We picked up two nucs early this morning, from a bee farm half an hour away.  Nucs are nucleus hives; a box with fully established frames, including a queen, workers, some honey stores, and brood growing.

In this case, the nucs were in cardboard boxes, each with five frames.

Here’s Jenn transferring the frames from the first nuc box to their new home, the orange hive (named for the base color). The hive box has three extra frames for them to expand into, for a total of eight:

The bees were not in a good mood, probably due to being shaken around on the journey, and the liquid smoke wasn’t working. One stung Jenn on the side of her hand through the thin gloves she was wearing.

Here’s the new hive installed, with a sugar syrup feeder, and a pollen patty inside. The nuc box was left in front, so the bees remaining in there can find the hive:

Jenn put on thicker gloves and fired up the smoker for the second nuc. Here she’s looking at a frame while transferring it into the hive:

Another frame, in a cloud of smoke:

The second hive was easier; the smoke really helps. Here Jenn tipped out most of the remaining bees from the box:

Both hives (all four, actually) have a pollen patty to help feed the bees:

The new orange and purple hives:

All four hives:

Yesterday we did another beehive inspection and mite treatment.

Here’s the yellow hive pulled apart to inspect and treat the bottom brood box:

A bunch of bees on top of some frames:

Jenn inspecting a frame:

A closer look at at that frame, which has lots of capped honey on the sides, and uncapped honey in the middle:

Inspecting another frame, with a practice queen cup aka swarm cell visible hanging off the bottom. If the bees ran out of room, they’d use these to grow a new queen, and the old queen would take half of the bees and go find somewhere else to live, aka swarming. The bees make these as an insurance policy when things are going well, so isn’t usually anything to worry about:

We did see the queens for both hives, which was gratifying. Though I didn’t get good pictures of either.

A bunch of bees on the edge of a frame:

Inspecting a frame with a lot of drone brood (the lumpy cells):

And a frame with worker brood (the flatter cells):

A closer look at bees on a frame:

Smoke across the top to get the bees to go down, so we can add another box without squashing them:

We added a queen excluder and the Flow super, to start collecting some honey.  It’ll probably take them a while to start up there, since they have space below, but it’s good to make sure they have plenty of room when there is good nectar flow:

Bee closeup:

Another closeup; you can clearly see the pollen sacs:

On Sunday we did an inspection and treatment of the beehives.

Here Jenn is pulling out a frame from the yellow beehive; notice the white rack that holds a frame, to make space to pull others out more easily:

We checked for mites via a sugar shake test, where powdered sugar is added to a jar of bees, shaken, water added, then mites counted:

The bees are unharmed by this; they are returned to the hive, where others will clean them off (tasty sugar!):

Adding an oxalic acid sugar water mix, that should kill mites without harming the bees:

A frame with some honey on the left, and capped brood (baby bees) on the right:

Lots of honey (or sugar water from the feeder):

A couple of hive boxes; the bees had very little activity in the bottom box, so we swapped them; they tend to want to move upwards, so would continue to ignore the bottom box if left there:

Some closeups of bees:

We spotted the queen in the Flow hive; I’ve circled her here:

A classic beehive frame, with capped brood in the center:

A bunch of bees hanging out at the entrance:

The Flow beehive:

The yellow beehive:

We did a beehive inspection today.

Smoker:

The yellow hive is still looking great, with lots of honey stored for the winter:

The Flow hive is also doing well, with a decent amount of stored honey:

I mentioned in my previous bee blog post that we were concerned about the purple hive; that it seemed like it had collapsed.

Well, that’s been confirmed. There were no bees, and all the frames had been robbed, i.e. all the honey scavenged by other bees and wasps, leaving just empty wax cells:

We removed the two dead hives:

Disappointing, especially since the purple hive was doing so well earlier.

We’ll replace the frames and get a couple more nucs to replace the bees next year, and try again.

We did the last varroa mite treatments today, following up from last week.

This hive (which we might call the yellow hive, after its base) is doing really well:

A bunch of bees on top of the frames in the Flow hive, which has recovered impressively from its earlier swarm:

The purple hive, however, is causing us much concern. It was doing really well, our strongest hive, but seems to have collapsed; there are now hardly any bees, no sign of a queen, lots of brood cells that look dead, and wasps stealing from it:

The top box was pretty much empty, so we decided to remove it, so the surviving bees can consolidate in one box:

It’s quite possible that the purple hive won’t survive the winter. They do have a bunch of honey stored, possibly enough for the reduced number of bees, so if they can make a new queen (if it has in fact lost its queen), they could rebuild. But we didn’t see any queen cells, so aren’t sure what’s going on. We’ll keep a close eye on it.