Honey in year two? A list of all the things that went wrong

I'm hoping I can harvest some honey this summer but I'm not sure what I'll end up with.  Here are the issues I have run into this season.

• Started out with good hive that wintered over - that was very encouraging...but that didn't last

• In early May, I tried to split off a new hive by grabbing brood, bees and honey from last year's hive and start a nuc

• A cold spell, that lasted at least a week killed all the bees in the new nuc I started

• Then I realized the queen died in last year's hive 

• I bought a new queen, put it in the hive in its little cage that it and the other bees were supposed to eat the candy plug so the queen could get out.  You give it 5 days to do this.  I checked in 5 days and the queen was dead.

•  I bought a new nuc with a queen to start another hive...still on my quest to  grow my business

• By this time, it was June and the rains started.  It rained practically the entire month of June.

• I was advised to merge the nuc with the old hive to try to get a good strong hive.  I did this and it worked. 

• However, I was told to add the queen excluder which I left on until early August.  Then I read that adding the queen excluder would reduce the amount of honey you get.

• Queen excluder came off and I started feeding the bees sugar water, something I did last year but didn't do this year. Not sure if it'll help with honey production but it will feed the bees and hopefully help them get through the winter.

•  I have people clamoring for my  honey...but last year's reserves are almost gone and am not sure what I'll get this year.

• I did say that this blog would tell my bee story...good or bad.  I'd say that this was a real learning year...and most likely a lean one.

Blogger a bit too busy to blog

This has been a busy summer so far and I expect it will continue to be the same until it's over and beyond.  Readers who have been with me for a while saw that last summer was what I think of as a "building year". I spent a lot of time digging out paths and covering with landscape fabric and wood chips, building my $40 patio, described in a few of my earlier posts, and of course starting my beehive.

This year is being spent maintaining!  And this year, I am needing to maintain two homes and a school garden.  Sadly, I need to spend several hours to get the school garden in shape for September.  I've gotten there about as often as I can, given the other maintenance that I've been doing but still feel like it's my orphan garden. The maintenance I'm speaking of has mostly been in gardens although I've spent time getting my Maine house back in shape and getting tasks done that it needed. 

My Maine home, rented the last few years, became vacant at the end of June.  That is two years of virtually no garden work occurring so I have spent time each weekend bringing those gardens back.  I also had the front porch refinished and trim painted so that it looks inviting again.  I'll snap some photos next weekend.

I bought this house in 2004 and it had no landscaping at all except for a few piddly shrubs.  It had an above ground pool there which I had taken out when I bought it.  That left me with this big bare grass-free circle area in the back yard.  I turned that into a pond and garden. Here is the back yard the next year where I used two existing trellis's and a board to make an archway, put a few chairs there and a birdbath and a few shrubs and called it a patio.

Back yard, year 2005

Back yard, year 2007

A few years later, the area looked like what you see above.  The pond is about 8' in diameter and about 3-4 feet deep, which I dug myself.  I had a load of field stone delivered because southern Maine, in my area, is all sand so it's easy digging. I used the field stone to trim the pond and get somewhat of a path from the side door down to the pond.  The path was never finished though.  I ran out of field stone and just never got around to it. Then I got some pea stone to make a walkway around the pond and added the outer plantings.  So there are plantings around the pond, a path and then more plantings.

Back yard August 2013 --  slightly tilted shot...not the garden's fault

This weekend, I will take another photo from the same spot so that you can see how things have matured in this section of the yard.  It really looks like I imagined it would as I was building it, forming a little private retreat in the midst of nature.  With the addition of a little waterfal to the pond, it's so peaceful to sit and watch nature all around. It's a lovely spot.  A glass of wine; a plate of cheese...frogs croaking, bees humming, butterflies circling...what could be better?

Today's mushroom find - Polyporus umbellatus

Like I said at the start, this blog would end up being about  more than beekeeping.  I also have an interest in foraging and one item I love to forage is mushrooms.

