Tough Bee Removals

I received a refresher course on how difficult some bee removals can be the other night. For this job, I did not get pictures sent to me and just offered a worst case sort of estimate. Turns out I bid low. 

I showed up on the job to find a home overgrown with vegetation from years of no care. Waste high weeds in the yard were covered in stickers, which didn't mix well with my shorts and tee shirt. After locating the bees, in a vegetation restricted area, I thought maybe it would be easier to work from the inside. So I attempted to go in. The code for the lock on the door wouldn't work, but with permission I was able to break the doorknob off, only to find a house ridden with trash, and to find that the inside of the area where the bees were had wall mounted cabinets, so working from inside wasn't an option. 

Back outside I fought my way through the vegetation and set up to work. I pulled down the soffit to expose a large colony that had been there at least two years. As I started working, I found honey combs pulled up out of the soffit and into the attic. I kept going, vac'ing bees and cleaning up honey. Then I found the combs started going down inside the wall as well. And on the other end of the nest, went so high in the attic that I could not reach them from the outside, which meant I had to crawl up in the attic to get to all of it. I did this, and glad for it, as I found also large clumps of bees hiding up there as well.

In the end, the job took ~6 hrs, 7 counting drive time. The only real saving grace is that the bees were mostly pretty nice and I was able to work without my suit on the whole time. I never did rig up my lights, but just used my headlamp on red or green light to see but keep the bees from flying at my face. 

I'm sure happy that job is done, but have another to tackle tonight. The homeowner already warned me "they've been there a long time" so we shall see how this goes....

Activity Update

The grafting/splitting effort is just about wrapped up. I'm more or less committed that I won't fool with it anymore. I seem to have far better luck just letting the bees pull their own queen cells and then moving them on a frame. Seems like about half the splits I do end up rejecting the virgin queens so I end up with emergency cells anyway. I think in the future I'll just make splits as I see fit and let them pull emergency queens. I can then cull out smaller queen cells to get a bigger/better queen. Sure it means setting a colony back for a week or two without a queen, but in the end I think it will be the better method for me. 

In other news, I've been pretty busy with bee removals lately. I've been averaging 2 per week, in addition to all my crazy busy lifestyle at home and at the farm. 

Dead Queens

Well it turns out that I did scavenge one more queen who was a late bloomer, emerging out of her cell at least a day late. Prior to this however, I had cage the other 3-4 live virgins that I had and transferred them to a new colony for holding until I sorted through the splits to find where to go with them. Unfortunately, I placed them for holding in a nuc that had a mated queen. As a result, the virgins were neglected by the nurse bees, and left to starve. I lost 3, all starved to death. With any hope, the one remaining that was alive yesterday evening will still be kicking this evening and I can find a suitable home for her.

The splits in general have not gone as well as I hoped. Seems I do this every year. I get behind, graft late, split late, and in my hurry make the same stupid mistake. Successful splits and grafting is very time sensitive. Perhaps more than veteran beekeepers put on. If I had more time, I'd be grafting every week so I constantly had a supply of virgin queens coming available just in case I needed them. Of course the simpler option is just to constantly have at least one hive queenless so you have a steady supply of queen cells. If this is the plan, I'd recommend an inventory of about 8-10 nucs used for this purpose. That way you aren't always subjecting the same hive to being queenless. And, the one that is queenless can always be subsidized with a frame of capped brood from here and there to keep it's population up. 

Oh the things I would do with more time... :)

Grafting Results

1 day after all my queen cells should have emerged, I checked the results. The caged virgin from 2 days ago was still alive and well in her cage. I had 5 more that had emerged safely, and 4 that did not. I opened one and found a more or less rotting larva, so no surprise. But the second I peeled open looked like a queen that could have emerged the next day. They should not be this far behind, but who knows, so I placed them back in the colony. If the virgins are not out today, I will discard the cells. 

The mated queen that was caged in the finisher colony was released two days ago when I caged the queen cells. She was out and about looking good, and had already laid up almost an entire frame in eggs. 

So as it stands currently, I have 6 virgin queens to make splits with. And only 5 to place, as I already have one queenless split made up. I hope to make the splits and allocate all the virgins this evening. 

End results, out of 20 grafts made, 17 of them stayed on the frame (other JZBZ cell cups fell out of the slot). 10 cells were raised and fed, and 6 emerged. Overall just a hair over 25% success. That's pretty crappy in my book, considering I've had near 100% success in the past with a 30+ graft. Of course that was way more queens than I needed back then, so most went to waste. But for now it's OK. I think a half dozen splits is about all I can make anyway, so I'm content. 

Grafting Queens/Fall Splits

Lately I've been in the process of raising queens for fall splits. I'm a bit late I'm afraid, even for southern bees since our fall pollen flow is on. But hopefully with sufficient feeding I'll keep them cranking all winter. 

The new queen cells were caged on Tuesday prior to emerging. Upon opening the hive Tuesday, I found one virgin already out, and she had ripped open another cell and likely killed the queen inside. This killer virgin was out roaming around, so I caught and caged her too. 

I'll check the rest of the cells this evening to see who all emerged and hopefully make a few splits. My goal is to split as many of my big colonies back as I can to carry mostly 5 frame nucs through the winter. Last year I was overly ambitious and it got the better of me. So I'm trying to be a bit more conservative this year, and only splitting a few, and splitting them with LOTS of bees and live queens to help the acceptance.