The Honey Super

The bees have done amazing things in the past week.   The hive is full.  It was high time to give them more space.  So the Honey Super has finally made an appearance.
I built the super to hold 2 medium frames.  It sits over a 1.5" hole I made in the center top of the observation hive.  That hole has been plugged until today.

The wood I cut to build the honey super, all cut from "1 inch thick" wood, which is 3/4":
2- 21" x 4.75" one for base, one for the inner cover.
                      The base has a 1.25" hole drilled in the very center, to align
                      with the 1.25" hole in the top of the observation hive.
2- 6.75"x4.75" sides
2- 6"x3" inner sides, for frames to rest on  
               Drill 2 holes in each pair of these (side and inner side),
               and place screen between for ventilation, as for the hive.
4- 19.5" x 1" for the top and bottom bars of the frame to hold the plexiglas in place.
4- 4.75" x 1" for the sides bars of the frame to hold the plexiglas in place
22.5" x 6.5" for top of telescoping outer cover
2- 22.5" x 1.5" side for telescoping outer cover
2- 4.75" x 1.5" ends for telescoping outer cover

Also needed are 2 pieces of plexiglas, 19.25" x 6.5"

Depending on your surroundings, you may want hardware clasps to secure the honey super to the hive.  I secured it by running tape around the junction.  I also did not install a lock on the telescoping cover.

The plexiglas is sandwiched between the 3" wide hive frame supports and the 1" bars that frame the plexiglas.  The wood is glued and nailed.  The plexiglas is not meant to open.  

This little super will be removed by (removing the tape I have around the junction and) sliding 2 flexible plastic cutting boards (or pieces cut from milk jugs) between the hive and the super, and lifting one of the pieces of plastic with the super, while leaving the other with a weight on it to plug the opening.  The super will be taken outside, the cover and inner cover removed, the filled frames removed and new frames installed.  The bees will be shushed by smoker in the direction of the hive opening on the outside of the house. As worker bees, they should have no problem finding their way home.  This part is all theory so far.  

The super is installed and the bees are beginning to investigate.

The Queen Mother

It is quite fun to have people interested in my bees, and honey bees in general.  My dark queen inspired questions about her color.  Her mother was a fair Italian queen.  Here are pictures I took yesterday in the hive that the observation hive came from.  This golden queen is bright and easy to spot as she moves along the frame.

Honey bees have been cultivated for thousands of years.  European bees were dark, then a strain developed in Italy that was golden.  People liked the bright golden queen because she was easy to spot.  They also tended to produce lots of honey.  So some people started using Italian queens, and when combined with European drones, the resultant bees were striped.  I'll bet you've see striped honey bees haven't you?  

  The drones are the males, and can be either yellow or dark.  They are distinctively larger, and their head looks very black because their larger eyes meet at the top of the head.  They also have a squared off butt.  Call them wide load, fat boy, or "pet me bees", they have no stinger, so you can pick them up & play with them.

 

Bees have been bred to select for mild temperament, productivity, hygienic behavior (if they find diseased larvae & dispose of them, the hive avoids the illness or pest), over-wintering, swarming behavior (or lack of it) and more.  There are several popular strains.  Italian bees were the predominant ones brought to this country with the europeans and spread across the country both with the settlers and on their own.  

I was told that whatever queen I get, my bees will most likely be Italian, because that's the largest population of drones, and the queen doesn't breed at home, but flies off to a drone congregation area somewhere high up in the air that really only the bees know about.  She generally only makes one flight, but gets genetic contributions from several drones.  My yellow Italian queen obviously got assorted contributions, in order to have produced a dark daughter, the one in my observation hive.  

Since many people in the area have bees, and buy special queens for one reason or several reasons, I can only speculate about my bee heritage.  Even bee breeders are faced with the difficulty, except those in very isolated places like islands (Buckfast Abbey, on a British island developed a special strain of Buckfast bees).  Very recently there have been some breeders who have more controlled breeding, but usually the approach is to make sure there are a LOT of the right kind of drones around when your queen makes her flight, so a breeder makes certain he has loads of the right drones (and all of his neighbors benefit, assuming they agree on what is "right".)

Royalty! The Dark Queen Reveals Herself

This hive has been so rewarding.  I love to listen to the peaceful hum, and on good days when the nectar is flowing, you can smell the honey being made.  I've watched rounds of new bees hatch and new brood develop, have monitored the comings & goings, watched the multi-colored pollen come in and be made into bee bread in the brood area, nectar be deposited, and then consumed,  and watched these energetic ladies draw new comb.

