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At long last, a break in the weather. For the last four weeks or so we have experienced rain, heavy winds and cold spells. This has prevented us from getting into our newly acquired beehives, until yesterday that is. We awoke to a glorious day, with temperatures soaring into the upper 70’s in the early afternoon. A perfect day for our very first beehive reconnaissance mission. This was a big day for us as it would be our very first “hands on” inspection, something much different than reading about this or watching several years’ worth of video on the subject. So, clad in our bee suits and armed with our smoker and hive tool, we made our way to a corner of our property, now designated as the “bee yard.”
Truth be told, I was slightly anxious, excited, and perhaps a wee bit overconfident when we smoked the entrance to the first hive we were going to inspect. We really weren’t anticipating any kind of ambush on behalf of the bees, but, never having done this before, we weren’t sure what their tactics would be. We quickly discovered that moving any part of a hive is not easily done as the bees glue everything down thoroughly with a substance they make called propolis, requiring you to pry every component of the hive apart with the hive tool in order to breach the interior and move anything. We knew about propolis of course, but it is quite another thing to experience exactly how “glued down” everything was! Also, lifting a box full of bees, eggs, nectar and honey is surprisingly much heavier than it seems. Thank goodness I had been taking weight training classes at the gym (before the recent necessary worldwide lock-down due to the Coronavirus that is)! Ultimately, after a little patience and muscle effort, we were finally on a roll and began lifting out frames, one by one, to see what the “ladies” were up to. We found them to be relatively calm and were encouraged to proceed as there was no counterattack on the part of the bees.
We had originally intended to treat the hives for Varroa mites, a common, tiny, tick-like parasite that beekeepers globally must treat for in order to maintain strong, healthy hives. This is usually done in the early Spring before the first nectar flow and Fall before winter arrives. We noticed immediately however, that the bees had been busier than we expected! We knew that Spring was the season that most hives swarm and, in order to hopefully control any swarming behavior, and losing part or all of a hive, there are certain measures you can take. One measure includes scraping off any potential queen cells from the frames. If one of those queen cells should hatch, there is a chance that a good portion of the hive could leave with the new queen if they like her better than the older already established one. We found that there were more potential queen cells than we had expected so we went in with a vengeance, scraping and cleaning off anything that looked remotely suspicious, probably sacrificing many drone cells (boys) in the process. Drone cells can tend to protrude around the outer edges of a frame and, for first time beekeepers like ourselves, they could seem suspicious even though they are not. Unfortunately for the drones, there were more than a few casualties yesterday. Fortunately for us however, bees are quite forgiving and indifferent to these types of invasions, and they immediately got back to work, cleaning up the mess that we humans, although well-intentioned, left behind.
Interestingly, we did notice that both of our hives have very different personalities - one is pretty laid back, the other more outspoken, but neither held our hive invasion against us, in fact, they were pretty harmless creatures, and dare I say it, even very cute, going about their day-to-day business without really paying us too much attention. Treating for mites in a hive is by itself extremely stressful for the bees, and we felt that we didn’t want to further disturb them with that process. Following the trauma of our inspection, we thought it best to give the bees a few days to recover before going back into the hives again to do what we had initially set out to do, and that is to eradicate as many mites as possible before going into Spring.
Mother Nature is unpredictable though and, right after that exhilarating hive inspection experience the Midwest weather turned again, and not in our favor. We have had freezing temperatures, pouring rain, thunderstorms, very high winds and, this week the forecast calls for snow again in the next couple of days! What a crazy Spring we have had this year. It has been almost a week now since our hive inspection and we still have not been able to get into the hives to treat for the mites. Weather permitting, we hope to do this the very first chance we get on the next warm, sunny day. We want our hairy little friends to go into this new season as healthy as they can be.
Completing our first inspection was exhilarating and addicting. It was the beginning of our new, complex beekeeping education. I am confident that our instructors, the bees, will teach us well. I can only hope that we can live up to their high expectations of us and be good and intuitive students. We look forward to getting to know them better and establishing a good working partnership.
K.
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