Where's the Brood?

So during this weekend's beekeeping session, I am completely bummed because I didn't see any brood in the hive. I'm fearing the worst, that either I injured the Queen at the last beekeeping inspection, or she may have swarmed. At the last inspection, I saw frame after frame of brood, so this is heartbreaking.

A video posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Jul 15, 2015 at 3:27am PDT

I did see brood inside the split that I made, so I decided to recombine the split to the original hive. In the split I saw 2 swarm cups and a supersedure cup empty, so a virgin queen was born and has mated. Hopefully, the hive will take to this Queen and she will be productive as the last one.

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Jul 14, 2015 at 8:57pm PDT

Despite all the disappointments, there was some good news, in the honey super there are 3 frames of honey! I can't wait until there are 10 frames of honey so we can do a harvest!

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Jul 14, 2015 at 6:36pm PDT

The bees are doing well!

Two weeks ago, I visited the beehive and it's looking amazing! I arrived at the first backyard and was blown away by the pretty garden! It is so lush and green!

Lilies are now in bloom!

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Jun 27, 2015 at 1:51pm PDT

The hydrangea are also in bloom! Isn't this so pretty!

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Jun 27, 2015 at 4:07pm PDT

The bees must be so happy living here. The beehives look great nestled in the flora.

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Jun 27, 2015 at 2:25pm PDT

At the second beehive location, the hive is doing extremely well. The Queen is laying perfect brood! I found 3 boxes full of brood, she is such a prolific layer!

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Jun 28, 2015 at 4:52am PDT

And the top box has frames of honey! I think we shall be able to harvest honey soon!

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Jun 28, 2015 at 8:28am PDT

Since the hive is very full, and I saw signs of swarm cells, I decided to split the hive and move some new larvae frames into a new box. I also added some honey frames. With any luck, they will raise a new virgin Queen and this will be a new colony!

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Jun 27, 2015 at 8:30pm PDT

The original hive looks like a skyscraper compared to the new box!

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Jun 27, 2015 at 9:34pm PDT

I'm so excited with how well this hive is doing! I can't wait to do the next hive inspection!

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Jun 28, 2015 at 6:56am PDT

Forgot to Post This Beekeeping Day

I have been so busy this month, that I forgot to post this beekeeping day! Last month, on my birthday, I went beekeeping. I was so happy to see that one of the Queens have been laying lots and lots of brood! This makes me super happy!

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on May 30, 2015 at 4:19pm PDT

The hive was super active. This is how the hive looked after I inspected it. The bees were flying around.

A video posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on May 30, 2015 at 11:36am PDT

I love these bees! They are so docile! Really happy bees, and very mellow. Which is quite lovely.

A video posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on May 30, 2015 at 5:01pm PDT

At one of the beehive locations, the roses are in full bloom. Isn't this just gorgeous??

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on May 31, 2015 at 10:12am PDT

I just love filming these bees in slow motion. I can watch this footage for hours!

A video posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on May 31, 2015 at 12:06pm PDT

Beautiful Day to Beekeep

I love beekeeping this time of year because the magnolia tree where my beehive is located is in full bloom! When I arrived to the beehive this past weekend, I was overwhelmed with how beautiful this scene was.

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Apr 25, 2015 at 11:46am PDT

I did a hive inspection of the overwintered hive and the Queen is laying really well. Perfect brood pattern. My only concern was that on the left there looks to be two supercedure cells forming. I didn't remove them and let the bees do what they do. If they decide to replace the overwinter Queen, I will let them be, to see what they do. They know more about the health of their Queen than I do.

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Apr 25, 2015 at 6:41pm PDT

Here is a closer view of the brood. You can see that there is larvae in those Queen supercedure cups.

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Apr 25, 2015 at 8:40pm PDT

I moved the brood box to the bottom and put two more boxes above it to allow the Queen to go up and have plenty of room to lay eggs. I really love how the blooming tree looks next to the beehive.

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Apr 25, 2015 at 8:16pm PDT

Here is a video of our other beehive in slow motion. I could watch this for hours.

A video posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Apr 25, 2015 at 3:24pm PDT

The bees were building a lot of burr comb, so I removed all of it. I'm so happy the hives are doing well! I'm still feeding the bees sugar water because we are still waiting for the neighborhood to start blooming. Look forward to the next inspection!

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Apr 25, 2015 at 10:13pm PDT

Frozen to Death

I received an email from my beehost yesterday and it was extremely bad news. This past Sunday, it went up to 47F degrees. And some of the bees ventured out of one of our beehives. But unfortunately, they were unaware that it's actually winter and snow on the ground.