Here is a series of pictures of a couple of new bees thinking of emerging.

Up, down!  It's a struggle.

   

 

 

 

I see this happen all the time in the OH, but I still don't take such good pictures of it;
I took these pictures outdoors in another hive.

The brood fills in an oval, then empties from the center out, and repeats.  That tells me they were successful in raising a queen from the young brood I placed in the hive, but weeks go by and I don't see her highness.

I have read that the bees can make wax more efficiently if they are in a dark environment, so I keep a cover over the hive when I am not watching the activities.  Here they have begun drawing comb in the 3rd frame up.

Capped & open brood, nectar and pollen.

Colorful pollen above and below brood.  The bottom frame  is from last year's brood nest.
The wax becomes darker as it is re-used.

Now they have drawn comb on all of the frames in the hive.  

The busy tube to the outdoors.  They navigate about 5' of tube.
I drilled small holes in it every inch or so because they had problems with condensation.
The holes allow the moisture to escape.

The bottom 2 sets of frames (there are 8 frames, 2 at each level) are full of brood.
The top 2 sets are newly drawn and currently are being filled with nectar.

the other side

nectar

Bright orange pollen being stored among the brood.
They ran short on open cells for a bit and have had a very busy wax-making week.

If you are using my plans to build a hive, I left more than bee space at the bottom.   I wondered if that was a mistake. You might want to leave less.  Here you can see the bees have drawn some comb suspended from the bottom bar of the lowest frame.  This is drone comb, as would be expected.  It will be interesting to see if it is used for storage, or always for drones.  It is new yesterday.  I expect it will first be used for drones, as there are very few drone cells elsewhere.

 AND... drumroll, please!  Presenting our Dark Queen!

In the center of this picture you can see the queen with her court.
She was busily evaluating and depositing eggs into the cells the bees had cleaned and prepared.
Under the bottom rung of the frame you can see the thick crowd of festooning bees stimulating their wax glands. 

The dark queen and her court.

I consider this hive a great success so far.  If I did nothing more with them but watch, and possibly add a feeder if & when food sources dry up, they would become crowded and need to swarm.  I can carry the hive outdoors to tend it, but I have not needed to.
I cut a hole in the center top of this hive before putting the bees in, and I hope to make a 'honey super' before they fill the 4 frames they have newly drawn.  The hole on the top is plugged.  I will cut a matching hole in the small super, align the holes, remove the plug and allow the bees to enter the super to deposit honey. The super would be just 2 frames side-by-side, so would be light & easy to remove & take outdoors to harvest the honey and give them new empty frames to work on.

Yes, you really do want to build an observation hive.

In this first picture, you can see a chubby yellow drone, newly hatched, center top.  You can also see the ladies warming the remaining drone cells by pressing their thoraxes against them, bottom right & just left of center bottom.  Most drones from the brood I placed into the OH have hatched now.

The beautiful weather has returned, and all of the blossoms that have been on hold during the chilly weeks are out there awaiting the bees.  The bees have had no problems navigating their tube.  I have it exiting through a hole in a 2x4, which is set in the window, rather than drilling holes through my walls like real die-hard bee-zerkers would do.  :)  It is rewarding to see the heavy loads of pollen and nectar coming in. The comb is glistening with cells full of golden liquid, and others packed with bee bread.

There is an opening into the tube in the middle of that crowd.

Settling In

Two days after installing the bees, you can see the development of very young brood, the pearly white little commas in the cells.  It is probably not coincidence that this is just about an inch above the first queen cup that was getting so much attention.  3 more queen cups were quickly built along the same stretch of comb, and a couple of others in other locations.  They are surprisingly difficult to get decent pictures of.

The weather took a turn toward more normal March conditions, and the bees in the observation hive have not had any reason to try navigating their tube to go foraging.  

The area center top of this frame of dark brood, where the wax has been built onto the window, is one of the queen cups, with its ever present cluster of attendants.  Notice how uniformly capped this frame of brood is.  It is now 3 days later, and that is changing rapidly. 

If you look at the 9 o'clock position in this picture, you can see a new little lady chewing her way our of her cell.  The newbees are very fuzzy, the light yellow of the fuzz on their thorax clearly identifying them.

Today some of the larger larvae are being capped into their cells.  Those would have been eggs laid 4 days before the frames were moved into the observation hive.   And in the lower frame, you can see an increased number of open cells, vacated by the newly hatched bees.  The drone cells remain capped.  If they are the same age as these ladies, they should make their appearance in 3 days.