More Syrup...What Else is New?

Today, I added two fresh gallons of sugar syrup to each hive. They had drained it by Tuesday or so, but as I said in my last entry, I'm only going to fill the feeders once a week on Saturday or Sunday. For the record, I also added a large chunk of pollen patty to both hives.

It had been awhile since I had done a full inspection (below the honey supers) on either hive so I decided to take a top to bottom look at Georgia today. I had the intention of removing the honey supers and the top brood chamber so that I could start by checking out the bottom brood chamber first, as is recommended in some of the books. This way, you get the most defensive part of the hive out of the way early and they can start calming down as you check succeeding boxes. The idea being that you'll have fewer guards and foragers to contend with the higher up in the hive you are working.

It sounded reasonable to me except for one little hitch. The Georgia girls have shown themselves to be quite fond of propolizing everything to the maximum and building prodigious amounts of ladder/burr comb. When I tried to pry off the top honey super, it became clear that all of the frames were fastened tightly to the frames below. As I tried to lift, the second super wanted to come too. This meant I had to begin by removing each frame in the top super, one by one, and scrape wax that ran the length of each bottom bar. The girls had also added gobs of propolis to the ends of each top bar as well. Clearly, they had done their level best to ensure BeeKeeper Man could not invade their bustling little abode. Unfortunately for them, they don't know about hive tools and muscles of a size their small minds can't even begin to fathom! But even with these advantages, BeeKeeper Man had his work cut out for him. I scraped and scraped and the ground piled up with wax. Each frame was filled with beautiful capped honey and a couple contained a fair amount of capped brood too. Supers filled with honey are surprisingly heavy, even with the shallows I have on the hives. I'd estimate them to weigh around 30 lbs. or so.

(I'm using shallow supers not out of choice but because they were given to me, along with a whole stack of shallow foundation, by a friend. My preference would've been to use mediums, but why spend the money if you don't have to, right? I have a total of five, ten-frame supers and enough foundation to build five more. The bees have already drawn and filled four of these and I had prepared the fifth to put on Georgia today. But I'll get to that shortly.)

I had been into the honey supers before and so I wasn't surprised to see twenty frames of capped honey in them. The girls were close to achieving that goal the last time I looked. It is tempting to grab some of it now but I'm guessing it was made largely from the sugar syrup I've been feeding them, so it probably wouldn't be anything to write home about. Another reason for not taking it is that I've pretty much decided to leave all the honey for them this year. The better to ensure their survival through the winter. The question I have is how to manage all of these excess stores. The battle plan was to have the bees draw out the comb, fill it with honey and then place an inner cover between the supers and the brood chambers below. This would make the bees retrieve the honey from the supers and move it down into the lower boxes, leaving you with nicely cleaned out frames for the harvest next spring. But I don't know where the bees would put it. Please continue reading to see what I mean...

On checking the first brood box, I found the outside frames heavy with completely capped off honey. As I worked towards the center, I found the queen and lots of capped brood, eggs and larvae. She still appears vigorous and healthy and was easy to spot in the multitudes with her big blue spot. The brood pattern appeared to be a little more spotty than her usual, but there was plenty of it, so I'm not too worried about it. The bottom box had two outside frames full of honey, just like the box above it. Interestingly, as I moved towards the center, I encountered vast fields of cells full of nectar, upper corners full of honey but almost no brood. I was getting a little concerned until I hit the middle of the box. Frames five through nine were packed with capped brood, eggs and larvae. So the queen has been laying prodigiously from the bottom of the hive to the top. Some girl, that queen, but as you can see, I have no idea where they would put all the honey they have hoarded in the honey supers if I were to encourage them to bring it downstairs. Must ask Pat about this...

As I reassembled the hive, I inserted my fifth honey super with the new foundation under the existing supers, giving Georgia three total. When they fill that one, I can almost picture them setting up a little hiveside stand to sell honey to bee passersby. Wouldn't that be great? Little bee entreprenuers. I'm sorry, the smoke probably got to me. I mean, we all know they would kill 10,000 bees and lose 10,000 of their own before they would give up a mouthful of excess honey to a bee outside their hive tribe. Hard wiring doesn't allow for deviation from the script, my friends. And why in the world would we wish on them a human characteristic like that anyway? Before you know it, there would be Bee monopolies, multinationals with watered-down honey, queens having whole supers to themselves while other bees were forced to live on a mere cell or two. Fortunately for them, they have no capacity to listen to anything we might have to say.

Friday, while trying to replenish their water in the Boardman Feeders a bee who couldn't tell my pants leg from a hive entrance managed to crawl, undetected nearly to my crotch before panicking and giving me the ol' honeybee jab. As I grabbed at my inner thigh, she came tumbling out of my shorts onto the porch floor and trust me, she was doing far worse than I at that moment. She did boost the tally though...

Sting total...14.