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Cape Cod, like much of the Northeast, has been battered these last days with a strong nor-easter. Yesterday morning I looked out my window through the wind and rain to see that the top had blown off Merope, one of our hives! Oh, no!
I ran out to replace it and found to my horror that there were bee corpses as far into the hive as I could see. I drowned my girls because the weight on the hive top wasn’t heavy enough! I replaced the top and came inside, soaked myself and with a very heavy heart.
Today the sun is shining and to my delight Merope is showing activity …. mostly dragging out dead bodies, but enough bees left, I think, to sustain the hive. Oh, frabjus day! Callou, callay! Merope lives!
Honey flow
September is here, and so is the honey! I checked the bees the other day, with great excitement. Everything is stuck together with propolis, so the hive tool ( sitting below, left) was my best friend. The weather was cool, so
 - Oh, what a mess!
each time I wedged a piece of the hive apart from another, there was a loud SNAP as the propolis let go.
What I found was that our tribe on the right, Marope, had filled several frames of their super with nectar, but that they had not capped it. They still need to fan away the moisture to cure the honey to the right liquid content.
Levitt, though, the hive on the left has been going like mad, and has filled nine out of ten frames with either nectar or capped honey. They were very busy in that hive, and watched me very carefully as I removed the frames for inspection.
In the photo, I’ve got a frame whose bottom edge had become stuck to the top of the one below it. That’s unusual, but we’d run out of frames in that lower hive body, and left one blank. The bees, hating empty space, filled it with their own, more free-form comb, then anchored it to the new super above for good measure. I’m shown here just before scraping the errant bits of comb from the bottom of this frame. The honey was just begging to be sampled, and I answered that call. It was nearly all I could do to wait until my bee-veil was off before trying some.
So now we know we’ve got to harvest, Jeannette is working to secure an extractor. That will spin the honey from the frames, and we will ‘simply’ strain and bottle the bounty. Honey is one of the few foods that rarely ever spoils, having some wonderful antimicrobial properties.
In an aside, today I went back to Levitt, our left-hand hive to add another super. The girls have got to have space to store their gold, and we’ve got good weather forecasts for the next few days. I became quite casual, wearing long pants and long sleeves, but no special bee gear for this task. All I had to do was open the inner and outer hive covers, pop the new super on, and replace the covers. Everything went well, with only a little bit of extra buzzing near the end of the job. I started to walk away, then noticed a funny tickling in my left pants leg. Yep, I had a bee up my pants. About fifty yards from my cottage, I held the pants away from my leg so I wouldn’t squash whoever it was in there, and walked as fast as dignity would allow. The pants are on my porch now, just to be sure she gets away.
Last post, I suggested opening the hive and inspecting it during crepuscular times,(dawn and dusk.) I just read in Beekeeping for Dummies that warm, sunny days are really best. Perhaps my tendency to hot flashes has influenced this author’s view of the truth. See your bees during the hours from 10:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M., please. Or trust your best instincts and do what you need to do when you need to do it.
By the way, the girls are a cloud of golden activity today. who’d have thought there was a tropical storm anywhere in the vicinity?
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Checking their work
Four or five days after adding a super to each of the hives, I couldn’t contain my curiosity. It was twilight. I waited until the bees had stopped zipping about the bee-yard. Still light enough to see, it was a warm, lovely evening.
I had great expectations. After all, the girls had filled 8/10 of their available space before their new additions. I just knew that there’d be four or five frames of newly ripening honey. Oh, how wrong can I be?
Wandering peacefully among the new frames on the pre-stamped pattern of honeycomb on flat sheets of wax were some of the most inexperienced bees I’ve ever seen. They were house bees, among the youngest members of the hive. Their job, not to put too fine a point on it, is to scoop the poop after young bees emerge from the comb. What makes them so easy to spot is that they have absolutely perfect hairs on their bodies, unlike their hard-working sisters. Older bees get dusty-looking, their wings get frayed. They look like they’ve been busy. Not these babies. More adorable than their perfection of form is their walk. It seems their legs aren’t as tough as older bees’. So they look a lot like puppies lying on their stomachs, legs splayed in all six directions. Why were they up here? I got the sense that their older sisters had had enough of them, and that they’d been sent to play upstairs.
I replaced the hive lid carefully.
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Despite their slow start on filling the new super with honey, our young house bees have been performing one of their more mysterious functions. They’ve been making propolis, and filling any gaps they find with the sticky, spicy-smelling stuff. A tentative poke at the new frames revealed that they were anchored with this resinous glue. But I’d call it a scotch-tape anchor, not rubber cement or super glue quite yet. No need to panic. Jeannete and I will scrape off this gunk next time we work.
 Hello.
This post from Dianne, Jeannette’s co-beekeeper.