I knew chanterelles were out because I picked a basket full last week in Southern Maine.  I have a few spots here in Southeastern Vermont too so I decided to take a walk and find some more.  I did find them in  my usual spots and also in one new spot so I grabbed them.  Most were a bit too old...they should have been picked several days ago. But they were still good enough to cook up and so that's what I did with them.  Then I froze them.

I've tried to dry chanterelles in the past but they get tough and chewy so I now will cook them in olive oil with a bit of butter until done...then freeze them. They are delicious after thawing and using.

But today's big find was this Polyporus umbellatus that I found on a slope in leaf debris and surrounded by various deciduous trees.  It looked like a Maitke but I knew it wasn't because of some various differences, including timing.  Maitke come in September, not early July.  Each leaflet looks like a little trumpet.  I guess someone else thought they looked like little umbrellas, hence the name.

 

The top mushrooms were perfect.  Towards the stem at the bottom, I could see insect damage.  But the top little "umbrellas" were clean and white and so I chopped them up and sauteed them in olive oil with a bit of butter for flavor.  Another delicious  mushroom...one I'd never found nor eaten. 

A Wiki entry says that these mushrooms have "Polyporus umbellatus may contain bioactive compounds with immunostimulating, anticancer, anti-inflammatory, and hepatoprotective properties".

No one should ever eat a mushroom based on this blog.  Any mushroom you eat should be researched in depth to make sure that it's not poisonous.  If you haven't learned about mushrooms from experts, you should not ever try to eat them.  BE WARNED and HEED THIS WARNING.

Back to beekeeping 101 and one hive

In beekeeping, I am learning that one needs to be patient. Earlier this spring, I tried to create a new hive by taking 5 frames (loaded with bees, pollen and honey) and creating a Nuc.  Since then, I have talked about how this failed for many reasons.  The main reason is that I tried to rush things.  It was too early in the spring to do this.  We had had some very warm weather early in the spring and I thought it would stay that way.  How many years have I lived in New England?  Most of my life and I'm no spring chicken.  How is it that I can still be fooled by some warm days in early May?  Well, I was fooled and I believe the bees in the newly created Nuc all died or went to find someplace warmer, except for the few who were in the Nuc when I picked it up to bring it home. 

I tried to get ahead of myself and the outcome was that I got nowhere. Because the hive...last year's hive...was impacted as a result of taking 5 frames from it.  In retrospect, I think I may have put the queen in the Nuc because the next thing to happen is that last year's hive (#1) did not thrive after that.  It got so dismal that I wanted to go buy a new queen and tried.

But a Charles Andros up in Walpole, NH, who I contacted to buy a queen, called me to find out what was going on with my hives...I had a new Nuc I bought that was thriving, and my #1 hive that was not.  His suggestion was to combine the hives.  He said he didn't want to sell me a queen because that probably wouldn't have fixed the problem with hive #1. I probably didn't have enough brood there for the hive to survive and of course, it had no queen either.  Doomed.  I loved it that he wasn't trying to sell me something.  He was trying to help.  And his suggestion appears to have worked.  Here's what I did, from the bottom:

Bottom board
deep hive (from #1)
deep hive (mostly #2)
queen excluder (so queen stays below making babies)
Super (for honey production)
Top Hive feeder (which I should not have put on there so I must take it off today...apparently shouldn't use feeder if there is a super on the hive)
Top Cover

I've been watching the hive and it seems back to normal, with bees loaded with pollen coming into the hive regularly.  Later this summer, hopefully, I will try splitting my hive again so that I can have two hives... early enough for them to move from a Nuc to a hive before the cold weather arrives. If that doesn't work, I will wait until next spring or early summer to make a Nuc...I will be patient; I will be patient; I will be patient......maybe next time I'll remember how the weather is in New England.

In retrospect - the early spring nuc was too early

I am looking back at my posts and see that I tried to make a Nuc way too early.  Early May is not a good time to do it.  I should have waited until mid-summer when the hive was strong...then do it. But I was over anxious and I think I have caused some of these issues I'm having due to being impatient!

I knew beekeeping wouldn't always be easy

The saga of my bees....or lack thereof!

