Today was a busy day inspecting the hives. Our Twitchy hive swarmed again the other day (successfully this time) and we wanted peek in on our original hive to make sure they have plenty of room to expand and to give an initial inspection on our four new hives. Our first four inspection were done without using any smoke on the bees, they all went about their business and left us alone while we poked around in their homes.

This colony of bees was captured by Sandy from somewhere in Thousand Oaks. Right away their temperament was very gentle. When they were placed here in the orange grove they went to work right away cleaning out their new home and have settled in nicely. They’re at about five frames at the moment and we’ll look to add a second deep box in a few weeks.

This colony was living in a wooden fence in Woodland Hills behind an Apricot tree. We cut them out of there and placed them with their own comb into one of the dark stained deep boxes we had on hand. Our initial inspection of them this morning showed them fanning the hive in the sun. This was a sign that we really needed to swap them out of that dark box and into something lighter. They adapted nicely and were at about eight frames, so we knew we were going to add a new deep box.

We moved the existing hive into the work area and placed the new lighter hive where the original one was. We simply moved the ten frames, keeping their positions, right into the new deep. This was a quick task and we took a little time to inspect how they repaired their original cut comb. These two hives will bring us lots of orange blossom honey. It’s a wonderful urban location that has plenty of non-citrus to keep them busy all year.

These girls are from a swarm capture that Sandy did in Moorpark. They were quite busy and were working on about 7 frames in the initial deep box. This is about the right time to add a second box and we took care of that.

Two Twitchy is a split from the original mean Twitchy hive on April 5th after their failed swarm. We didn’t do much with these girls. We popped the lid to see that they were working in the upper deep brood box. This was a good sign. We’ll have to check back in a few weeks to check for brood.

This is our first hive. It’s a couple years old at this point and there have been a lot of dirty little feet on that porch. This inspection showed that there was brood as high as the 3rd box (lowest medium) and the fourth box had 9 frames of bees. We added a fifth box (3rd medium) to keep them growing. Over the next couple months we’ll have to manage this hive and take some honey in about a month. During the inspection we exposed a few of the pupa and before we collected our tools we saw the bees dispose of a couple of these chalk brood off the porch. That was fairly quick work. In this video clip at about 12 seconds the bees at the end of porch are dragging something away. This is the only hive we used a little bit of smoke on.

We didn’t take any honey today, but we will soon. This is a pretty fun hobby to share with Sandy.

It’s been an exciting few weeks with bee activity.

The past few days we have been watching a few scout bees go in and out of the swarm trap in the front yard. We keep looking at night to see if anyone has moved in but were disappointed. This afternoon we were outside and heard a hum that is indescribable — loud but not angry. The sky was black with bees. I placed my Mac outside of the hive box and recorded the swarm moving in. As more and more bees were arriving the weight of the trap caused it to fall not once but twice until it finally rested on the ground.

We moved the swarm from the trap into a hive tonight. Only 4 stings amongst the three of us.

When we opened the trap to move the bees into a deep, we were amazed at how many bees were there. The trap was more than half full when we started moving them in there they easily filled the 10 frame deep box. We added a second deep to contain the overflow of bees and topped it off with a hive top feeder full of sugar water.

We did this at night and had some problems with the bees crawling on us and finding their way inside the bee veils (all the little holes are taped).

We still have a few things to learn about transferring swarms from the traps into hives. We’ll have to watch @Kirkobeeo do this one day.

Here’s the clip from the swarm’s arrival.

The swarm is growing accustomed to the hive today. We’re feeding them with a hive top feeder.

Today there is a lot of bee activity around where the swarm trap was yesterday. This is probably from the bees that didn’t arrive yesterday, but we’re not sure. We’ve put out the swarm trap again and they’re collecting inside it as well as sucking down the honey that’s been placed there.

Can swarms arrive over two days?

Tonight we’ll move the swarm trap to the hive and reunite them. We’re guessing that we’ll simply open the swarm trap and leave it on the hive. The trap has a couple thousand more in it and we’d rather not repeat last nights excitement.

The Swarm

Sometime on March 7th or 8th our original hive swarmed. We were able to recapture the swarm and set it up in a new hive. Bees swarm for a reason, usually it’s because they’re our of space. There wasn’t a camera around for photos of this so I have nothing to show. The bees swarmed to a branch about 50 ft away from the hive, about 20 ft up. We moved these bees successfully into a new hive and it looks like they’re staying.

The Inspection

Since our original hive swarmed we were expecting a hive that was full, had no brood and some queen cells. This is exactly what we found. We pulled 7 frames of honey out of this hive and added a honey super to the top. There are now 30 frames.

The Harvest

Sweet, sweet honey!
35 lbs of golden honey.

For the record…

One theme that persisted throughout my photography are my photographs of bees. I’ve always liked seeing bees on the flowers and photographed them every time I had a camera in hand.

This year Sandy set me up with beekeeping gear for my birthday. I’m hooked. I admit it, I like playing with and observing the bees.

We now have hives in two locations, are registered with the county as beekeepers and members of the California State Beekeepers Association and looking for ways to provide for more bees.

There will be honey soon, the sweetest kind.

My Apiary and its new ant proof base. The bolts are covered with Tanglefoot to keep the ants out of the hive.