I’ve discovered that it’s really better to approach the bees during the early morning or evening, when they are less active.
One morning recently, I woke at 5:00, obsessed. I was convinced that Jeannette and I had left them alone too long, and that they’d become crowded and decide to swarm. Or something. Who can say?
The 7/10 rule states that if the topmost hive body or super has more than seven out of ten frames filled with honey, brood, and/or pollen, it’s time to add another hive body or super. Our girls had filled eight to nine of the frames in each upper hive body, so I was just in time to give them a new super. ‘Super’ is not what you’d think. A super is about half as deep as a regular hive body box. We superimpose it onto the rest of the hive, thus the name.
So I suited up and explored the basement where the extra frames are stored. (Had Jeannette mentioned that she’s not a morning person, and that she’s been really busy lately? I wouldn’t dream of waking the woman at 5:00A.M.. Thus my solo expedition.) I had to pass some close neighbors, looking like an alien in my getup. They were nearly as bleary-eyed as I, but were eagerly inhaling cigarette smoke, so their day had already had somewhat of a kick-start. Oddly enough, they did not join me when I asked it they’d like to try beekeeping. I hauled 20 super-size frames upstairs, and took a peek at the hives.
Jeannette has described the hives at midday, but in the morning, they are quite different. Twenty bees sit clustered on the front porch, guarding the hive and honey. Their job is to asses danger, then fly out to meet it. In the worst-case scenario, this means that they sacrifice their tiny lives for the good of the collective. With that kind of commitment, bees can be scary. But these bees, well, they looked like kids with punked-up hair, still in their pajamas. They hardly budged. I was thrilled. I used the smoker on them anyway, so any alarm-scent they might have released would be disrupted. Without that scent communication, bees have a harder time launching a defensive attack.
I’m pleased and sorry to say there was no dramatic conclusion to this blog entry. I put the supers, then the lids back on the hives. I watched them in rapt admiration for a time. Then I went back to my cottage, showered off the smoke, and went back to sleep.
A week went by, and Dianne and I (with Paul looking on) decided to look at the hives. There was still, after all, a queen trapped somplace in there. She called our friend Marie, who’s always armed with a camera, and we suited up again.
We started with the hive still containing the queen box, and were pleased to find she’d duly left … and amazed to see what the bees had done in the week we’d left the hive alone.
It turns out that, like nature, bees abhor a vacuum. They like their hives tightly packed (I’ve known people who felt the same way about their apartments) and when there’s space, they fill it.  Our girls had created some amazing “cushions” of comb, lightly attached to the frames, to fill the space left by the missing frame (which had been removed in order for there to be room for the queen’s box).
Dianne boldly grasped a nearby hoe, and we proceeded to strip off the extra comb, restore the frame to its place, and add a tenth frame to the super so that it was all nice and dark and close. Just the way the girls like it! 
I spent the first night worrying about the girls. What if I had done something irreparably wrong? I woke up feeling concerned—well, okay, in a bit of a panic, really—but not knowing exactly what to do.
It was Sunday and a fabulous day on the Cape. In the afternoon Paul and I went down to Orleans to hear the spring concert given by the Outer Cape Chorale (it’s small out here, we either know by sight or are friends with just about everybody in the chorale). My friend Dianne had a magnificent solo in Hayden’s Mass in a Time of War and as soon as we all repaired to Willy’s Gym for a party, I accosted her. “Great solo, you sounded wonderful, can you help me with my bees?”
At least I complimented her first, right?
Dianne is wonderful. She is unflappable. She kept bees when she was a child (I’m going to let her tell that story herself as a guest blogger) and lives next to me in the summer, a perfect neighbor to have. “Please please please please….”
Dianne arrived the next morning and we suited up (by this time I’d created a makeshift bee outfit that kept my veil tied on tightly) and pulled the queen boxes from the hives. Never mind all this marshmallow nonsense—Dianne merely pried off the screen covering and set the box down in front of the hive. Within minutes one of the two queens has been escorted safely inside. I was amazed. Dianne was matter-of factual about it.
I had to leave then for my writing workshop, but when I got home there was still a cluster of bees around the queen-box in the right-hand hive, an indication she wasn’t inside. And it wouldn’t do to leave her out all night. So I opened the hive and put the box in. This time, with the screen pried open, there was a far better chance of her getting where she needed to go. Still didn’t see the damned marshmallow.
This beekeeping is quite a challenge!
So I’d read about how it’s done. I’d watched it on YouTube. I’d seen a demonstration at Bill’s Bog. I was intelligent, competent, and prepared. Everything should have gone smoothly.
It didn’t.
The two boxes were attached to each other, so my first challenge was separating them. That done, I carefully pried off the top of the transport boxes. So far, so good.
