I ordered two 3 pound bee packages that will arrive some time on March 25th. They are coming up in a truck from Georgia. We’ll all be waiting for him in the parking lot of the Palisades Mall. The price is good ($80 each). I spoke to Adam Fuller of AZ Apiaries on the phone and he seems like a good guy.

If you want bees, order NOW because the truck is almost full.

It was very warm for January 18 and the sun was out. I went back to see the bees. I mispoke, there is 2 quarts, not gallons in the little super.

Bees on January 18, 2010 from Keith Graham on Vimeo.

About a year ago I decided that would be the year that I started keeping bees. I have not had a good time of it and I am going into the new year with only one hive out of the three that I started with. I harvested no honey. I spent hundreds of dollars and I am in the position where I must spend more to continue.

I had no beekeeping contacts or anyone nearby with whom I could discuss beekeeping. There are no clubs in this area. I met a local beekeeper, but he seemed skeptical that I was of the right stuff to be a beekeeper, and although I may have misjudged him, he seemed reluctant to get involved with my project. I later met someone local who has been keeping bees for a while, but she seemed to be as hit or miss about things as I was.

I read as much as I could, and I watched dozens of YouTube videos and then plunged in.

Mistake #1. I signed up for a bee package from Betterbee. This is not a bad idea, but Betterbee is about three hours drive, one way. They scheduled the bee pickup for a Saturday, which worked for me because I cannot take a day off from work. They then delayed it two weeks and the pickup was scheduled for a Thursday. I could take off an hour or two from work, but I could not take a day off to get the bees so I had to cancel (I lost my deposit). Betterbee was late in getting the bees, and then I had to search for an alternative, which made things later still.

Betterbee caused me to lose a month of good bee weather. I started late and the bees suffered. This year I will join with a bunch of local beekeepers I’ve heard about, and get packages from a truck that comes up from Georgia making local stops, or else I’ll get some nucs from my Rhode Island contact if he makes a Georgia run this year.

Mistake #2. I did not buy enough woodware. I bought a “complete” package including hive, frames, bee hat, smoker and an instructional CD. I thought the single hive body was all I needed to get started. I fed my bees in the beginning and they prospered and multiplied quickly. The bees swarmed several times in May and early June. I ordered new deep hive bodies and supers from Brushy Mountain, but they took almost a month to get them to me, because of the May rush. In the meantime, I had lost time.

The bees should have been building out comb and filling up supers with honey instead they were swarming out into the wild where they surely died eventually. By the time I got the wood and put it on the hives they were done making comb and they never moved up into the supers. Only one hive made any progress (at the expense of the other hives).

Mistake #3. I put the hives too far from the house, where they could not be seen. My wife did not want bees anywhere near the house and would not let me put them where they could be seen from the windows. I put them in the back, where they could be seen by neighborhood juvenile delinquents. Kids knocked over two of the hives and one was exposed for almost a whole day before I got home from work. I fixed the hive as best I could and moved it 100 feet closer to the house, but the bees kept returning to the old location and many died.

I will reposition any new hives closer to the house and I have a camera that I will hook up to the internet to keep an eye on them.

Mistake #4. I was not careful when I added new deep boxes to one of the hives and I think I killed the queen. I added a new deep to a hive that was just one hive body and a super. This was in late June when Brushy Mountain finally sent me the three deep supers that I ordered. I found the medium supers on eBay and ordered five which arrived quickly in May, but the frames did not arrive for three weeks. I wanted to keep the medium super on top and move the deep underneath it. I lifted the medium and set it next to the hive and put the deep on, and then put the super on top. I came back and I found a clump of bees on the ground next to the hive, and I realized that I had knocked the queen out of the super and not returned her to the hive. As carefully as I could I scooped up the clump of bees with a piece of cardboard and shook it back into the hive, but I guess the queen was gone or dead by then. The hive was dead, but I didn’t know it until a couple of months later when the last of the bees died. They did not make a new queen.

Mistake #5. I did not harvest any honey. My bees did not do well, but each hive filled up at least one medium super with honey. All summer and through the Fall there was more rain than sun and the bees did poorly. I did not want to take their honey. They did not fill out their deeps with comb and, although I fed them, they did not put too much honey away. Only the first batch of medium supers that I put on in May were full of  honey.

