I spent last weekend in Virginia with my family, meeting my brand new niece, celebrating my brother in law’s graduation from law school, and giving my parents some much overdue face time with their 4 month old grandson, therefore justifying the 33 years they had to put up with me.
We went out for a celebratory graduation dinner and I spent a little bit of time talking the ear off of my sister’s-husbands'-mother (there’s got to be a better way to come up with a term for that) about bees, as she’s interested in getting some bees. I did what I always do when I get on the subject about something I am excited about, and Kelley isn’t close enough to give me the stage hook: I rambled incoherently, getting ahead of myself and probably made her lose interest in the endeavor entirely
So this is kind of a redo, where I stop trying to keep up with my brain and instead write down something organized. Teddy and I have had some late nights together in our first 2-3 months where there wasn’t much to do but drink milk, nap and watch youtube bee videos together, so I’ve definitely earned a degree from YouTube University.
I’m sure there are mean beekeepers out there, but I haven’t met one yet. There are many beekeeping organizations in your state, and if you want to give it a go, you’ll probably be able to find someone more than happy to mentor you. The most experienced and impressive beekeepers (from hobbyist up to commercial) I’ve watched on youtube speak very fondly of their mentors and the advice they got starting out. I am lucky to have a mentor who lives in the same town as me. She’s invited me over to help out with hive management, gives me good advice, and hasn’t given up on me when I try to do something crazy I saw on youtube.
Ultimately, getting into bee keeping means helping your colony(s) grow and survive through it’s first year so that it can grow to size large enough to harvest a spring honey crop the following year. There will always be a yearly attrition rate, losing over 25% of your colonies is not out of the ordinary, even for a professional beekeeper. Problems from winter weather, disease, varroa mites, and starvation can finish a colony, and these pressures can be exacerbated by things such as poor nutrition, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides.
But have no fear! Bees are a lot like us, and focus particularly on two things, stocking their pantry full of food, and reproduction. And they do these things particularly well! But before we can get around to harvesting their honey, we need to start a new colony, which means someone’s colony needs to reproduce.
Birds and the Bees
I think most people are aware in concept that the queen bee lays eggs at various rates throughout the year, at times over 1500 eggs a day. What is less clear, (at least it was less clear to me) is how does a hive start, or how does a queen bee come about? A bee colony is a super-organism, and reproduces as one. The colony creates male bees, drones to flood the surrounding area with their mother queen’s genetics. The colony will also create daughter queen bees to replace the hive’s current queen when it is time to swarm.
Swarming is the true reproduction of the hive. The queen, along with half of the hive will fly off in search of a new tree cavity to start a hive elsewhere. An overwintered colony, with adequate pollen and nectar stores, has been growing in size since the winter solstice, and will rapidly exceed the limits of their current hive. Sensing this, the hive creates larger queen cells which will allow a virgin daughter queen to hatch 16 days after the egg was laid. As soon as the queen cell is capped over, (allowing the queen larva to gestate and emerge as a fully developed bee) the queen and half the colony will leave the hive, swarming into a nearby tree, and begin searching for a new home.
The virgin queen hatches, reaches sexual maturity (6 days) goes out on a mating flight, returns, and begins laying eggs, boosting the hive back up to size in time for the late spring and fall nectar flows. The queen will mate once in her life, with up to 15 or more drones on her single flight away from the hive. Hive survival rate with a successful re-mateing is something like 75%. The virgin queen can get disoriented returning to the correct hive, eaten by predators, inclement weather, etc and never return, leaving a hopeless hive to die off, unable to requeen itself.
The original queen and her colony will fly to an acceptable new home, a tree cavity, the soffit of your roof with that hole you’ve been putting off fixing, or a swarm trap set out by a local beekeeper. Once the site has been established, the bees, which engorged themselves on honey stores before leaving the colony, will explode with wax secretion, creating comb to allow the queen to resume laying eggs, the generation that will start pulling in nectar for the honey that will allow them to survive the next winter. Colony survival rate upon leaving the original colony, is something like 20%.
I’m playing hard and fast with rates, but it’s pretty tough for a swarm in the wild. But they do survive. And propagate! See Seeley for additional information, he’s an extremely authoritative source on the subject of wild honey bees, particularly on swarms.