 

 The bees became disoriented and could not find there way back to the beehive. These warm spells are the worst because they get tricked into thinking it's spring and so they will come out of the hive to forage and look for food. But with the snow all over the ground, they become confused.

Seeing all these honeybees frozen, trying to get back to the hive makes me so sad and want to cry. I feel heartbroken. I really hope there are enough bees inside the hive to keep the Queen alive. I almost can't wait until the end of next month to open the hive and see what's going on inside.

Fall Honey Harvest 2014

It's been months since I wrote on my blog. I'm terrible. I don't know where the summer went. It went fast. Here's a quick update of what happened last month. We harvested honey from our hives. In the beginning of the season, we had high hopes and was hoping to have a big harvest of honey. We started the season with 2 hives and grew it to 4 hives by adding 2 Nucs. We had a series of problems such as some kind of poisoning killing off almost half of our bees. Plus we had a slow cool summer, with wet temperatures. We were lucky to even have any honey to harvest with these issues. We inspected the hives and pulled the super frames for harvesting.

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Of the 4 hives, we only could pull 10 frames of honey. Way less than last year's harvest. Last year we pulled 18 frames in the Fall and we had less hives!.

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But at least we had a harvest. Our first year we didn't have anything to harvest. So we are glad to have some honey.

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It's amazing to me that these two frames of honey are from the same hive! The top one is likely from early summer and the bottom one was made recently, late summer. Just beautiful and two different taste profiles!

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I love scraping the wax off the frames. It's almost therapeutic.

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Can you believe how dark this honey is? Some of the frames of honey was this really deep black coffee color! Now that is rich fall honey!

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And when it starts flowing, oh my gosh. It smells incredible. Like you want to dunk your head in it!

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The flow of raw harvested honey! Yum!! #honeybee #honey #beehive #beekeeper #beekeeping #brooklynbees

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A quick video to demonstrate what I mean. If only there was a smell app!

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After we harvested the five frames of honey and split them up between the four of us (2 beehosts & 2 beekeepers) this is what each of us ended up taking home. 1 quart & 1 pint jar. This was the saddest harvest ever! But, at least we got a harvest.

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I'm going to savor every last drop of this precious drop of my local Brooklyn honey!

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Frustrations of Urban Beekeeping Part 2

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how sometimes beekeeping in an urban environment can be very frustrating and disheartening. This past weekend, the frustrations continued. When we went to the first beehive location, we were shocked to see that there was yet again, another huge die off of bees. Has this ever happened to your hives? What did you do to combat this?

I’m not exactly sure what is causing the bees to die off in this manner. We are looking into moving this hive to another location in hopes that whatever is causing this will stop. Luckily, when we opened the hive, the bees looked healthy. They weren't disoriented like last time.

There was also pretty good numbers of bees, so the hive had healthy numbers as well. We saw that the Queen was laying very good brood. So that is a good sign that it hasn't affected the inside of the hive. We suspect the die off the bees are likely the foragers. Hopefully with the Queen laying well, the foragers will be replaced with the newly hatching brood.

We pulled some frames and they were also building out wax and filling the frames with honey.

We looked inside our other hive and they have also been busy with making honey. In fact, they built some honey on top of the frames.

That looked and smelled so incredible, so we scraped these off the frames. And had a little taste for ourselves. Oh wow, is this every good! Floral, sweet, deliciousness!

After beekeeping duties were done, I saw that my favorite Cesar's taco truck was sitting outside the subway station.

I picked up one of these beauties. This is a chicken empanada. It's a perfect snack after beekeeping. Yum.

Frustrations of Urban Beekeeping

I love beekeeping, but sometimes it can be frustrating in an urban environment. Especially when you have neighbors that don't want you there. Two weeks ago, at my last inspection, I arrived to the backyard where I keep two of my hives. It's a beautiful yard, full of blooming flowers. I was getting ready to do an inspection, I started up the smoker. Only to be greeted by an angry neighbor behind the fence, screaming at me. In a very angry voice she was shouting at me to stop what I was doing and to not open the hives or continue with my inspection because she had guests in her backyard for a party. I was going to comply with her requests, and then she starts threatening to call the police on me. Upon which I stated, "Go ahead, call the police. My beehives are registered with the Department of Health. These hives are completely legal to own and have." I proceeded to tell her that she didn't have to scream at me in that manner and all she had to to was ask nicely to not do the inspection, and I would have complied. Apparently, she was stung by a bee the previous day, and now she feels scared of them. But how does she know they were my bees? And what if it was a yellowjacket, or wasp, or hornet? They all can be mistaken for honeybees. I now feel frustrated with having my hives here, if there is a chance that I will be accosted every time I show up for an inspection. I can tell she seems pretty unreasonable to talk to, since every time I tried to calm her down, she would talk over me loudly. People like that don't care that honeybees are an integral part of the eco-system, and that without them and their pollination, we wouldn't have the fruits and vegetables we consume.