I should have taken that honey. The bees, if they were going to survive, needed much more honey than the one super. I could have sold the honey, used it as gifts, and had some proof that I had actually accomplished anything. As it was, alien bees came in the fall and cleaned out the dead hive and the weak hive, robbing all the honey. My beekeeping neighbor, about a half a mile away, must have had a good year at the expense of my hives. Next year I am taking the honey in June and to sell it at $5 a bear from the driveway. This will at least help pay for any new packages that I will have to buy in 2011.

Summary. I made lots of stupid mistakes. This was mostly because I did not know anyone who was willing to give advice to me. All the books that I read assumed a certain level of previous knowledge that I did not have. I will make similar stupid mistakes again this year, but I hope to have a better luck this time.



I have one hive that is doing great. One died last fall, and another hive that does not have enough honey to live through the winter.

I fed the weak hive around Christmas, but I don’t want to open the box since now since the weather here is in the 20s and quite cold. If it warms up on a weekend I will feed again.

The good hive has two deeps and a full medium super. I am thinking of moving over the super to the weak hive.

I gave both hives pollen patties, but neither is eating much.

I am researching places to buy a package or a nuc.

Last spring someone delivered package bees at the Palisades Mall in West Nyack, but I heard about them after the fact. I heard it ws quite a party with all the local beekeepers there waiting at 3 in the morning for the truck. This is not far from where I live. This year I am trying to find out if there will be more.

Last year I got my nucs from Paul at Hivedepot.com (Rhode Island). Paul drove a truck right up to the house in West Nyack, and I had my pick of species. I think he was coming back from a trip to Georgia and he made stops all along the way. I have his phone number and will call him soon. I emailed him, but I don’t think that he checks his email that often. If he is coming through again I will order nucs from him. Paul has very good prices for nucs; about the same as a package from betterbee.

I want to try other races. The Italians went pretty nuts in the summer when the weather was bad and they robbed from each other, which is why I think there is one great hive and the other hives suffered. I tried feeding them, but they were so aggressive that I had trouble getting near the hives without a suit.

You can email me if you are in the lower Hudson valley, New York, Southern, Connecticut, or northern New Jersey, and we can coordinate things. If you know of another run coming through the area with packages or nucs, let me know so I can decide how to go on ordering my next round of bees.

I got a little Flip video camera and I walked out to the bees on Christmas. It was too cold to open the hives.

Christmas Day Bees from Keith Graham on Vimeo.

It is final. She’s gone. All of the activity that I saw happening in Ethel the last few weeks was just robbing by the other hives.

I took the top off and there were no bees (except for a few scavengers) in the frames and all the comb was clean of honey. I should have harvested when I could. It took a few months for all of the bees to die and then the robbers cleaned it out. I thought that there must have been a queen because there were so many bees, even if I didn’t see one.

If the weather is good this weekend I will break up the hive and clean out he dead bees.

Technically I should not reuse any of the hive parts, but my other bees have been all through it cleaning out the honey, so if the other other hives survive, then the hive should be safe for a new package in the spring.

I think that the bees are done for the summer and will not be foraging much. We’ve been down near freezing a few nights and will have a good killing frost any day now. I think this is a week earlier than usual.

I have to figure the best way to feed the bees this fall to help them make it through the winter. I have reducers on the entrances to keep the cold air out. I pushed in the bottom boards all the way, but I am wondering if there isn’t a better way to keep drafts out of the bottom of the hives. I have heard of piling leaves around the hives. I might get some mulch and pile it up covering the base of the hives. (I have them on three layers of bricks to raise them up off the ground.)

I will buy a roll of roofer’s felt paper and wrap this around the hives, using a staple hammer. I have seen this method over and over again in posts as the best way to insulate the hives. If you put too much insulation on the hives they suffocate or they get too humid. The roofer’s felt keeps the wind off, but it is not water tight and air circulates under the felt, since you don’t wrap it tight. You have to be careful not to cover the bottom opening and also not cover the top. The top board has a notch so that acts as a vent for humid air, but is small enough to keep from chilling the bees.