Starter Colony
So! How does this information get me honey? Well, you first need to start out with a brand new colony, and we use this swarm impulse to our advantage. Starting out, there are two ways to buy a hive, a nucleolus colony, called a “nuc”, or a “package” of 3lbs of bees. These small colonies will be used to fill out a full hive over the course of the spring and summer.
A beekeeper selling bees will take a queen cell and place it in a small 5 frame mating nuc. (A 5 frame nuc is basically half of a single hive box, more than enough to start a colony, but not large enough to harvest honey.) The queen cell will catch, fly out to mate, then start laying eggs. Now, with a mated queen, the beekeeper has 2 options for selling a colony: sell the entire nuc, or sell a package of 3lbs of bees in a box and the queen in a cage.
Buying a nuc gets you a hive that has accepted their queen, who is laying eggs and contains maturing brood that will hatch and multiply the size of the hive in short order... These benefits are a great head start, and also cost more money.
Buying a package mimics a swarm, with a mated queen and 10,000 worker bees desperate to start drawing comb to start a new generation of bees before they die, in as little as 3-4 weeks. The brood they hatch will continue the work to grow the colony in size. Unlike the relatively low survivability rate of a swarm in the wild, your helpful beekeeper has provided them with a box to call home, and a gallon or two of sugar syrup to stimulate growth and wax drawing.
Packages are cheaper, they don’t require the beekeeper to part with frames of fully drawn out foundation, wax comb that takes the bees awhile to make. The beekeeper simply puts a mated queen in a small cage for protection, and scrapes handfuls of young nurse bees into a box on a scale until it reads 3lbs, something like 10,000 bees. These newly hatched bees will survive the longest, which is important, as during the spring/summer some bees will only live for a little over 40 days.
So what am I supposed to do with this information?
Managing the swarm impulse is something you’ll be doing every year as a beekeeper. Believe it or not, losing half of your bees and a laying queen is not ideal if you are trying to harvest some spring honey. Your neighbors will also like you better if you aren’t blasting swarms of bees their way.
Swarming can be effectively managed in two ways, preemptively splitting the hive and moving the queen to a new box so that their swarm has been done for them, or combatting their swarm drive by adding additional boxes, allowing for them to realize they haven’t filled out enough of the hive to be able to move on to the next location.
I thought that learning all this stuff would prepare me for beekeeping, in the sense that I would know what to do when problems arise. I assure you that’s not the case! When installing my 2 nucs, I ran out of smoke for the second colony, and they were a little spicier than the first! I almost ran away! This is where a little guidance from an experienced mentor comes in handy. I consumed so much beekeeping material that Kelley doesn’t even want to hear about bees anymore…
All of this knowledge and preparation didn’t help me to prevent both of my nucs from requeening themselves within a month of hive installation. I don’t know if they swarmed, or if the queens were superceded or what. One day I looked at the hives and there were swarm cells. Sic transit gloria mundi.
That’s where a mentor comes in. Not only do they have good advice when you’re in the middle of your bee yard, they’ve got their own stories to cheer you up. You aren’t in charge, the bees are. And they’re doing what they were born to do.
In the middle of writing this, I went out and discovered that my second nuc colony, my “good” colony which had quadrupled in size, had swarmed on me. I was pretty down about that and pouted for a couple days. Texted my mentor for therapy. Today, I went out to the bee yards and inspected the 3 colonies I split from the first hive that swarmed; I had put a frame with a queen cell in each of the three boxes, hoping at least one of the three queens would go out, mate and return.
I found mated queens in all three colonies, and successfully laying, with fresh eggs and larva. I have now gone from 3 colonies, to 5 in less than 6 weeks. Highest of highs and lowest of lows, and probably more too come before I get any honey.
If you’ve read this far you know I can’t take any credit for my colony expansion, it’s just the bees doing what they do best. Honey Bees really are fascinating creatures. And taking up this hobby can get you a front row seat.
Lots of fun packed in just a month and a half, you’d be forgiven for thinking I’ve forgotten about boats, or baby boys for that matter. Next time we’ll get back to it!