~ Hall and Oats, Baby Come Back

As I type this, thousands upon thousands of our girls are sitting up in the old maple tree on the south side of our house, where they’ve been for almost twenty-four hours. Yesterday the scouts were moving southeast. Today, they’re mostly traveling northwest. In the meantime, the hot wind is howling with winds gusting up to 30mph. Are the bees regretting their decision? What will happen if they don’t find a suitable new home? Do they ever return to the original hive?

Things looked a bit crowded when we last inspected the hive. Saturday we got an extra super from the Chicago Honey Coop and added it to the hive that night. We ordered two more from Betterbee. Ironically the bees were swarming yesterday at the exact moment that UPS was delivering our new supers. Last night with the bee swarm swaying on a branch high overhead, Greg created a second hive with the new supers. He put a bowl of sugar water on the roof, and a fresh bouquet of lemon balm at the hive entrance. Watching his courting process was heartbreaking–how he loves our bees.

We’re both sad to see the bees go, but watching them swarm–the sky thick with bees–was something I will never forget. Fortunately, plenty of our girls stayed behind. In fact there are so many bees buzzing about the old hive today that it doesn’t look much different than it did before the swarm. Now, we hope that our loyal girls are busy raising a new queen, and that the gypsies will discover the new hive.

It’s often said that the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

This rings true for us every time we open our hive and even when we’re just sitting nearby watching with wonderment. Though we’re entering our third season as beekeepers, there’s plenty we don’t know and plenty we’ve not yet experienced with our hive. For our first two years our hive started in June with a brand new queen and a small colony of 3000-5000 bees. This year, our bees survived the winter leaving us with new questions. When to open the hive and check on them? When to put on the super that we removed for the winter?

Mother nature tossed in a few curve balls to complicate our lessons. Our late winter and early spring temperatures were unseasonably high. The bees were out in force, but what were they finding to sustain them? We didn’t know how much honey remained in the hive. Should we feed them? (We didn’t.) As the hive strengthened and the bees began flying with a greater sense of purpose, we added swarming to our list of concerns. Mistress Beek did an informative, timely how-to post on spring hive checks. She offers advice on what to look for before opening the hive:

Pollen on the legs of bees entering the hive: If worker bees are carrying pollen inside the hive, this likely means a) there are fresh larvae inside needing pollen and b) those workers aren’t robber bees.

For weeks, we’d been watching bees like the one in the photo return to the hive loaded down with pollen. It was time for our first ever spring hive check! The top box was full of bees. (We wintered the hive with three boxes.) The frames were approximately eighty percent full of uncapped honey. We didn’t see any brood in the frames, but we couldn’t confirm that the queen was somewhere in the lower two brood chambers. We briefly considered opening the lower boxes, but we don’t like to disrupt the natural rhythm of the hive any more than is absolutely necessary. So instead of placing the queen excluder between the second brood chamber and honey super as we’d done the first two years, we placed it between the third and fourth super–the top level of our hive. Before we added the excluder and fourth super, we followed Mistress Beek’s advice again and “checkerboarded” the frames of the third and fourth supers, removing every other honey frame from level three and exchanging them with alternating empty comb frames from level four.

With plenty of room for our bees to grow and a return to normal cool spring temperatures our swarming fears have abated for now.

March 19th, 2012, two days before the Vernal Equinox.

Our little blog has been dormant for months, but our mighty hive is alive and kicking.

Early last September we harvested over twenty pounds of honey, a 225% increase from our first-ever harvest in 2010. We were surprised by the yield, since our bees didn’t move into the hive until the first of June. We suspect it was the colony equivalent of moving into a furnished apartment. These bees had a lot less comb to build out and could get right down to the business of making honey.

Winter came. Early predictions called for a brutal winter. We braced ourselves and our hive for the worst. Instead, an unusually warm and mild winter prevailed. The temperatures hit the mid-50s January 6th. Our bees spent the day taking cleansing flights and casting dead bees from the hive. A few weeks later they were out and about again. By early March the temperatures were regularly in the 60s and the novelty of watching our bees fly among the leafless trees wore off. Still, it was an odd scene. Their flight patterns didn’t look like patterns at all. They flew aimlessly in all directions like drunken sailors on leave. And anytime we got close to the hive, bees came flying right at us–an aggressive side we’d never observed before with our usually docile colony.

I was content to watch them from the window. Where were they going? What were they finding on their journeys? The days were warm, but buds and blossoms were still safely tucked away. I wanted to succumb to the spring fever, like our bees, but I couldn’t shake the memory of the previous winter–the harshest Chicago winter I could remember. Our bees came out of the hive on a warm day in February last year. The weather snapped. And a month later we discovered that our entire hive had somehow perished.

The warm winter days of 2012 continued and working against the calendar, spring persisted. The ground and trees turned from grey to green as if in an instant. The bees were flying with a greater sense of purpose, returning to the hive loaded down with pollen. Daily high temperatures reached the 80s on March 14th and the eight days that followed. Our bees, accustomed to the shade of our 100-plus-year-old cottonwood tree, which had yet to leaf out, spent the last week of winter enduring summer-like temperatures and bearding on the side of the hive.