I want to make a porch roof for each hive to keep snow from piling up over the entrance and suffocating the bees. It will be a small board that I can screw into the bottom hive body that will overhang the entrance.

Ethel is not dead. I poured some sugar slush on the top board last week and the last time I checked there were dozens of bees cleaning it up. The bees look young. I saw some activity over the weekend when it was a little warmer. There were lots of bees going in and out and I saw lots of dead bees on the ground. I think that the younger bees are cleaning out the dead.

Ethel had some kind of event back in July and may now be recovered a little. I think that there may not be much honey reserves and I will have to put the top feeder back on. I don’t want to keep the feeder on all winter, but they I am sure that they did no foraging for all of August and September. I first noticed that the hive was relatively inactive in early August, so if she had died, all of the bees would be dead by now, but when I lift the lid she seems to be full of young healthy bees.

I don’t like taking the hives apart, and I think it is now too cold to inspect the lower boxes. I could not help them if there was something wrong and I could only hurt them by exposing them to 40 degree winds.

Last time I wrote that I was putting in a bee escape in the Ethel hive. I have been concerned about Ethel’s viability. (I put the escape in correctly with the diamond side down.)

I just don’t know what to think anymore.

The Bee escape was a bust. I went back a few days later and took out the escape. The top super, still full of honey, was still full of bees. The escape was clogged with dead bees. There is obviously something wrong inside of Ethel.

The top super is still chock full of bees. I took out the queen excluder. Every time I take the lid off, the area above the top board has many actively moving bees. I can see down through the hole that the top super has lots of active bees.

Very little activity happens at the entrance. I have an entrance reducer set to the wide feeder slot so that bees can defend the entrance better. For a while I saw bees dragging out yellow jackets in a life and death struggle, but there is close to zero activity at the entrance now.

I have a yellow jacket trap near the hive. I was worried that it would kill bees as well, but it quickly filled with yellow jackets and no bees. There are no yellow jackets around at all now. If you get a yellow jacket trap, get the $10 or $15 one. The cheap $5 one did nothing.

It has been well over two months since I noticed that Ethel was slowing down. She was once the most active hive and the only one to move up to more than one super. I am suspicious that she was a victim of her own success. I fed the hives when the it was raining almost every day and I think that Ethel put away too much honey, becoming “honey bound”. What happens is that all the comb has honey and there is no room for the queen to lay eggs for brood. A couple of months later the population starts to drop very fast.

I was watching just now and I saw a worker bee loaded with pollen enter the hive. That is supposed to be a sign that the colony is viable. I saw a queen cell surrounded by bees when I put in the bee escape, and it seemed empty when I took out the bee escape. Could it be that the hive is still working?

It is nearly October. There is less than a month for the bees to gather pollen and get ready for winter. I don’t know how their population changes at this time of year. I read that the brood from October is a different kind of worker that is able to make it through the whole winter. The weather here has started to cool, maybe the queen will be laying eggs for workers that will overwinter. If this is true then maybe Ethel will have a chance.

I am thinking about an October feeding, which is supposed to be thick sugar, possibly with some medicine in it so that the hives will make medicated honey for the winter. I am not enthusiastic about putting medicine in the sugar, and I will have to ponder this.

Since the Ethel hive does not seem to be viable I decided to get the honey.

Since there are still a bunch of bees in her, I went out with a bee escape. This is one of those double triangle ones that create a one way maze. I took out the top super that was empty and lifted the super with the honey. When I took off the queen excluder there were a bunch of bees clumped around a queen cell right at the top of the frames. I put the bee escape on and put the honey super on top of that.

I don’t have high hopes for the hive living even if the queen survives. I will go out in an hour or so to see how the bee escape worked (I am worried that it is on upside down).

I have decided that the queen in the Ethel hive died a month or so ago. The bee population is dropping fast and there is no activity of workers bringing back pollen, in fact no activity at all. I will try to get the honey out soon. There is no sense trying to save it this close to the end of the season. I will buy a package for this box and any hive that doesn’t make it through the winter.

