Why do we steal

To get sweet stuff, Honey!

I pulled these honey frames out of my hives yesterday. Then crushed and strained them.
I'll bottle the honey once it has had a chance to separate from the wax. There is about a gallon of honey here.
I'm also trying to split my hives so that I can move a couple of hives to another location. When split into a new hive without a queen, the worker bees will select a young larvae and feed it royal jelly. 21 days later out pops a queen. There are plenty of drones, male bees, in my hives so I'm sure its time. Here is a photo of my new hive.

I dumped a bunch of bees from the other two hives into this one, its really stuffed full of bees, I'd say 4-5 lbs of bees. Some of the bees were returning to their old hives, but I'm sure there will still be plenty inside. There is also honey, pollen and freshly laid worker bee eggs.
While looking in the other hives I found the queen laying eggs on one of the combs, so I moved her to another frame and took the frame with the new eggs. I've been getting really good at spotting the queen. Last year I had some difficulty locating the queens in each of my hives (1 per hive), but this year it seems pretty easy.
While looking through the strong hive I saw a swarm cell. Swarm cells are built by the worker bees during the spring, usually. They are larger cells, generally located at the edges or bottom of the comb(s). This is where they typically raise another queen. Once the existing queen lays an egg into the queen cell. She (old queen) will depart with half of the worker bees to start a new bee colony somewhere else. Obviously I don't want to loose half a hive. So I will keep an eye on this cell and make another split if it looks like they are getting ready to depart.

Royalty

Its still too cold to start gardening, back and forth between snow, rain, and 60-70's. I've been following and identifying the local bloom watching what pollens the bees are bringing home to eat.
Its been warm enough to open the hives and check how things are progressing. I did this on March 16th. One hive is really strong, the other not so strong.This was apparent just watching the traffic at the front of the hives. My guess is that there was a 20:1 difference in traffic strong hive to weak hive. Upon opening the weaker hive it had a small population with the majority of the bees only 2 combs vs 8 combs in the more populous hive. I added a pollen patty to each hive at this time. Pollen is used by the nurse bees to make bee bread which they eat and feed to the larvae. Pollen patties are manufactured pollen substitutes. these help the bees build up their populations sooner especially when it is too cold to gather natural pollen.
I was shocked to see the difference in the two hives and with it getting dark I was worried that keeping the hives open for too long for fear of chilling the bees. The next warm day was Wednesday, March 19 so I took a long lunch from work and came home for a quick hive manipulation. I removed two combs from the populous top bar hive that had lots of emerging bees on each comb and transferred those into the weaker hive to boost their numbers. It when really well and things are picking up in the weaker hive. I did also see both queens. Here is a shot of one of them:

She's center right. Here is a close-up:

Most of the bees around her are really young. You can tell because their faces look fuzzier than the older bees. I think the older ones are the one that appears to be climbing over the queen and the one pointed up real close to the queen's tail.
Most of the others look like they have smaller eyes and more face fuzz.
The brownish comb that the queen is standing on is capped workers they are anywhere from 8 to 21 days after being laid as eggs. You can see in the above picture there aren't a lot of capped workers as evidence by all the open (uncapped) cells. The hive needs to keep plenty of bees to warm these capped bee (larvae), so with low numbers of emerged bees the queen will limit how many eggs she lays when the temperatures are still cold. This because when it gets cold the bees huddle together to stay warm. The colder it gets the tighter they huddle. If their cluster gets too small to cover some capped larvae, those larvae freeze. The other interesting fact is that this comb has no stored honey or pollen. There is plenty of honey in this hive towards the back, probably 50 lbs. When its cold the honey will freeze and the bees need to warm it up to move it from where it is frozen. This takes a lot of energy. The bees have been busy collecting water to help them liquefy their stored honey and make bee bread (pollen).
Here is a saucer that I fill with water for the bees to access. I'd rather they drink in my yard than on of my neighbors.

Both hives have plenty of honey. I expect the dandelions to be in full bloom within a month. The dandelions flowers are a great dependable source of nectar and pollen, that is followed by fruit trees weather permitting. Last year a late April deep freeze (17 degrees) killed all the fruit tree blossoms before they could open. So I made a judgement call that I could take some honey from the weaker hive (they still have plenty after my plunder). Here is what I helped myself to:

It was about a gallon after straining.
So here are some pictures of blooms from our neighborhood:

Lupine

Not sure what these are but this house has a nice fence row of them. It was too cold for the bees this day so I didn't see any of them out this morning (April 5th).
Here is a bar from the more populous hive. These raised cells, often called bullet shaped,  indicate that there are drone larvae (males) capped inside.

