Because of an early spring in 2012 (think spring in January . . .), most of the spring and warm season plants were bloomed out by the time Georgia Tech was ready to make honey.  But we thought we’d experiment, and see what they did.  So we bought a couple of supers with frames, painted the boxes, and put one on top of Georgia Tech.  We waited for a couple of weeks, then opened the top of the hive, and looked through the super.  There were lot’s of bees in the super, and as we inspected the frames, they seemed to say, “Thanks for the new living room space!”  But as we examined each of the frames in the girls’ new living room, we found nothing but bare foundation.  Not a bit of honeycomb.  What to do?

Then we remembered a bit of advice our bee mentor, Libby, had provided us earlier, and decided to try it.  Leaving the supers on top of the hive, we added a top feeder with sugar water on top, closed up the hive, and waited a couple of weeks.  We checked the top feeder on a daily basis, adding sugar was the girls eagerly drank it.  Over  the course of the next couple of weeks, Georgia Tech’s bees consumed ten gallons of sugar water!  At the end of the two week period, we opened up Georgia Tech again.  Behold!  We found ten frames with completely built out comb, packed full of nectar.   And many of the cells had already been capped, indicating that the bees had already completed the process of drying out the “sugar water nectar” to create “sugar water honey.”

Since we had a second super, we put it on top of the first, placed the top feeder, and continued to feed the girls for another couple of weeks.  When we went back in, we found two supers filled with capped comb, ready for us to harvest at our convenience.  But why do this when this was “honey” that we couldn’t sell, and that didn’t provide the good flavor of true honey made from nectar?  Well, there were three benefits:

• It encouraged the bees to build comb on the bare foundation of the supers, which enabled the girls to get started packing the super with nectar as soon as we put it on this spring instead of spending valuable time and resources building comb.
• While the “honey” they produced wasn’t suitable for sale or human use, it made a great fall feed to help the girls prepare for winter.
• It let us get some experience extracting “honey” in our first year of beekeeping with a little less stress, since we didn’t have to worry about bottling it for human consumption.

After over two months, with two boxes, Michigan’s population was still sparse, a sign of a weak queen. Bees should have been covering all of the frames.

Michigan had a different type of surprise.  As noted in my previous post, Michigan’s queen wasn’t so hot, so the worker bees revolted, and raised up their own queen, who replaced the old queen, and began laying eggs like there was no tomorrow.  Normally, when a queen is superceded by a new queen, the new queen kills the old queen, or the worker bees starve the old queen to death (and you thought all that nectar and honey made the bees too sweet for that sort of thing).  So when we found the new queen, and failed to spot the old queen, we assumed the old one was history.

But when we opened up Michigan again a couple of weeks later to see how the new queen and her subjects were doing, one of the first frames we inspected had the old queen on it!  What was going on?  Had the new queen fled the hive?  Unsure what to do, we continued going through the frames, and when we go to the bottom box, there on one of the middle frames was the new queen!  Now we were really puzzled.  We finished the inspection, noted the location of both queens on our home-made inspection form, and closed up the hive.  We went on the internet (how did I ever obtain information before the internet??), read through a number of reliable beekeeping websites, and found that, while not common, the bees will sometimes keep both mom and daughter queen around.  Why, no one seems to know.  Our theory is that the old queen had such weak pheromones that the daughter queen may not have been aware of her presence in the hive.

We have never been able to determine if mom queen bothers to lay eggs, any more, but we’ve always noticed that the worker bees keep her in an area of the hive away from her daughter.  We never find them together on the same frame, or even adjacent frames.

Our final experience with queens for the summer occurred at the end of the summer when we decided we weren’t willing to tolerate the feisty nature of Georgia Tech’s bees, and bought a queen from Jeff Ritchie of Morganton, NC.  Since queen bees aren’t “produced” in a production line mode, but require a lot of natural ingredients–including the weather and the bees themselves–we contacted Jeff ahead of time to reserve her, and he gave us an approximate date–several weeks later–for her availability.  Marianne drove all the way up to his bee farm in the mountains–a beautiful drive I hope to repeat with her the next time we need a queen.  Along with a couple of attendant bees, she was in a small cage typical of those used for shipping new queens, marked with a cheerfully bright yellow spot to indicate her year of birth.

While Marianne was gone, I opened up Georgia Tech, located the old queen, and placed the frame she was on into a small nucleus hive.  Some beekeepers will kill the old queen before they put the new queen in the hive.  However, I was advised to put the old queen in a separate box away from the hive in case the new queen didn’t survive for some reason (including rejection by the hive) . . . she was my insurance policy in the event of failure.

Bees cover the cage for the new queen. The sugar plug has been chewed out by the bees, and queen is already in the hive.

When Marianne came home, we put a couple of bent nails into the cage, and then hung it between a couple of frames.  The reason for doing this instead of taking the queen out of the cage, and putting her directly in the hive is that the worker bees need to smell her pheromone for a period time  before they will accept her.  The cage is equipped with a sugar plug at one end, which the bees chew through over a period of a few days.  Most of the time, the bees get used to her pheromones during those few days it takes them to chew through the plug, and by the time they can actually reach her, everyone’s one big (and I do mean BIG) happy family.

After waiting the recommended one week, we opened up Georgia Tech, and found the cage empty.  We removed the cage, put back in a frame we removed to accommodate the queen cage, and closed up Georgia Tech.

But what to do with the old queen?  Fortunately, our bee mentor, Libby, who raises queens, asked if she could have her to “practice handling queens.”  (The idea is to learn how to handle them without accidentally killing them.)  She came over with a little container to carry her home in, picked her up and put her in without incident, and took her home.

And so our first summer with the bees drew to a close, and it was time to begin preparing for winter.

More to come . . .

Ed