Have you ever experienced something like this? It makes me really sad and start to rethink the location of this hive. Would I need to move it elsewhere? Somewhere where there are less neighbors perhaps? I have an upcoming inspection this Sunday. I'll have to see if I get into another verbal altercation with this neighbor. Hopefully, she has calmed down a bit. Fingers crossed.

Forgotten Spring Photos

I downloaded photos off of my phone and found some I completely forgot to post on this blog. The photos show how amazing the spring flowers are in one of the gardens where we keep our beehives in Brooklyn. Don't these irises look amazing? I wonder if the honeybees like them.

Here's a view from another angle. Way in the back are the beehives.

A closeup of the irises. So pretty!

Closer to the hive are some blooming alliums. I just love these flowers. They remind me of cotton balls!

Here is our other beehive location. The fun part of this location is that we are always greeted by Oscar the kitty who lives at this location. He loves it when we are doing a beekeeping inspection. He watches us beekeep the entire time.

On this day, we also had to build our bee nucleus that we purchased. I've been wanting to raise bee nucleuses for awhile. I finally went ahead and ordered a kit.

And here is the nucleus completely built. It looks awesome! I can't wait to raise nucs!!

Installing My New Bee Nucleus

This past weekend, we took a drive to Beehive Barn to pick up our new bee nucleuses. We ordered 2 Nucs from them because we've had great success with this NJ apiary. We did really well with two of our beehives surviving the winter with these hygenic bee stock. So we have been continuing to buy our bees exclusively from them. Beehive Barn is on this amazing piece of property in Cranbury, NJ. The property is dotted with barns and greenhouses, a real nice piece of farmland, with lots of land for the bees to forage in. This was the perfect day to pick up bees. Sunny, clear day, just fantastic! Aren't those just perfect clouds in the sky? Pretty right?

Sally, who owns the Beehive Barn, said we could go into the yard and pick out our own Nuc from the many nucs she had. She has about 70 hives, so we had a lot to choose from. Is this not incredible?

Here is another view with more boxes. Love. Love.

We brought our beekeeper suits and gear with us. Here we are puting together some cardboard boxes for the new nuc.

Here we are inspecting one of the Nuc boxes. We are looking for a box with frames of nice brood pattern and frames with pollen. We realized that we should have brought with us a smoker, that would have helped a great deal since the bees weren't too happy that we were opening the Nucs. They were getting slightly agitated from us opening the hive and the smoke would have calmed them down tremendously. I was stung here on the knee when we pulled frames. Ouch. We made sure we saw the Queen and we put the frames into the cardboard box and taped up the box for the car. We made sure we taped the lid pretty good. Last thing you want is the box to tip over and 10,000 bees spilling out into your car. LOL.

One of the things I love about this apiary are the chickens on the property. I saw this beautiful rooster checking us out! Sally gave us a dozen fresh farm eggs as a gift. That was so nice and thoughtful! I love fresh farm free range eggs, they taste so much better than supermarket eggs!

On the property, she also had this trailer with lots of Nucs lined up. I had to take a photo of this. I just love the look of these Nucs in a row!

We selected our Nucs and headed to Brooklyn to our two beehive locations. At our first stop, we added  the frames into our new beehive! Woohoo! We now have two hives in this backyard location! I cannot be happier!

Then we headed to our second beehive location. For this one, we decided to combine the Nuc to an existing beehive that survived the winter but has no active Queen. To combine the Nuc we added a deep box to the bottom, put the Nuc frames in with some empty deep frames. Then we placed newspaper between the bottom deep and the boxes of the existing hive. The worker bees will start to eat through the paper to get to the Queen. The purpose of the newspaper is to allow the old bees and new bees to become acquainted with each other's pheromones and with the pheromones of their new Queen. This is to prevent the old bees from killing the new Queen. By the time they eat through the newspaper, which should take only a few days, they will accept the new Queen.

Sadly, this day wasn't all happiness. We noticed at our green hive that there were lots of dead bees in front of the hive. There was a pile of at least an inch deep of dead bees. This was heartbreaking. We looked closely at the bees in front of the hive entrance and they looked like they were disoriented and walking in circles. We have seen this in the past. We had a die off in one of our hives and we suspected it was because of pesticide spraying or they were somehow poisoned by something toxic. Ugh. This makes me so sad. The only thing we can do is hope the Queen is healthy and that they will bounce back! Since this is our healthiest hive, I think they will definitely come back in numbers. Fingers crossed!

