I have not been paying much attention to the bees. I noticed the other day that the populations seem to be down with fewer bees hanging out. Two of the hives looked like there was robbing going on so I put the entrance reducers on them. I am guessing that July with its heat and August with a dearth of flowers has hurt the bees.

I decided to put the feeders on and give them some pollen substitute. I have forced days off at work and today was a nice day so I put the feeders on today.

I stapled some plastic screen door screening over the tops of the feeders. I don’t like the bees buzzing me when I refill the top feeders. I did not anticipate that there were hundreds of bees hanging out on the inner cover and clinging to the underside of the telescoping cover. The screen prevented these bees from going back down into the hive. I had to prop the edge  of the cover up with a stick to let the bees escape. I am hoping that in a day or two they will wander back to the front entrance and back into the hive.

One of the hives, Connie, was quite bitchy. I did not smoke the hives. I was just taking off the cover and putting on the top feeder. The hives all seemed to take offense. I wore a veil, but did not suit up. When I went back without a veil to check them I was attacked and pursued. No stings, though.

I’ll go back at dusk and peek under the lids to see what is going on. The fall flowers like goldenrod, queen anne’s lace and ragweed may not be enough for the bees. I will have to feed each hive a gallon every week or so. Fall sugar is supposed to be thick. I used a half gallon container and filled it 3/4 with sugar and then topped it off with water. I hope that is thick enough. Every hive got a quart and I’ll give them each a 1/2 gallon on Sunday or Monday if they have taken all the sugar.

When I checked the supers at the start of August, the comb was well drawn, but little honey. I hope that they can store enough now to make it through the winter.

I have been a little worried about the bees. July was very hot for most of the month. I lifted the telescoping cover and put a small stick to hold it open so that the bees would have plenty of air circulation. The bees liked to beard the front of the hives and when I lifted the lids they hung out on the top of the inner cover and enjoyed the shade and the breezes. The temperatures have dropped down to the 80s during the day and into the 60s at night so the covers are back in place.

Watching the hives I did not see any bees returning with pollen for most of July and I was worried that they were hungry. I have heard about hives starving in July and August. There are good bee flowers in the fall around here. I hear golden rod is good, and I’ve seen bees going nuts on sumac trees. The sumac should start soon.

The hay fever plants like golden rod, rag weed and queen anne’s lace bloom starting in late august and last until the killing frosts in October. I think these are good for bees.

I cleaned out my top feeders and stacked them near the house preparing to start feeding.

I woke up Sunday morning, August 1st, with horrible hay fever allergies and have been taking pills since. My head is all stuffed up and it means that the fall allergy flowers bloomed over the weekend.

The bees are now returning to the hive with baskets of yellow and orange pollen. I am guessing that I won’t have to feed them. I was prepared to start the feeding, but I think now that the fall flowers are starting up and the bees will be able to replenish their food supplies. They may have used up some stored honey in July for a few weeks, but they are back at work gathering food.

I have four hives. One I robbed in the spring and they are slowly refilling the supers. One is a Russian hive and grows slowly. The supers in the Russian have some honey and are well drawn, but there is not enough to harvest. The two new hives that I started from packages in April have lots of honey in the supers and I will harvest about 30 frames as soon as I solve the problem of the honey extractor.

As far as the honey extractor goes, I am still going to make one of my own. The disaster of the last one is still with me. I don’t want to use the crush and strain method again. It took 4 or 5 hours to get a few gallons of honey.

I have sold about $50 worth of honey from the roadside sign. I hope to sell lots more and everyone I know will be getting honey for Christmas.

It has been mostly raining today, but it cleared up and the heat is not as bad as it has been, although it is still in the 80s with high humidity. I decided to pull the tops just to see how the girls are doing on the top super.

Martha, my weak hive, had lots and lots of bees, which surprised me as she has only a few sitting on the front porch. She has moderate activity with workers coming back with baskets of pollen, but nothing like the other hives. The inner cover was dense with bees and when I pried off the inner cover there were lots of bees in the top super. There were two drawn and capped frames, but the rest was empty. This is disappointing. The last time I looked, a month ago, they were working on those two frames, and I expected to see more done.

I had put two empty supers back on Connie after I robbed her honey. This was last May 23 or abouts. The chopped off wax in the top frame had been mostly repaired with some new comb, but no capped honey was to be seen. I expect that since I put the two empty boxes on they had been working on the lower super. They were irritated with me and started to get uppity so I closed her up without digging down deeper.