The first thing to remove is the feeding can that, filled with sugar water, kept them nourished on their journey. As soon as the can came out, so too did the bees. Lots of them. Very unhappy.
And I hadn’t yet gotten the hang of wearing the bee veil, so was a bit taken aback when several of the girls crawled inside it with me. They’re not supposed to do that. I decided to ignore them as best I could and carried on emptying the box. Damn! I’d carefully lit my smoker ahead of time, but the fire had gone out. Not a good thing, with hundreds of bees angrily wanting to know What Was Going On.
I gave up on the smoker and turned instead to my spray bottle of sugar water, which is supposed to calm them. Sprayed liberally. I didn’t notice any change in their behavior. Decided to just get on with things, and brought the box over to the hive where the frames were waiting to welcome their new residents.
You’re supposed to tap it — pound it, really — vigorously so that the bees fall gracefully out of the box and into the hive. I pounded. I think about a hundred or so did actually fall—not like the thousands who’d fallen when the demonstration was done over at Bill’s Bog. The rest stayed in, and now I couldn’t pound it a second time, or I’d crush the bees that were already out.
I shook it. I implored them. I used the gentle bee-brush. I implored some more.
Meanwhile, one of the bees sharing my veil with me had gotten tangled in my hair and as a last-ditch reaction, stung me. It hurt. I ran away from the hives, pulling off the veil and trying to untangle the bee (now pretty much a corpse, but she’d been joined by another). Brave Paul came out of the house then and succeeded in untangling her.
Deep breath. Veil back on. Back to the hives.
It was time to pay attention to the box holding the queen. She’s separated from the other bees so that they can all get to know her scent—a new queen, abruptly introduced, is often killed by bees seeing her as an interloper. There was, I’d been told, marshmallow at one end and a cork at the other. Remove one frame, put the marshmallow side down and suspend the box in the hive. Sounds easy.
I couldn’t tell for the life of me which side had a marshmallow in it. And by now I was getting thoroughly tired of all these bees being so damned angry with me. I put the box down on the bottom of the hive with both sides clear and hoped for the best.
I still, after all, had another hive to go!
You’ll notice the tree. Dianne (more baout her later) and I have decided that if anyone ever watches us dealing with a normal hive that’s up on a hill, they will conclude that we are hunchbacked, as we’re getting used to working with the bees under a tree. With low-hanging branches. Yes, I’ve already clipped myself. Sigh.
 Finally got them all in. Not exactly to my satisfaction, but in. Lots buzzing around unhappily. Lots still in the boxes, left carefully by the tiny hive entrances (a reducer is put in place at the beginning so that the guard-bees don’t have as much territory to guard). Took Paul to dinner … the least I could do!
The girls arrived on a cloudy Saturday in May.
The directions I’d been given were to meet them at Bill’s Bog, route 124. Wow. Big help there for the GPS. Scared that I wouldn’t find them (I’m not terribly swift with directions), I convinced Paul to go with me. More on that later.
So there they were, 11,000 of them per box, and there were a lot of boxes. Some wonderful association member had driven all night from Georgia to bring them all north to us. He’s got enough good karma going for a very long time indeed.
One box per hive, so I picked up my two boxes. 22,000 bees. And not all of them, as Paul poitned out, quite inside the boxes.
I should digress a moment to mention that Paul is my best friend, my husband, my partner in myriad ventures, and deathly afraid of bees. He’s has two encounters with wild ones and they hadn’t made for happy memories. So now here he was, closed in our Volvo wagon with about 22,000 bees, none of them happy, all of them vocal about not being happy, and some random ones loose. He’s a very nice person, Paul.
Got them home and discovered that watching someone else introduce bees to their new hives and doing it oneself are two very different propositions! But for now all was well. They were alive and well, no-one had gotten stung, and all was temporarily right with the world
So it was a long winter. Bee School was once a month in West Barnstable—an hour’s drive each way for me, as I was coming from the Outer Cape (I would decide to live at the end of the world!)—and also a lot of information. Notes to be read over. Books to be purchased.
I ordered materials for two hives (a good choice for beginners, as hives often don’t produce honey the first year) and was astonished at the amount of materials brought one day in February by UPS. What wasn’t mentioned in school (or I conveniently forgot) was that the hives were far from pre-assembled. Oops.
Fortunately I have a good-natured family and one weekend when Paul’s teenaged kids were staying with me, we all pitched in and filled the house with boards and frames (which have to be carefully constructed, one at a time) and wax foundations, and the sound of hammering was heard in the land.
I painted them a discreet dark green (I do have neighbors, after all) and got them set up and ready. I felt like an expectant parent waiting for an overseas adoption to go through. (Well, the bees were coming from Georgia, which is practically another country!)
And the wait began …
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