Raising Another Queen

This week I ordered new front feeders for the beehives because our bees seemed to not care for the top feeder. The ones I ordered are just plastic cap holders that you screw on top of mason jars. At $3 a pop, this will work just fine. I like to use Mason jars as feeders because you can clean them easily and get all the gunk out that builds up when the jars are in the sun.

The main goal for this hive inspection was to look for Queen cups or evidence of a new Queen. At the start of this season, this hive was Queenless. Then we raised a virgin Queen which died. So we moved fresh brood over to attempt to raise another Queen. Since it's still early enough in the season, and we have another hive that is very strong, we decided to take the risk of raising another Queen instead of buying a mated Queen.

When we looked closer, the hive was brimming with activity, so this is definitely a good sign.

The first frame I pulled from the middle of the top box had a Queen cup. Woohoo! And all that spotty brood are drone cells. That means there is a laying working somewhere in the hive as well.

Here's a closer look at the frame. At this capped stage, the Queen should emerge in 7 days, and then hopefully a week after that takes her mating flight. I saw around 4 Queen cells in the hive so the first one to hatch will kill the other Queens.

 

Here's a look at the new blue hive. It's just waiting for my new Nuc to arrive. I spoke to the Beehive Barn and they said with the cold weather we were having this spring, they are about a week late with the Nucs being ready. I am hoping that we can pick up the Nucs the last week of May. I'm eager to get the Nuc installed so that I can get this hive up and running.

Since the day was a bit overcast, the bees were super aggressive when I inspected. I suspect that most of the bees were close to home because they sensed it was going to rain. I actually got stung 3 times! Twice on my legs, (one sting on each leg).

AND... I also got stung on my neck. Somehow, a bee got into my veil and stung me square in the neck. Oh man, did that one hurt! It got pretty swollen and my neck pretty much "disappeared". I get a really bad reaction to beesting. My doctor says I have a mild allergy to bee venom so I carry around a prescription bottle of Cetirizine, which is an anti-histamine that my doctor prescribed for me for times like this when I really need a strong dose to calm the swelling.

After getting stung 3 times, I went straight home to take a relaxing shower. I found a bee stuck on my clothing. She must have been one of the bees that stung me. Poor bee. If you ask me, she got it worse than I did.

Brand New Beehives!

This was a busy week for us. We received our delivery from Mann Lake of our two new beehives. We bought the apiary kit from them, which includes the basics that you need to start a new hive. A bottom board with an entrance reducer, a telescoping cover, an inner cover, and we went with the 4 medium boxes with wooden frames. I prefer medium boxes over deeps as the brood box because I find that it's easier for me to lift when the box is full of wax, brood, and honey. With the addition of these two hives, we now are the proud owners of five hives in total. Two years ago, when I started this beekeeping adventure, I didn't think my passion for raising honeybees would grow to this level. I think any devoted beekeeper would tell you that it's something you can't quite explain until you try it. Maintaining your own hives is an amazing experience. One that I learn from constantly and a hobby I know I will maintain for many years to come.

Emily, one of our beehive hosts wanted the hive to be sky blue. Since neither Paul or I have backyards to keep our hives, we use her backyard as the host location. She picked out the paint and we spent last Saturday afternoon painting the hive. We use an exterior paint to paint the hives to protect the boxes from the elements of being outside. It rains and snows a lot here, so a good exterior paint helps a lot with the inclement weather.

Paul had a great idea to hang the freshly painted boxes on tree limbs in hopes that they would dry faster. I really thought this looked pretty funny. It reminded me of an art installation.

 

Hanging them on tree limbs allowed the sun and wind to hit every angle of the box. The neighbors must have thought we were weird.

We temporarily assembled the hive on top of cinderblock. This hive will get a bee nucleus which is due to arrive in late May. I really love how the color came out.

And here is a view of all three hives in Emily's backyard. I think it looks pretty awesome!

After we finished painting and installing, next we went over to our other beehive host located a few blocks away. When we arrived, Oscar the kitty was there to greet us right away! Oscar lives here and watches us beekeep every Saturday. If you look closely, you can see his "girlfriend" neighborhood kitty in the background. We don't know who owns the girlfriend but she follows Oscar everywhere! He's not very fond of that.

Here's Oscar inspecting my beesuit.

We installed the new hive temporarily next to the older one. Can you tell it's new? LOL. So shiny! We're calling this new hive Oscar's Honeywell.

I did an inspection to see how well the new Queen is laying. We installed this package this spring, so we are keeping a watchful eye on her.

The Queen in the Carlton Reserve hive is laying perfect brood. She has just about filled this entire frame of brood. This is the pattern you want to see in the hive, because it means she is laying in practically ever cell. Pretty awesome!!