Connie went nuts about the time I took these videos. I made the mistake of wearing a black t-shirt and was stung four times in the back and shoulder. I went back later with a white shirt and found what looks like a dead queen. I think that Connie re-queened. The swirling bees might have been the mating dance. She is happy now and there are lots of workers bringing back pollen, so I am hoping she is OK.

Martha, the hive that was trashed by kids is going strong. There are lots of bees coming back in so heavy with pollen that they can hardly fly.

The wildflowers are strong, especially goldenrod and ragweed and I understand that the bees like these. I saw queen anne’s lace and lots of fall perennials with bees on them so I hope that they will fill the deeps with honey.

Around the end of september I will start to feed them. I found that by removing the bee guards from the top feeders and pouring in 5 lbs of sugar that bees go crazy over it. I moistened the sugar, but not enough to make it liquid. I understand that you have to be careful in the fall not to make the bees think that there is a nectar flow or they will increase and swarm. The wet sugar keeps this from happening.

Ethel

Connie

Martha

I named my hives after my Mother and Aunts – the Three Hunt Sisters. We all went out to Dnner last night because Ethel was up from Florida. All of them are now in their 80s or early 90s.

Here are Connie, Ethel and Martha.

It has rained here so much in July that I think I may have lost the Ethel hive. Ethel was the only hive that was not disturbed by kids. I have read that one of the greatest threats to hive health is humidity. Perhaps the humidity sickened Ethel. There is very little activity on her front stoop. Only an occasional bee goes in and out. Today, of course, is not a good day for checking because it is raining, but yesterday morning I saw only a lonely bee or two entering or leaving the hive.

I will check inside the hive if it ever stops raining.

By way of contrast, here is a picture of Connie’s entrance:

Lots of activity in Connie, even in the pouring rain. That’s propolis on the left. I think they are trying to close up the entrance way a little.

Martha, the hive that trashed by kids, also shows some activity, although not as much.

Neil Gaiman, the writer of Coraline, keeps bees and every once in a while he writes about it on his blog. He is trying this Bell Jar trick. It is very cool, but I won’t be doing it because I don’t want to stress my bees more than I have to.

I was thinking about making a Plexiglas super for one of my hives so I can look in at them without bothering them. It appears that they don’t really mind the light.

Bees Makes Hive In A Jar

On very warm or humid days I see a bunch of bees at the front of the hive fanning like crazy. On bad days the bees leave the hive and crawl all over the front. This is due to an increase in heat and humidity inside the hive.

If you see lots of bees on the front of the hive, pull out the mite board on the bottom to let more air into the hive. If you see the hive building up propolis at the hive entrance you can put the bottom board back. Bees need to be warm and have their own methods for keeping the hive at the right temperature. They are good at it, but you need to watch for signs that they are uncomfortable and help them if you can.

When I added the last supers I put a one cent piece at the corners of the bottom deep and this made a slight gap between the bottom and the first super. The bees can use this to gap to control the ventilation in the hive. If it is too cold they will close the gap. A penny is thin and the bees can easily close the gap. If the hive is too warm they can open the hole up again. A penny is as cheap as you can get for a useful tool and is thinner than a wooden matchstick, which is usually recommended.

If you are in a hotter climate you might make similar gaps between all the supers.

Take the pennies out in the fall. The bees will regulate the temperature naturally by fanning when they need to, and they will need to conserve their heat when the temperature starts to fall.

I finally got around to putting on the deep supers today.

I bought a bee suit from Dadant – much cheaper than anywhere else I tried. I fired up the smoker using pine straw from my white pines and there was no trouble at all. I was worried about swarms back in May and so I bought medium supers and put one on each of the hives. They don’t tell you when you buy a beginner’s “complete” hive that it you really need two deep supers. I put a queen excluder in and put the other two medium supers on the top as honey supers. When I looked in early June there was not much in the supers.

I started feeding the hives after the kids damaged them and it looked like the sun would never come out. Martha has recovered and Connie, the hive that was less damaged is doing well. All three hives have some honey in the top super. It is mostly from my sugar, though, so I am not harvesting it.

