Moving On

I was at a vintage trailer rally in Ojai, CA this past weekend and found this in a thrift store.  These are labels from Biggers Bees, an apiary run by George Biggers in the 60's and 70's.  He appeared many times on TV showing off his bee beard and was a favorite of Ripley's Believe It or Not.

Last week I thought I had sealed off the hive from ants.  I returned yesterday to discover they had crossed the moat on debris in the water and found the single tiny break in the band of Tanglefoot.  Since this will be a continuing problem with honey left in the combs, I decided to clean out the hive.  I removed all the comb and all the ants I could find after I had fixed barrier problem.  I put the hive back together and put out the Space Available sign.  Maybe someone will move in now with the ants gone and no wax moth damage to fix.

This is the first batch of comb, my wax melter is not that big.  It will be a long job.  The honey still in the comb is not capped so I do not plan on trying to salvage it.  I shall see if I can adapt the solar cooker I have to increase the amount of wax I can process.  This method works but will be painfully slow give the amount of comb it can hold.

There are some of the queen cells I removed.  The one on the left had two queens,  Most located on the bottom of the frames but a couple were mid frame

Once this was done I took a chance, wearing only the hood, I popped the lid off the twitchy bees and added another super to that hive.  It is now five high and I surely do not want these girls to swarm.  I had the top off for less than three minutes but I still had a couple guard bees come by and yell at me.  No stings and I retreated as soon as the top was back on.  

Odds and Ants

After the small honey harvest last month I have not been messing with the bees much.  Shorty after the honey day I left town for a couple of weeks.  When I left things were in good order except the bees were ignoring my newly planted Russian Sage.

When I picked it up in the nursery all of the plants were covered in bees.  I have not see a single bee on it at my place.  After looking closely it is apparent it was all a matter of bad timing.  The blossoms are empty and drying up.  It may be the season or the result of transplanting but the bees will get their reward in the next bloom cycle.

This has not been a normal So Cal summer.  It has rarely gotten hot.  In my area, three miles from the coast there is always an ocean breeze and it rarely gets over 85 but for now we have rarely been over 74 and this is August, the start of our hot season.   With the cooler weather I had not seen much evidence of ants this year.  When I got back home lifted the cover of the Playa Vista hive and checked to see if they needed another super.

Oops, the ants were  back.  I put the lid back on and got suited up.  I used the bee brush and kept pushing them off of the frames and sides of the hive.  When there were fewer bees I started to add water to the turkey pans under the hives, something I should have done months ago.

Yes, those are bee bodies in the pile.  Not to worry.  Both hives seem to have used the pans as covenient ossuaries to collect all the dead bees from the hives.  They are not recent deaths but from over the entire winter.   I scraped the majority of them out so they would not provide a bridge for the ants to the hive.

The larger Twitchy Bee hive had only a few bees evident on the hive exterior and none on the top super frames.  I topped off the water in the pans on both hives.  I could have applied more Tanglefoot which would have corrected things but given my hive positions that would have meant lifting and moving both hives.   The water will work just fine for now and I will keep it topped off for the summer.  There is one problem I have to work out.  Most days I find several bees drowning in the water which may be unavoidable for now. 

Over the last couple of days I have lifted the lid on the Playa bees and brushed away more ants but their numbers are lessening.  I will go in next week and clean more out but Ii can see it is working, there seems to be much more bee activity in the top super than there was before.  I may be adding another super quicker than I planned but it is ready with frames and wax starter strips all set up.