The other two hives, Justine and Ethel, are the packages that I installed in the beginning of April. These are very successful and very “hot”. They each have three supers. Justine is less active than Ethel, so I popped her top. The top super was waxed to the super and I was pulling up frames when I pulled up the top. The top super was almost fully drawn and filled with capped honey. I did not bother with Ethel as she is very populous and aggressive. I don’t want to be attacked. I figure her to be the same as Justine, only more so.

I guess it’s time to harvest. I don’t have any more spare supers or I would put them on these two hives. I haven’t gotten a working extractor built and I don’t have the cash to buy one right now. The honey harvest using the scrape and mash method was messy, to say the least.

I have enough for two supers and 20 frames. I will order these and hope that they come by the end of the week so I can paint them and put them on next weekend.

I have some 12 and 8 oz bears. I made a label and Erica made a sign. I am waiting for our first customer. We have a bad road with heavy traffic. People speed here so it is hard to stop. I hope we sell some.

I gave away a few of the baby food jars of honey. The overwhelming response has been More! More! I am not sure how the word got out, but I could sell my entire honey crop at work if I wanted.

So far I have been giving away the free samples to friends. I have not sold anything yet. It seems a wrong to part with the golden stuff for mere cash. The bees worked so hard to make it and I had so many sleepless nights worrying about the hives. I want to keep the stuff forever.

I have decided to sell it for $6 a 12 oz bear. This is high, but it is not as high as the organic honey in the health food stores. If people think it is too much, then let them go down the street. It will be hard giving the stuff up. I should get upwards to $120 if I sell it all. Not much, but a good start to paying for all the bees and their houses.

Next step is to paint a sign.

My homemade honey extractor failed badly. It turns out that my drill, which I used to spin the frames, is one speed – fast. I should have used a variable speed drill and spun the frames at a slow to medium speed. As it turned out the thin metal that I used twisted up into corkscrew when I tried to spin the frames. Back to the drawing board.

The problem then was that I had 15 frames full of honey that I was going to spin. I uncapped several frames and set it to drain, but the honey doesn’t drain, I think by design. The honey stays in the comb and that has to do with the viscosity of the honey and the size of the comb.

I then scraped off the comb and spent a few hours squeezing honey out of the chunks through cheese cloth. I now have 2-1/2 gallons of honey. That’s 12 bears, 20 baby food jars (as samples for friends), and a couple of mostly filled 64 oz containers.

Getting hands on with the honey this way gets it all over you, your clothes, your hair and everything within 10 feet. I spent an hour cleaning up and there is still puddles of honey out on the driveway where I stored the equipment after I had finished. Even after two hot baths I still feel sticky.

I returned some of the demolished frames to Connie, the hive that I robbed. The rest I have in spare supers. I need to pile these on the other hives so the bees can clean them off.

I have ordered a Honey Sign and more bears. I have to get this stuff out of the house. I ingested quite a bit of honey yesterday and I am feeling a bit queezy.

I worked on my Honey extractor a few hours this weekend and I have some pictures. I am about half done. I got into a situation where the bolts holding the bottom to the trash can are not waterproof and I decided to use some silicon caulk to seal it, but Erica doesn’t want any honey exposed to the chemicals so I am going to pick the caulk all out. I may have to rebuild it with rubber gaskets.

The bees are all doing well except for Martha.

The new hives, Ethel and Justine, installed on April 9, are doing very well. They are very enthusiastic with huge numbers of bees. I haven’t opened them since the smoking I gave them on May 1st, but I am assuming that the queens are thriving. A honey bee in the summer lives 28 to 35 days so anything that was in the box when I installed them are now dead. These all have to be new bees.

Connie is equally exuberant and I need to split her soon. She is half Russian, and she will want to swarm unless I split her.

Martha, I think, reacted badly to the smoking I did on May 1. A few days later they were all bearding the front of the hive and I think they absconded.  There are lots of bees left, but I peeked inside and the hive is not that full. I am hoping that Martha will force a queen and in a few weeks recover. I have been feeding her sugar syrup. I will suit up one of these nights after work and open Martha for a good look at her insides.