Connie and Ethel each have a medium super below the queen excluder which is so full of honey that it was hard to lift. The top supers had some honey in Connie and was nearly full in Ethel.

Martha had lots of honey in the super over the hive. I had not added a honey super to Martha.

I added a deep over the base hive in all three. These have ten new frames, so they bees will need lots of sugar for the next few weeks. They need sugar to draw the comb in the new frames. They will not draw comb this time of year without sugar.

I left the super below the queen excluder in each hive. They will have two deeps and a medium to make it through the winter. I put a honey super on each hive and two in Ethel. Ethel was packed with honey and is my strongest hive.

I will feed them about 10 pounds of sugar for each hive and that should take me into August. I will stop feeding after that and let them make honey out of the late summer flowers. In late September or Early October I will take off the honey supers and any honey in them is mine, even if it is mostly from my sugar.

Since June was a bust in the weather department – it was the wettest June in local history – I’ve been feeding the bees. I have two of the large front feeders and one regular sized feeder that came with the bee starter kit. The large feeders seem to hold about a quart and a half and the smaller feeder about 3/4 quart.

The hives take about three hours to empty a large feeder and then keep on swarming all over it so that I have trouble retrieving it to refill. Even a day later there are lots of bees on the feeders.

I put one of my top feeders on Martha and I put two quarts of sugar syrup in it. I came out the next morning and it was bone dry and full of bees that had somehow worked their way around the barrier and into the feeder.

I put a gallon in another feeder and put it on the hive and I was stung under the arm when a bee sneaked up the back of my jacket and up to my armpit.

Today I ordered the Dadant.com professional bee suit. I am not fooling around any more. I can’t work the hives if I am afraid of being stung.

When I get home tonight I will go out and see if I can sneak in another gallon into Martha. It’s easier to fill a top feeder because if you do it carefully the bees are not really aware that you are doing it.

All of this sugar is being made into comb, I hope. Soon there will enough comb for them to continue on their own. July is not a good month in New York for bees. The bees break even during July, but in August and September the hay fever plants all bloom and the bees do well on these. By then I will have the suit and I will have redesigned the hives with an extra deep and maybe a super or two without being stung. I will feed them for the rest of July and hopefully they will fill out the hives with comb and brood. If it looks like they can make it, I will stop the sugar about half way through August.

In October I will do another week or two of feeding to top off the hives for winter. With luck some bees might live through to next Spring.

This weekend I finished assembling and painting all of my hive bodies and supers. I assembled all the frames and put them in the boxes and my goal was to smoke my hives Sunday night and reorganize the hives.

I wanted to raise the Martha hive a few inches so that there would be more air circulating from the bottom. I wanted to add a deep hive body to all the hives so that they would have more room to store honey for the winter. I wanted to put a queen excluder on Martha and a honey super on top so that when she moved up I might get honey. I wanted to take pictures.

Well, things did not go as planned. Around 8pm on Sunday I got everything together, suited up and went back to the hives.

I lifted Martha up and put some scrap lumber under the hive so that she would get better air circulation, but the hive shifted a little and one side is not where I want it, but I did not notice at the time. The hive is fine, but I’d like to reposition the scrap pieces if I can.

I smoked her (and myself) before I started, but Martha is a little skittish. I lifted the top and there was no comb on the medium super that I put over the hive body. In spite of all the feeding and good thoughts, Martha has not moved out of the hive body. Remember that Martha was a weak nuc that I bought late in the season. She has been violated by kids with rocks and I have moved her to a new location. She looks healthy enough with new brood. and yesterday, in good weather, workers are returning heavy with pollen. I guess she just has a ways to go in order to catch up.

I went to Ethel, next. Ethel is my middle hive as far as strength. She did not increase as much as Connie in the Spring. She was late moving up into the medium super. I smoked her and lifted the top and there was no comb on the super above the queen excluder. I was all set to steal a frame of honey to see what it was like, but there was nothing there. The medium super just under the excluder was full of bees and comb.

I decided that I did not want to rearrange Ethel if she hadn’t moved up to the honey super. I will let her go at her own pace. About this time one of Ethel’s bees stung me on the top of the foot through the leather sneaker. Another bee got under the veil somehow and started buzzing around my face.