Hive #2 continues to flourish.  In fact, I think that when I can get into the hive again, I may add a super because they are running out of space in that deep hive. But I may not need to with what I hope is the solution to Hive #1's issues.

Hive #1 is still struggling.  All week I have been thinking, reading and having conversations about what my next steps are for #1. One person I talked with was Charles Andros, a NH beekeeper who I didn't know.  He was great, spending a good amount of time on the phone with me and not selling me the queen bee I had asked to buy. Instead he offered me some good advice.

His advice was to merge the two hives.  He feared just adding another queen to Hive #2 might not get me anywhere because it might end up the same way with the queen dying. He said something about not enough brood, I think.  (It was a lot to absorb).

But I did understand some other stuff :).

I remove the queen cell in Hive#1...the one I spotted last week during an inspection.  If that queen is born, one of the queens will be killed. It's best it's the current queen in Hive #2 because we know what she is and she's clearly producing well based on the growth in that hive.  I sort of hate to upset the balance.

Next I will add the new hive to the top of the old hive with a sheet or two of newspaper between them. The bees will begin to adjust to their new friends in the upper hive while they are eating through the newspaper. By the time they do that, they should be acclimated. I will also add the queen excluder under the newspaper.

For those of you who don't know, a queen excluder is a a thin cover that has, in my case, metal slots that bees can fit through.  But the queen can't fit through it.  By adding that, should there be another queen down below, she wouldn't be able to get up to where Hive#2's bees are in the deep hive above.  After a few weeks, I'd remove the excluder. 

I sure hope this works.  The idea is that by doing this, the new hive can bring back the older hive and later on this season, I can make another nuc to try to expand into two smaller hives rather than one large hive. I'm not sure how I'll handle these deep hives. I won't be able to lift them off.

I may need to reduce Hive #1 which has two deeps, by consolidating into one deep. I can handle two deep hives but not three...not if they need to be lifted. I'll think about this for the next few days until I can do this. The weather here has been too rainy to want to go into the hives. I'll wait for a sunny day, hopefully Sunday. 

Stay tuned.

The queen bee is dead

Hive #1 - The queen I put into the hive in its cage is dead. That is a waste of $30, plus costs of going to get the bee. Oh well. It could have been worse. One of my friends, or I should say a friend of a friend, had the bees in a brand new nuc swarm the next day. It's difficult to understand some of this...but not so difficult to understand why some people don't continue beekeeping. It's a rather expensive start-up. These issues I've had are not uncommon...not at all!

My latest plan is to wait for the bees to make a new queen. If bees live in the wild all on their own, they can make their own queen. I need to go in and fully inspect the hive to look for eggs to see if there might be one now. I just don't want to disturb them so I'm not sure if I'll go into the hive quite yet. It's getting close to a month since I realized I no longer had a queen so perhaps they have one or are close to having made one on their own. I don't think so yet based on the lack of pollen gathering.

 I keep observing the hive almost daily and haven't seen enough pollen gathering. Yet when I looked into the hive yesterday to ensure the queen got out of her cage, and found her dead, I did see the few frames I looked at with uncapped pollen on them. So some bees must be gathering pollen but I saw none yesterday and only a few bees loaded up with it a few days ago. I think the outside activity is a good indicator of what's going on inside...or not going on inside.  

Hive #2, the new hive, needs to be opened up. The front entrance still has the entrance reducer on. I need to now allow the full opening so the bees can more easily get in and out. Bees were coming in yesterday, I noticed, and it looked like a traffic jam out there. I'll do that today.

 I also want to check how full the deep hive is at this time. It's been a month and the bees had 5 frames to fill up. Once they get to two frames that are still empty, I'll add a super to give them room to grow. I only want to use supers on that hive since they are shorter and lighter.  Manipulating deep hives was too heavy for me to manage alone.  I couldn't lift them last year so had to figure out a way to slide them over. So I'll probably   add two supers to equal one deep hive. I want them to grow numbers of bees right now so they need that additional space to grow.

Let me just add that this new hive looks like #1 looked last year.  Healthy, busy bees intent on growing and producing. It's fun to watch them.  I am looking forward to seeing both my hives looking like this one does right now!