My plans are to finish the honey extractor and pull the top super from Connie, which weighs about 30 pounds with capped honey (left over from last year). I’ll pull any capped frames from the super under that and any capped honey frames from the deep box under that. I will also check the new hives, Ethel and Justine, for capped honey.

My goal has been to split Connie on Memorial day, but I may do it next weekend. She is way too successful not to swarm, so I want to beat her to it.

This will be a simple walkway split.

1) I will set up an empty hive and base right next to her. I’ll make a foundation the same height as Connie’s. I’ll loosen all the boxes with the hive tool.

2) I will take off the supers and replace the cover.

3) I’ll smoke the top of the hive to drive the queen downstairs. I’ll also knock on the lid and scare them all downstairs. Over the winter and into the Spring, the hive usually moves to the top box and hangs out there. I’ll put in the entrance blocker to try to keep the swirling bees to a minimum.

4). I’ll quickly put the second story deep body, full of brood, but without the queen, onto the empty body.

5) I’ll lift the bottom body of the original hive, hopefully with the queen, and put it on an empty deep and move the pair onto the old base. (If the hive is too heavy, I might leave it where it is and put the empty deep on top.)

6) I’ll put the supers back on, and take out the entrance blocks. If the bees are too active, I’ll wait a day to put the supers back.

What I want to accomplish is to move the active hive upstairs with an empty downstairs. All this room will let the queen think that there is no need to swarm. I want the old top box where the queen has been living and laying to the top of the new hive and move the old downstairs, hopefully with the queen, upstairs on the old hive position. I think that the smoke will drive the queen down to the bottom box, which is where hangs the tale.

Worst case, the bees will figure it all out, find the old queen and inhabit one hive. This is a tie for me as it is about the same as a swarm, but they new hive will be more roomy downstairs and they may not swarm.

If I don’t get the queen in the right box, this is the same situation, except there is a chance that the queen was laying eggs downstairs and I still might get a new queen.

The split might fail, but I’ll still have at least one  good hive, unless the queen leaves in disgust, in which case there is still brood in at least one of the boxes for a queen.

I am hoping that there will be swarm cells hanging off the bottom of the frames so that the new queen will appear fast. I don’t want to crush them, though when I move the boxes.

I went to Lowe’s over the weekend to buy some plants for the yard. While I was there I started buying parts for my Do-it-yourself Honey Extractor. I am trying to keep the cost under $75 for everything except the tools. If you don’t have a drill, metal shears, and a screwdriver this project will cost you more.

I bought a medium size plastic garbage container. It is about 24 inches in diameter and about 30 inches deep. I could have bought a galvanized steel garbage can of the same size for a little more. It is up to you, but I am going as cheap as I can.

I bought two 3/8″ Galvanized Floor Flanges. I need these to hold the central axle which is a three foot length of 3/8 inch threaded rod.

Floor flanges look like this:

As you can see, it has a place to screw in a threaded pipe, and a flat bottom to attach it to things.

A short length of 3/8 threaded is called a nipple. I bought two 2-inch 3/8 inch nipples. Nipples are what plumbers call a short length of threaded pipe.

I will screw the nipples into the flanges. I will then attach one to the center of the garbage can lid and one to the bottom of the can.

Since I will be using the flange and nipple to hold the threaded rod steady, I need some kind of metal shield or “strike” under the bottom flange in order to keep the threaded rod from drilling into the plastic bottom of the can and eventually punching a hole in it.

I bought the cheapest piece of steel that I could find, which is an electrical box cover. I wanted to get the round box, but they all had a knockout in the center and I didn’t want to have the rod break through it. This is what I bought:

I will place this under the flange so that the rod rests on it. It will also give added stiffness to the bottom flange so that the force of the spinning frames doesn’t rip up the thin plastic of the garbage can.

I bought a box of 3/4 inch 10-24  machine screws and nuts to hold this all together. 10-24 screws are about 3/16 of an inch. They will fit well into the hole from a 3/16 inch drill.

I have to drill 4 holes in the box cover and then drill 8 holes in the bottom of the garbage can and attach the parts to the bottom of the can using the machine screws.

I will attach the other floor flange to the top of the lid in the center. I might use another electrical box here also to add stiffness.  I will have to drill a 3/8 inch hole in the center of the box and the lid so that the rod can go through the lid and stick up.