Spring is officially here now, and I’m starting to relax. It looks like our ladies have survived their first Chicago winter.

Once bitten

Sunday night.
It’s hot.
We’re tired.
Our bodies are rebelling against us after a six hour road trip.
The sun is setting, and our bees are settling in for the evening.

We wanted to curl up with a slice of our favorite delivery pizza–garlic and double mushroom–and reruns of No Reservations, but during the long drive we agreed to add our second honey super to the hive that evening.

Perhaps our docile group of ladies had lulled us into a false sense of safety. Or maybe it was just blind stupidity. Either way, out we went to the hive, neither of us donning our protective gear. You can probably guess the rest from here.

A curious bee buzzed dangerously close to Greg’s eye as he was placing the cover back on the hive. Greg who is usually as calm as our bees, moving slowly and deliberately at all times around the hive, lost his cool and got his first sting of the summer on his nose. He raced into the house. Heeding the call of her kamikaze comrade, a second bee gave chase and made it inside before I could get the door closed. (Being none the smarter, I was slow to react because I was at my usual post behind the camera lens.) Once inside the bold bee was immediately drawn to the bathroom light fixture where she later died. And twenty-four hours later I was sitting across the dinner table from Two-Face.

Once bitten.
Twice shy.
Another lesson learned the hard way.

Formic acid strips

After a lot of research and discussion, we agreed with Bob. He had suggested we use one strip in the hive, but we followed the Dadant instructions and used two. The first application was recommended for mid-July with a second in late August. In the video below Greg is placing the strips between the two brood chambers.

We applied the strips in the evening on July 11th. The following morning we watched as weakened bees crawled from the hive, died, and were carried away by a survivor bee. Many of our references said that some bees would die as a result of the formic acid application. Still, we wondered, had we done the right thing?

Formic acid strip placement on bottom brood chamber

Eleven days have passed since we applied the strips, and we’re happy to report that the hive is buzzing wildly again with no visible after effects from the treatment. The bees are pulling pieces of the strips from the hive and scattering them on the roof, which our research had prepared us for too. The second application of formic acid is tentatively scheduled for the last week of August, but we haven’t decided whether or not we’re going through with it. Maybe a little tough love can go a long way.

The view from our meditation spot on the roof

For those reasons and far too many more to list here, we were elated when we finally brought our new bees home from Burns Harbor, Indiana on June 4th. The first couple of weeks were similar to those we experienced with our previous colony last summer with one notable difference–we were more relaxed as beekeepers and didn’t go running to the Internet or our Dadant books every time the wind changed direction.

But right when we stopped expecting anything new to happen, these girls surprised us. This decidedly docile colony of Hoosier bees was growing fast–much faster than our first. Greg put the second brood chamber on after just three weeks (as compared to six weeks last summer) when he reported to me that the bottom chamber was “jam-packed-full of bees”, and the frames were teeming with brood and honey. We had never seen our hive so full before. I wondered, Had our new colony come close to swarming? “I guess it’s like moving into a furnished apartment,” Greg had said that night over dinner. “The comb was already built for them this time. So the queen was able to start laying eggs right away, and the girls got busy making honey.” It made sense, so much sense that we wondered why we hadn’t anticipated it.

It feels good having bees back in our life–our connection to nature rightfully restored. We can lose a whole hour sitting hive-side watching new bees learn how to fly and experienced bees return to the hive weighted down with pollen. What will they teach us next?

~ Carol Sobieski and Thomas Meehan, Annie

It’s been two months since we lost our hive. Though I’ve always believed that something good can spring from even the darkest of tragedies, I wasn’t prepared for the outpouring of heartfelt sympathy and support from friends, family, neighbors, and especially the urban beekeeping community that I’ve come to know through this little blog. That support has inspired us to begin again. But before we introduce you to the new ladies on the block, we wanted to pay homage to our first queen. Over the course of her short life she taught us many lessons about bees and about ourselves. Thank you and goodbye sweet queen.

Our first year as urban beekeepers ended on a sad note: we lost the entire colony. On a recent, warm spring day we opened the silent hive in search of answers. Our investigation was inconclusive, but we ruled out starvation.

When the second warm day of the year arrived nearly a month after the first, our hive was morbidly silent. My husband and I crouched in front of our hive desperate for a sign of life. We thought we’d done everything right. We’d left several frames full of honey. We added a few sugar-filled frames as a precaution. We were bereft and completely mystified. How could our hive have survived the worst part of the winter, then perished in the final days as spring and its promise of pollen was in sight?

In the end, it wasn’t enough. And I couldn’t help but think that we weren’t enough. We’d failed our bees just as I had feared we might since the day we brought them home.

…soon, we will start again with new bees in our hive. I remain an urban beekeeper.

The Bees Are Alive from Dagny Taggart on Vimeo.