I backed off from the hives and got my bee hat off and released the bee without getting stung. I got all of my tools and boxes and frames back to the house and put out the smoker. I found the camera on the ground on the side of the path back to the hives. I could not have taken pictures even if things went well.

I don’t have good luck inspecting the hives. I invariably get stung. It must be my attitude. My attitude gets a little worse every time a bee stings me.

I never got to Connie, my strongest hive. I have to get to her, perhaps on July 4th. Connie is the only hive, as things are now, which is likely to make it though the winter. I have to get the deep box onto her so that she will make some comb and take advantage of the late summer flowers. The hives don’t seem interested in making new comb, even though I am feeding them large amounts of sugar. I have read that after the spring build up, bees don’t like making new comb. Perhaps the hives have all the comb that they are going to get.

It looks like the weather is finally breaking. I have been feeding my bees sugar syrup and they have been taking a pound or more of sugar per hive per day. They cluster on the feeders even after they are empty, making it hard to get at them for refilling. For the last month it has rained every day with only a few hours of sunlight each week. My bees have missed the main nectar flow of the season.

It has been 17 days since my hives were attacked by kids. Martha, the most damaged, has settle down. The bees no longer dive bomb me when I come close to the hive. I am guessing that there is now a new queen and that she has had or will have a mating run. I have no way of knowing, though, as I did not want to smoke the hive after all of the damage already done. If there is a new queen, I don’t want to upset the hive.

I will open Martha on Sunday and see how she is doing. If there is no brood, I will rob a few frames from one of the other hives. Perhaps they can make a queen if I give them a frame with eggs, but my hopes are not high.

I have yet to assemble and paint the hive bodies that I bought because I am working on my new deck on weekends. I will buy some paint tonight and with luck I will be able to combine my hive checks with a new hive body on each hive, moving the bottom one to the second story. This will provide plenty of room for winter stores if the sun ever comes out again.

I should take some pictures, but I am always too busy to stop and take a picture. Erica was stung in the foot a few days ago, so I doubt she would want to get close enough to take pictures.

Moving the Martha hive to a new location is harder than it seems. Bees memorize the location of the hive so that the workers who leave the moved hive return to the old location of the hive. I have been moving them back every night, but they don’t learn.

Martha, the hive that was trashed, may have lost the queen as it is behaving badly. The bees are acting upset and buzz me when I go near the hive. I do not know how long the frames were exposed to the weather and I am hoping that there were some viable eggs that might make it to queen.

I have been giving them sugar at the hive, and I have set up a community feeder. The rain here has been awful and the bees have not been able to get out and take advantage of the spring nectar flow. I think they are all doing poorly. I will not be getting any honey this summer, I think. Since I am feeding them this late in the season, the honey made from the sugar water will not be good.

I will have to smoke and open the Martha hive soon enough and see if there is any brood, but I don’t want to upset her, especially if they are making a queen. I have also bought some deep boxes and I want to put a deep box on the bottom of all of my hives. This way I can move the bees up to the second story and create more room for them. They can, if they want, move down slowly to the bottom box. This will make plenty of room for the summer and fall and I hope they will be able to collect enough honey in the two deeps to make it though the winter.

I have five medium supers that I have not put on the hives, but it since the weather is so bad it is not likely the bees would move into them. There are one or two supers on each hive and as of two weeks ago they had moved into lower one, but the top supers of all the hives were still empty.

I wish that things had gone better. I would have liked to have at least a jar or two of honey this year, but having the weather so bad and the vandalism, the bees will have to struggle just to live through the winter.

I ordered a hive kit when things were going better. I wanted to be prepared in case one of the hives swarmed. I don’t think that I will get to use it this year.

I found that there are a dozen or so beekeepers in Rockland and that they all know each other. This spring they collected at the Mall at 3 o’clock in the morning, and met a truck that drove up from Georgia with packages. Next year I may need to get several packages, so it is good I found out about this. I don’t know who coordinated this, but I am trying to find out.

The NY beekeepers ball is at South Street Seaport on Monday, June 22.

Erica expressed interest. It might be fun.