Snapshots of Cleopatra

Last Fall Frank Walker came with me while I was inspecting my hives. I am one of the few top-bar beekeepers in the area and he wanted to see how it has been working for me. As we made the tour he took some photos: all photos in this post are by courtesy of Frank Walker, president of Tidewater Beekeepers Association.

Here is Cleopatra. She is the first split from my one surviving package from my first season of beekeeping. The box is made from reclaimed pallet wood. It is 4 feet long overall with 6" handles on either end. The handles are nice when moving the hive around but it leaves a 3' long space for the colony to build in. The top is built from pieces of 3/4" pine and two sheets of 1/2" HardiBacker.

Here's the east end of the hive with the top off. They looked vigorous at the time but sadly they didn't put away enough supplies to get through the Winter (despite my giving them plenty of syrup) and they didn't make it to Spring. This Spring I combined a queenless colony and a brood comb from a healthy colony in this box and they seem to be doing alright. Time will tell. At the time of the photo the colony mainly occupied the east end of the box, so I would start the inspection from the west end, as shown:

Here we're looking down into the hive from the west end. Most of the bars were still empty: the visible comb is the outskirts of the working part of the hive. The bottom of the box is a drawer that slides out from the west end. On top of the drawer is 1/8" screen, on the theory that varroa mites will fall through it and not find their way back up into the cluster. And some of them may have done so but it also provided a protected space for moth larvae to build cocoons. Also, many bees found their way under the screen but apparently never found their way back out, prematurely removing themselves from the colony's workforce. In the future I plan to make hive bottoms more like Lang-style bottom boards; a separate assembly from the hive box with a screen bottom and an inspection drawer that can be pulled out. And if I leave a small gap between the drawer and the screen, bees shouldn't be able to get lost in that space.

The bees did attach comb to the sides but only a bit here and there. They maintained a gap almost all the way around the bottom and sides of the comb. This eliminates one possible hideout for small hive beetles. In other parts of the hive I found groups of SHBs hiding in the small gap between the side of the box and the sides of the remaining frames. I am considering using foundationless frames in one of my hives, to provide additional support and prevent the kind of comb failure I saw there this Summer. If I make the clearance between the frames and the side of the hive tight enough that they don't make a SHB shelter the bees will probably glue them to the sides, mistaking the small gap for a possible source of draft. But I guess that's the lesser of the possible problems.