 3 swarms this year.

(Yes, I know that adds up to 10 hives, but you'll see what happened!)

My over-wintered hive from last year did great this summer. They grew to 7 boxes tall and are as healthy as ever. I harvested about 60 pounds of honey from this hive in July. At a recent inspection I saw signs that this hive had swarmed - the population was smaller than usual, there wasn't as much honey in the hive and there were lots of hatched queen cells in the hive. I'm not too worried about them but the swarm and the loss of population and honey could be a potential problem heading into winter. There was a new queen present and she was laying well. And the nuc from Don Sausser has done well too, they are on my roof. I harvested about 35 lbs of honey from them. Although one thing I will say about these bees is that they are a bit feisty and they don't always take kindly to my bumbling inspections! My total honey harvest this summer was about 150 lbs - most of which is already gone (either sold or given away!).

The last time I wrote was way back in April and I was writing about the removal at Oakland cemetery. The bees from that removal have done quite well for themselves this summer. Unfortunately we did kill the queen in the removal process but the girls quickly made a new queen and therefore perpetuated the genetics of this feral hive. The colony proceeded to settle in to their new home in Francisville and they have built up nicely over the course of the summer. About 6 weeks after this removal job, I got another call from Jackie. It turned out that she hadn't had a chance to fix the window and roof and another swarm of bees moved in to the same exact spot!! So we went back to the cemetery and removed that colony. It was an easy job because the comb was being built right out in the open.

Woodford Hives with some great 'shrooms from all of the rain this summer

Another view of the 3 Woodford Hives

In late March when I installed my new packages at Woodford Mansion and Marathon Farm, I tried a new queen installation method where I placed the queen in the front door of the hive instead of placing her between frames inside of the hive. Well, that experiment was a TOTAL FAILURE!! I lost 3 out of 4 of those queens!! It turns out that the weather was too cold for that kind of queen introduction and the bees basically abandoned their queens to die on the bottom boards. At Woodford, one of the queens actually survived and the bees from the hive next door (who had lost their queen) all moved into the hive with the healthy queen! When I opened that hive it was bursting with bees (6 lbs worth) and the hive next door was empty! I was going to split this hive back into two hives but when I caught some swarms, I decided to leave this super hive alone. (This is why I only have 9 hives instead of 10.)

The other 2 hives at Marathon had no eggs to grow themselves a new queen, so this lead to a situation known as having a "laying worker". Basically this is when some of the worker bees start laying eggs because of a lack of a queen. Sounds great and pretty amazing, right? But the problem is that laying workers can only lay unfertilized eggs, which produce drones, the male bees. So if you don't remedy the situation, the hive will eventually die out. The solution for both of these hives was to donate frames of worker eggs from my other hives so that the queenless hives could make themselves a proper queen (this is when it really pays to have multiple hives). It took a few weeks but both hives eventually made themselves a new queen.

Because these hives lost so much time, they didn't grow to be big enough to make it through the winter, so I recently combined the two hives. I removed the queen from one hive and placed her in a nuc with some other bees as an insurance policy just in case something went wrong with the combine (the nuc is in my backyard, not sure what I will do with it). Then I simply stacked all of the boxes from both hives on top of each other with a sheet of newspaper between them. The newspaper helps to temporarily separate the hives from each other so they don't fight. In the time it takes the bees to chew through the newspaper, they will accept each other and not fight. It's a neat little trick.

Notice the bees flying around on the left, trying to figure out where their home went!

The next day - see the little green fuzzy stuff in the corner of the bottom board?

And a big pile of green fuzzy stuff on the ground next to the hive? That's chewed up newspaper!!

Combining these two hives greatly improves their chances of surviving the winter. We'll see how it goes. If they survive the winter I can split them back into 2 hives in the spring.

My 3 other new hives are made up of swarms that I caught this summer. In the interest of telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, I made a separate blog post about my swarm stories from the summer, including the very funny story of "The Honda Swarm". Go read it!

Bees at Marathon Farm

In addition to Woodford Mansion, I am super excited about my other new apiary location this year.  Thanks to friend and fellow acupuncturist Laura Hawley, I learned about the Marathon Farm project a few months ago. It's a project of the mini-chain of Marathon restaurants in Philly. In a nutshell, they are taking a big vacant lot at 27th and Master in the Brewerytown neighborhood and transforming it into an urban farm. The food grown at the farm will be bought by the restaurants and also sold to the community via a small farmers market near the site. You can read more about the farm and their progress here. When I learned about the project I immediately emailed farmer Patrick and asked if they would be interested in having bees at the farm. He spoke with the owner of Marathon and everyone was really excited about it, so it was a go.

With the support of an incredible array of volunteers, the farm has come together quickly and seeds have already been sown. There are a bunch of raised beds and a small greenhouse. There are plans for a picnic area and a small play area for kids. These are the kinds of projects that we need more of, especially with the ridiculous number of vacant lots in our fair city!

Since my packages of bees for this site came earlier than I expected, we had to scramble to get the site ready. Including myself, there are now 3 Adams involved in the Marathon Farm project - the farm manager and the education director are both Adam too. Farmer Adam, the owner of the Marathon Grill, Cary and I cleared a spot for the hives in a location where they should receive nice early morning sun. We plan on putting some kind of low barrier around the hives to discourage people from getting too close.

Checking out the queen with farmer Adam.

I meant to do the same type of front door queen introduction that I did at Woodford, but I forgot to bring a little stick to attach to the queen cage and I couldn't find anything on site. So instead I just laid the queen cage on the bottom board.

Dumping the bees in on top of the queen

Check out the "hive stands", rounds of tree from some of the weed trees that they cut down as they were clearing the lot (remember that if you click on images, you can see them full size).

 

First hive set up, getting ready for the second

 

Second hive

In the next picture you can see the raised beds of the farm and the greenhouse. Across the street from the farm is a recreation center with some ball fields.

Both hives set up, view of the farm and greenhouse

This is the view looking in the opposite direction. You can see this is an oddly shaped lot, triangular, with long brick walls that must have been part of a large building. The lot just goes back into a corner. This is where they plan to put in a kids play area.

Future site of kids play area

The weather last week after installing all 4 of my packages was pretty nasty, cold and rainy. The bees didn't have much chance to forage, but they should be fine with all of the honey and pollen that I gave them. I was able to look in the hives this weekend to check on things. One of the hives was bringing in bright yellow pollen, it didn't take them long to find food! Mainly I wanted to see if the queens had been released from their cages and three out of four of them were released. One of the queens at Woodford was still in her cage, all of the attendant bees in her cage were dead but she was fine. The bees in the hive didn't release her for some reason, it actually kind of looked like they were ignoring her. I am learning that you can tell a lot about a hive by observing the activity in front of it and the bees in front of this hive were acting weird, they were not aggressive but they looked disorganized. I opened the queen cage and gently placed her on top of the frames and watched her scoot down into the hive. Hopefully everything will be fine, but only time will tell. Once the weather warms up a bit, I'll do a more thorough inspection of all hives to see if I can see signs of healthy, laying queens.