Not a good week in the bee yard
I learned the hard way that even though the mite treatment said I shouldn't open the hive for two weeks after starting it, in Florida, in the late spring, you cannot go that long without looking. The nectar flow was strong this year and the bees were productive. Had I noticed it before it became honeybound I may have been able to control it. Expensive lesson.
As I mentioned in my previous post, my hive had become honeybound, so I added a new box and frames to try to give the queen someplace to lay eggs. It appears that I didn't get it right and my hive may have swarmed. When inspecting today I found only scattered/shotgun capped brood, and no eggs or larvae. There were a few queen cups but they were empty and with no eggs or larvae, so the bees don't have anything to work with to make a new queen, therefore, I'm going to have to buy one (bleh), she'll be here on Tuesday, unless the local lady I originally bought my bees from has a spare queen, then it'll be sooner.
Introducing a new queen is fairly easy. She'll come in a cage similar to this:
I ended up buying a honey extractor and the associated equipment, buckets, uncapping knife, honey storage container (long term), etc. I had to build a platform for the extractor, because when it spins and the weight of the frames is unbalanced (because the bees don't care about how heavy the frames are), it will walk like your washer when you have all the sheets on one side of the drum. They sell springs that go on the legs, but they were around $100. I had some plywood and I bought some nice lockable wheels for less than $25, and put them together based on some videos I'd seen online. I put some bolts where the legs go on the platform to mount it and voila, worked like a champ. Based on Newton's third law, where for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction, when the extractor wants to move one way, the wheels move in the opposite direction and keeps the whole thing relatively steady. I just have to place a foot gently on the platform to keep it from walking away. Unfortunately, this honey is only good for the bees, but I did get around 2 gallons, so I'll have plenty to feed the bees over the winter if they need it. I also froze half a dozen mostly full frames for later as well. If the bees don't need them I'll probably just thaw them out, extract the tainted honey and discard it :(.
I've condensed the boxes again to account for the swarm, the extra wooden box has been completely removed and the frames are temporarily in the new long hive that I finally got placed in the bee yard yesterday. I took the nice clean drawn out frame from when I extracted the honey and put them in the brood box. I also placed an escape board between the two remaining boxes, that will force the bees out of the top box so they can draw out the brood box again for the new queen. The escape board looks like this:
The bees crawl thru the hole in the top of the board because that's the only way to the hive entrance/exit, they can get out of the gray device on the bottom of the board, but not back the other way, so eventually, all the bees will be in the brood box again and I can remove the top box and we can start over.
But as I mentioned earlier, one of my young neighbors helped me get the new long hive (it's super heavy) out behind the fence and I spent this morning getting it level. After that I inspected the original hive. Working bees in Florida in the summer is a whole new level of hot. Even with the ventilated bee suit after 15 minutes, working in the shade, I was literally drenched from head to toe in sweat. I actually poured sweat out of my boots. I also need to get some good sweat bands for my forehead, to keep the sweat from running down my glasses. Re-hydration is the order of the rest of the day.
I'll let you all know how the new queen works out.
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