Part Four: Ask Experienced Beekeepers Questions, Get Helpful Answers

It’s really exciting (and scary) that the population in our hive is growing every single day! It is a learning curve to get used to the unique ways that bees fill their frames and to get over our fear of accidentally squishing bees during a hive inspection. We read a lot this month, which made us increasingly worried about diseases and issues our hive might have. But asking other beekeepers at Betterbee questions helped alleviate these fears. Following are a few questions asked and the answers received.

How long should we keep feeding 1:1 sugar syrup to our package of bees?

As the weather gets hotter, we can’t help but feel bad for cutting off any ventilation with our hive-top feeder. Because we introduced our package of bees to heavy-waxed medium frames, and each new box has 10 more frames that need to be drawn out, most everyone I asked recommended continuing feeding through the third brood box. Two months in, we just added our third box, and continue to feed. The bees are still sucking it down, and are not storing it all (as we originally feared), so we’re going to continue feeding for the next couple of weeks. After that, we’ll remove the feeder and give them a bit more ventilation to work with during the hottest months of the year in the northeast.

Update: A week after adding the third box, we did a hive inspection and noticed sugar syrup mixed in with nectar stores, along with an almost fully drawn out third box (after a week?!), so we removed the feeder. They're on their own now until fall!

How do you get the bees to draw out the two outside frames? Do you move them to the center of the box?

It’s well known that bees favor the frames in the center of the boxes over the frames near the outer edges. They also tend to build upward instead of outward, if there is space above. To get them to draw out comb on all frames, Betterbee partner, Neal Kober, recommended that we shift the outer frames inward one notch, so #1 would switch with the #2 slot and #10 would switch with the #9 slot. It’s also okay to flip the frame if one side is a little drawn and the other is completely undrawn. So, this is what we did with our first two boxes. Three days later, when we went in to grab a couple frames of brood and move them up into our newly-added third box, our bees had already fully drawn out the frames moved in a slot.

What do you do when you have 2+ boxes and find the queen in the top box? How do you keep her safe when removing the box to inspect the others?

I’m beyond freaked out that I’ll squish Kha-bee-si, or she’ll fly away, and send our hive into complete disarray, so when we saw her in the top box in early June, we finished our inspection and closed the hive up, worried about hurting her to inspect the bottom box. However, I learned that the queen is too weighted down to fly, so setting her and the box she’s in on the edges of an overturned outer cover at a slight diagonal is the best way to handle the situation. You can also put a corrugated piece of plastic, like a political sign, on top of the box. This will help prevent her from getting smushed or knocked onto the ground. You can then proceed to inspect the box(es) below.

What is European Foulbrood (EFB) and how do I recognize it in my hive?

So, this is one example of my reading a little too much and getting paranoid. Cornell’s Dyce Lab for Honey Bee Studies performed random hive inspections throughout New York state and found EFB in 13 of the first 18 yards they inspected. Here’s the great, short video they shared to pinpoint whether your colony is affected. When we opened our hive to “just be sure” no funny EFB business was taking place under our roof, we had to scrape off some burr comb and rogue drone cells on the bottom of a frame. “It’s really goopy! Is that EFB?!” We both stared at each other in shock. But this is normal! The larva was not yellowy, there were no small holes in the capped brood, and the "goop" in the cell with the small larva was just the brood food fed by the nurse bees mixed with the protective sack around the larva.

Why do I have two frames chock full of pollen?

This was interesting to see. In the bottom box, we lifted out two full, heavy frames of solid pollen. The bees even started storing it in cells that previously housed brood. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but learned that they are thinking ahead (perhaps far, far ahead!). They could be prepping to feed brood in January! They add pollen, put in a layer of saliva/nectar, add a different kind of pollen, and allow the whole mixture to ferment into what is affectionately known as “bee bread.” These bee bread stores can be used to feed larva any time of the year.

This month, we spotted our first Varroa destructor mite on our screened bottom board’s mite monitoring tray. So it begins… next on the to-do list is to start doing sugar rolls to establish mite trend data for the hive.

A Year in the Life of a Beginner Beekeeper Series

Part One: Tackle Your Fear by Experiencing the Wonder of the Honey Bee
Part Two: Plan and Prepare for Your Bees
Part Three: First Hive Inspection
Part Five: The Beekeeping Journey has Many Twists and Turns, Surprises and Regrets
Part Six: Newspaper Combining, Drone Culling, and Honey Harvesting, Oh My!
Part Seven: Preparing for Winter 
Part Eight: Lessons in Mites and Moisture
Part Nine: The End of a Decade, The Beginning of Something New
Part Ten: Winter Feeding & a Heart-Wrenching Loss
Part Eleven: Eagerly Awaiting Spring
Part Twelve: Exiting Winter Isolation & Kicking Off Mite Management