Eye candy

Here is a photo taken in early September of a comb from the hive I call Victoria. This is one well outside the brood area; probably 15th to 18th from the east end of the hive.

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.

My, how time flies

Its been over two years since I updated this blog - the fate of so many blogs. But the bees are in much better shape than the blog. I now have four horizontal top-bar hives: one in my back yard and three hosted in yards in the Thoroughgood neighborhood of Virginia Beach. Currently I am giving them all the sugar syrup they will take in hopes that they'll winter-over in good shape. Before long I will mix up batches of fondant or something like it, put it in the hives and bid them farewell for the Winter.

I am considering an ambitious plan for next year. I may build several new hives over the Winter and try to stock them all with nucs I split off from my larger colonies. More on that as it develops. In the near future I plan to update this blog and tell details about my hives, this Summer's honey harvest, and more about my suburban beekeeping.