I will file down the top of the threaded rod into a square shape (don’t worry, I’ll have pictures). This will make it easier to attach my drill to it so I can use the drill to spin the frames.

One night this week, or Saturday if I have time, I will get this part done and take pictures.

The frame holders will be made out of galvanized sheet rock bead. I am not sure it will be strong enough, so I will hold off until I get it working before I do part 2 of this project.

I think that I can use heavy duty large rubber bands to hold the frames steady while they spin. Think cheap. I have a super full of honey just waiting to try this baby out.

One last thing – I bought a honey gate from http://www.blueskybeesupply.com/ on eBay. It only cost me $10 with free shipping. You can buy a plastic 1.5 inch valve from Lowe’s that might do as well, but this is threaded and looks like it will be easy to insert into the garbage can. They have them on the website and their prices are low for most things (but not everything so compare). You might order more stuff to get a better rate on shipping. Every time I go back to the website there is more stuff.

I have been nervous about checking the bees since I was stung so often the last few times that I opened the top feeder to add sugar syrup. I dug out my pair of size 13 Frye boots and put on my bee suit.

I set the smoker up with a little newspaper to get it started and lots of Pine straw. Pine straw is great for smoking. It is the dried pine needles under my White Pines. I should package the stuff and sell it to beekeepers. It smokes like crazy and the bees seem to hate the acrid smell.

I smoked up my suit to keep the bees off me. This is a trick I learned from talking to an old beekeeper on the phone last summer. It really works.

I pulled off the lid of Martha and gave her some smoke and waited a few seconds. I then took off the lid and smoked under the inner lid and then lifted the top feeder and gave her some more smoke. I was worried that I was smoking her too much so I stopped then.

When I lifted the top feeder there was bridge comb that held the top to a couple of frames that wanted to lift up with the top.

I put the top deep on Martha towards the middle of March and it was 75% drawn and much of it had capped honey. I put the queen excluder on the top and covered that with a medium super with some partially drawn comb. I put her back together.

I went to Connie next. Connie has been bitchy, but with a few puffs of smoke there was no problem. Connie had the medium super that I left on last winter because I was afraid that she would starve because of the bad late summer and fall that we had. The super seemed to weigh about 40 pounds. It probably weighs less, but I had a tough time lifting it. It was packed with capped honey.

I put a queen excluder down and a medium super and put the full super on top. I will come back soon to harvest it, but I have to build my honey extractor first.

Next were the two new hives that I installed as packages on April 9. it has been 21 days and by my count this is the earliest that the brood could be coming out. They are fairly aggressive when I feed them, but the smoke did its job. I have been concerned about Ethel as she has half as many bees in front as Justine. I opened her up first and again the top feeder was glued to the middle three frames. Ethel is two deeps. The top deep was all new black Perco frames and 5 frames were almost fully drawn and full of uncapped honey. I lifted the top deep and the center frame of the bottom hive was full of brood. Yes!

Since Ethel’s top deep was drawn so well I put a queen excluder on top and a medium super with some partially drawn frames.

I went to Justine and it was the same story. There were lots of bees. It seems that there were many more than I could have possibly shook out of the package. Maybe I have my calculations wrong and the brood have been emerging. Again there was good comb on the black Percos and I put a queen excluder on and a medium super.

I have now 4 supers that I might be able to harvest at the end of may and one that is already full that I will use to test my honey extractor when I make it.

The flowers are going crazy here and there is lots of nectar. The top feeders still had some sugar in them, but I will mix up some more tonight or tomorrow and feed them in case we get some rainy days. The weather looks, good, though and I think the bees are doing much better than I thought they would.

I will sleep better tonight.

This is April 24, 15 days after the bee packages were installed. The new hives, Ethel II and Justine, have calmed down a lot, but I am still being stung when I take the top off to feed them. I’ve never had this problem before.

Martha and Connie are strong. Martha, the Russian hive, is doing very well. I am still amazed that such a small ball of bees in February is a full hive in April. Connie, the hybrid Russian Italian is going like gangbusters and will want to swarm soon.

Here are the vids.

Ethel II and Justine.

Martha.

Connie.

I want honey this year and that means extracting honey. You can make chunk honey and let it drain or you can use a spinner. The advantage of a spinner is that the comb is kept mostly intact.