The drone's cells, approx 30 on the left, are larger diameter as well as dome capped. The orange colored cells in the center of this comb are filled, partially, with pollen. Both of these items, pollen and drones indicate that this hive is confident that they can make it through the spring till the next bloom. The drones don't do any work in the hive and if the hive, with a good laying queen, was struggling they wouldn't be raising drones. The weak hive had no drones being raised. That means that this stronger hive has a high probability of passing its genetic code, via the drones, to unmated queens in the neighborhood. There are many more drone cells in this hive, I would guess 200. I used this picture because the other pictures I took with drone cell had lots of bees covering the cells.
Here is a picture of the queen from the strong hive, center right:

The bees with their heads in the cells are feeding larvae. The older/larger larvae can be seen in the upper left of the image, they are curled. They will soon be capped by the workers, at which time those capped larvae will spin cocoons and pupate.
Here is a close up of the larvae:

And here are the eggs, they are at the edge of my vision and look like tiny grains of rice:

 Thats all for now. I'll find out what those flowers are and be back with more very soon!

Pollen Identification

It was a warm sunny day yesterday and the bees were bringing in lots of pollen. Can anyone help identify where this pollen comes from?

I would guess the pollen is from a tree blossom but not sure. The only trees that seem to be in bloom are the maples.





























I did see my first dandelion flower yesterday, but only one, here it is:

I also saw this crocus flower:

Here is the garlic I spoke of in my last post:

Early Pollen Source

I took a walk this evening just before dark and saw these maple blooms. In my last post I mentioned that I saw the bees bringing in pollen that I believed was from maple. Here is some more evidence. These pictures are from the same tree a few hundred feet from our house.

You can see the stamen (white) and anthers (yellow-brown tips). The pollen is found on the anthers

It is early March and it freezes every night. Yesterday we got a couple of inches of snow. This and the previous snow started as rain then changed to snow. It still accumulates and freezes hard over night. It is not uncommon for us to get very deep spring snows. Still not much gardening to be done.

I did see garlic poking through the soil yesterday to the right of the tomato baskets. So it will soon be time to get the early stuff planted!

First flowers of the year

We were out walking yesterday and spotted our first flowers of the year. After a few minutes of internet searching I discovered the its name. It is Erodium cicutarium, redstem filaree.
Thanks MU see link:University of Missouri Extension

I found several of these plants near our home. This picture was taken on February 22, 2014 in our neighborhood in Boulder County, Colorado. I saw many plants flowering in southern exposed undisturbed (weedy) soil (clay). We are having a normal winter with snow on the ground weekly, either from larger snows (+5 inches) that take several days to melt, or smaller (<2 inches) that melt the following 24 hrs.
I didn't see any honey bees on the flowers, although I did see many bees flying in and out of my hives. The temperature is low, for bees, at about 55F.











I believe this is pollen coming into the hive.

I think this is maple pollen. My wife says she saw bees on a maple tree in our neighborhood. Below is a picture of the flower buds. I didn't see any bees on this tree, nor did I see any open flower buds on this tree but there must be somewhere on the canopy or on other trees.

Here is a link to Wikipedia that I use to help identify individual pollens. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollen_source
Spring fever has officially started.

Winter Buzz

Wow, I was dumping some kitchen scraps into the compost pile and noticed some raiding.

They aren't really eating it just messing with the coffee grounds.

They are flying and bringing home what I'm guessing is propolis.

Otherwise they seem to be doing good. Both hives had bees flying in and out. The temperature was in the low 60's.
Its still too early to plant stuff outside but the warm days are a nice change to melt some of the snow.

Cure for Colds

We've all heard that garlic and honey are natural cures. Years ago a friend gave me a jar of honey that contained garlic cloves. The story that went with it was, 'when you feel a cold or sore throat on the way, eat a tablespoon of honey with a clove of garlic'.
So feeling great on a nice warm day, I decided to make a couple of jars of cure for a "rainy day".

Here is my work station. I started peeling the garlic by hand, the red plastic can is my compost pail. Even though its January the skins on the garlic are still cumbersome to remove. I remembered something I read about peeling garlic...

That's where the cardboard box and air compressor come into the picture.
I found it best to break the garlic bulbs into individual cloves. Then blast them with air. Then work the garlic skins by hand. Then go back to the compressed air. Then finally pick at the last bits of garlic peels that remained. I peeled about 6 bulbs this way pretty fast.
I cut the ends of the garlic and split the large cloves in half. The next step was adding honey.

Here's an expert tip: Do this step in the house where its warmer!
It actually wasn't that cold today. The sun was in and out of the clouds. I peeked at the outside of the bee hives. They were busy bringing home what looks like propolis.

This is what the finished product looks like. I'm sure it will keep away vampires and the not-sick people too.