Comb takes as much as 10 time more sugar to make than it takes to make honey (one source says 17 times as much sugar). A pound of comb could have been 10 pounds of honey, so it make sense to preserve the comb as much as possible in order to return it the hive. The bees will then fill up the old comb rather than have to draw new comb at the expense of making honey. Reuse of comb means more honey.

The chunk honey method is to just chop up and mash the comb and set it in a colander and let the honey drain out. Then you can process the beeswax. You then filter the honey and you are done. You do this if you can’t afford a honey extractor.

Spinning requires a honey extractor. The cheapest extractors cost around $200. There is a guy who is making a spinner that you attach to a drill that can spin a couple of frames, but he charges $140 for his.

I have been planning my do-it-yourself extractor based on a few old magazine articles and I think that I can do it for under $50.

What you need for a honey extractor is a clean garbage can. Rubbermaid has a good variety at the local Home Depot. You need a central rod that you can drive with an ordinary drill (think 1/4 inch threaded rod). You need a base to keep the rod from cutting through the bottom of the garbage can (think galvanized pipe fittings). You need a brace at the top to keep the thing steady and then you need a way to attach the frames to the the rod so that they are held out from the center when they spin. It should be easy to flip the frames so that you can do both sides without taking the thing apart. I am thinking about using galvanized strapping for braces and holding the frames, but I am not sure it will be stiff enough. I will have to experiment with that part of it.

Stay tuned. I am going to start buying the parts this weekend. Maybe by next week I will have the first prototype working.

It has been a week since I installed my packages.

It has been cooler here – 40s in the evenings and maybe 60 during the day. It is going to rain for the next few days.

It is not yet bee weather. The hardwood trees are all blooming and the apple and other fruit trees look like they will start soon, but for the next couple of weeks I have to feed my bees, especially the new bees.

Connie stung me badly many times when I opened her up the other day. My ankles are swollen where I was stung through the socks and my wrist is so swollen that I still can’t put my watch on. She is a very successful hive and I don’t believe she needs feeding. I see many bees entering her with pollen. I figure that I can save some stings if I don’t feed her.

Martha, the very dark Russian hive, is doing well with foraging for pollen, in spite of the cooler weather. I will feed her because she seems to be the gentlest of my hives and I would like her to succeed. The Russians manage the population in the hive better than Italians, but the flip side is that when the nectar starts to flow they might not have built up a good population, yet. I have to be careful because another trait of Russians is they will swarm easily. I was thinking about splitting Connie, but I may have to preemptively split Martha if she spikes in population too quickly. Feed or not to feed? It is a difficult decision.

My real concern is the two new hives. They are named Ethel II and Justine. These are the new packages. They seem very very aggressive. I am concerned that it means that the queens were rejected or died and now these hives are queenless. Bees are not happy without a queen and act be more aggressive.

I fed them yesterday and when I cracked the top feeder a little, they buzzed out at me in defense, and I was stung on the top of the head. Now I have a headache.

The two new hives both have some bees returning with pollen, but only one bee every 20 seconds or so. This gives me concern. Perhaps it is because they have a low population. It will take three weeks or so before any brood hatches. I installed them on the 9th and assuming the queen was released shortly after there should be a spike in population during the first week of May. If the hives are queen right and successful I should know by May 15th.

I am reluctant to open the hives to inspect them, though. Each time I get stung it is worse. When I was stung in the throat I had to take a Sudafed because I had trouble breathing. I have started to worry about being stung. When I started, a sting hurt a little and then it went away. Now I swell up and the pain remains for three or four days.

I am getting frustrated by the bitchyness of my bees. I know some of it is my fault. I should have been better protected and used smoke when I did my inspection.  I will open up the bees again on May 1st to see what I can see. I still want to take the super off of Connie and harvest the honey.

I opened up the two new hives. There are lots of bees and lots of new comb. I could not find one of the queen cages – it must have fallen all the way down. I did not use smoke and the bees were agitated. There was a large lump of bees and I think they might have been huddling against the queen cage. I will wait a while before looking for the cage. There’s not much I can do anyway.

I pulled the mini-super out of the Connie hive. The bees were very upset with me. This is the hybrid Italian-Russian hive and it was very upset and there were a huge number of bees. I thought it would be over fast, but I was wrong. I should have used smoke.

I will always use smoke from now on with the hives. I was stung a dozen times today and I hurt!

I am 6 ft 3in and the bee suite, although being XL is not extra long and they bees stung me many times through my socks.

I think I will ignore the bees for a while. The next step is add a queen excluder and super on each hive, but I will wait until the memory of pain goes away.

I have installed my new “Survivor Italians”. They are pooping all over the front of the hive and I am now a little worried about nosema. I hope they settle down and get their digestive tracks back to normal.

I am a little concerned about the races of my bees. I say races because the bright gold Italians that I just received show that my existing boxes are anything other than Italian.

When I first got my nucs last year, the bees were all golden yellow, but after a few months they darkened up. I was concerned that I had changed race, but I also thought that the older bees might be darker than the young ones. For a long time I had some dark bees and some lighter bees.

My hives each swarmed last year. So there was some mating going on, but with whom?

Now, looking at my old bees compared to my new bees, I am pretty sure that the was a Russian drone somewhere along the line and either my original queens or one of her successors had some Russian sperm stored away.

Martha is much darker than Connie who is much darker than my new hives (Ethel and Justine).

Here is Connie:

Here is Martha:

And here is one of the new bees from Justine:

It’s had to get a closeup of the bees, but I think you can see how dark Martha is. You can also see that Connie is darker than Justine, although has more in common.

Justine’s bees are smaller than with Connie or Martha, too, but that could be that I’ve been feeding Connie and Martha a gallon a week for the past month. The new hives have gone through 6 quarts each in two days, so they should be fat, too. I hope that the nosema is not too bad (you can see the poop in the last picture).

I got up this morning and it was damp and cold. The last few days had been warm and yesterday it was in the 80s, but it rained last night like a son-of-a-gun and the temperature dropped into the 40s. I left the bees in the back of the truck (it has a cap). I put an old blanket over the packages so that they would not suffer greatly in the cold, since they were used to warmer nights in Georgia. I was careful that they had some ventilation, though. I did not want them to suffocate.

In the YouTube videos the beekeepers don’t wear gloves or veils and in one he remarks that he did not get any stings. Don’t believe them. The bees were agitated even as I took out the queen, and I ran back to get a veil and gloves.

I set up the hives for the bees and removed some frames. I put pollen patties in each hive, taking off the paper on one side and pressing them into an empty frame, and stripping some paper off the exposed side. I filled up 1/2 gallon containers with sugar syrup, and set up the top feeders so I could put them on and fill them.

I pried off the wood that was stapled on the top of the package and found that the queen was in a unexpected kind of queen cage. It had a disk of sheet metal stapled on the end instead of a cork to hold in the queen. I pried off the disk and punched a hole in the bee candy with a finishing nail. The queen looked well, although she was unmarked. There were a few bees in with her, I guess to help keep her warm and to help her escape.

There was no ribbon or tab on the queen cage so I set it down on top of the frames of the bottom super. I set the hives up as two deeps. I know it is a lot of room, for a package, but it seemed that they could ball up in the top deep and keep warm, so I thought it was a good idea.

The can of sugar was not even starting to empty so I am guessing that the bees were in the package less than 24 hours by the time I got them. This is good as it stresses the bees less, but bad because they haven’t had time to get used to the queen. I hope that they don’t kill the queen if she gets out early.

I then dumped the bees into the frames, banging it and knocking the bees out. This is when the bees got upset with me. There were a good bunch of bees that refused to leave the package so I set it upright with the opening facing the entrance and I hope that they smell that new hive smell and get a move on it before they die of exposure.

I covered the hive with the top feeder, inner lid and cover, and I went on the the second hive.

The second package went the same way, but I was more aggressive about getting the bees out of the package and it upset them quite a bit. There were also many more bees in the second package and had to shovel them into the opening between the frames. The bees did not like this and I was stung several times.

When I got back to the house I had a dozen or so stragglers on me and Erica brushed them off. One stung her and she was not pleased. She is not a bee girl. Two bees managed to hitch hike right into the dining room and I had to catch them and release them outside.

One of the stings was in my throat and my throat began to swell. I had to go to work, so I took the next bus and about 15 minutes into a one hour trip my throat began to close up making it hard to breath. I remained calm and it did not get much worse. It was scary, but I was never in danger. I could always breath, although it was uncomfortable. I got into work and took a sudafed, and I felt better in a few minutes. I never reacted badly to bee stings before, but this sting was was on my throat. The next time I go to the doctor I will get a prescription for an epipen, just in case.

I will leave the hives alone for a few days. If it is warm early next week, I will open the hives and check the cage. You are supposed to leave them alone for a few days. Some sites say 5 days and some say 3 days.

It’s two in the morning and raining like crazy. I have two packages of bees in the back of the truck. I’ll install them in the morning as soon as the rain lets up a bit.

Here are some pictures of beeks in the rain.

3AM Friday morning – about 21 hours from now – I will be picking up my bees.

Bees are coming early this Friday morning by truck to the Palisades Mall.

I painted the hive boxes over the weekend and set up the empty hives in the old Ethel location. I decided to make them a side-by-side apiary style setup. I see this in the websites where all the hives are together and facing the same way. Originally, I wanted to keep my hives segregated. I had the idea that the less interaction they had, the better they would be as far as sharing disease, etc. I am less sure now that it makes a difference and it may be that the bees share their population between two queens this way. The hives will be identical, so bees might return to the wrong hive and not even care since they are so close together.

Martha, the weaker hive, was nice and active. I fed her early last week and yesterday she was almost done with the half gallon .

Connie is amazingly active with a cloud of bees in front of the hive. I fed her yesterday with a half a gallon, although I am not sure that she needs it. Connie and Martha have lots of returning bees with yellow, orange and red pollen.

Both hives were flying about and bumping me, and when I opened the top they starting coming out and landing on my face and hands. I was not stung, but I am not comfortable with the situation so I closed them as soon as I could. I was not wearing anything special. I sometimes wear a panama hat when I open the hives to keep bees out of my hair, but I broke all the rules yesterday and wore dark clothes, and that and my dark hair challenged the bees.

Tonight, if I have time, I will put on the bee suit and do a proper inspection.

I want to verify that Martha is laying brood and has a queen, if I can find it.

I want to see how full Connie is. I have not been able to take off the mini super that I used for baggie feeding over the winter. Each time I open the top there are too many bees swirling around to do more than close her right up again.

I need to take Connie apart and see she is doing for honey and brood. If there is too much honey in the bottom deep I will take out the honey at the edges, move the frames over to make room in the center  and try swapping in some empty frames in the middle. If she is “honey bound”, so full of honey that the queen has no room for eggs, then she will start making swarm cells. I want to hold Connie off from swarming a while. I need her to want to swarm in early May so I can split her then.

Connie has a medium super on her that I left from last year because it was full of capped honey. I was going to move it over to Martha, but when I opened the hive last Fall, they were all balled up in the super (I had neglected to put in the queen excluder). I would like to take that super off and put in a queen excluder. If the Super has brood (I don’t think this is likely) I will move her over to Martha. If it has capped  honey, I will harvest it. If it empty or has uncapped honey and no brood, I’ll just put the super back, but over a queen excluder.

Last year I did not worry about being stung, but this year I am more skittish. I worry too much.

I took some videos of Martha and Connie on the first day of spring. I just realized that I neglected to post them here.

You can see the bees returning with pollen from the trees that were just starting to bloom.

Several people I know are have lots of trouble with hay fever. There is lots of pollen in the air. This is very good for the bees.

Bees First Day of Spring from Keith Graham on Vimeo.

More Bees first day of spring from Keith Graham on Vimeo.

Turn on HD to get a little more detail.

I needed to get some paint for my new hives. I went back into the yard and thought about ways to make the hive look natural. There was a copper beech, a silver maple and some ash trees. All had gray bark with a bluish tinge. I decided that I would like to paint the new hives a dark gray with a bit of blue in it.

I discussed this with Erica Saturday morning. She was no overly excited about the dark brown I had chosen for the first hives. It was dark and dull. We wanted the hives to blend into the woodland background, but the brown was just ugly.

Saturday afternoon Erica received a message from FreeCycle.org. Someone had a can of exterior marine paint. It was dark gray with a bit if blue in it. The person had purchased it years ago, used a little and then sealed it up. We went to get it and the paint was old but not dried out at all.

It is amazing how reality can appear to be preordained. I wanted gray paint with a bit of blue and the universe rearranged itself so I could have it. I know it is just randomness, but it can be spooky sometimes.

I assembled the new hives on Sunday morning and I expect to paint them this Wednesday when the rain stops.