Comb Management

A few posts back, I mentioned that the honey combs were going off-course and that a comb management system had to be put in place. The plan was to keep opening up space between the straightest combs and to put fresh top bars in-between. The construction on the blank bars would be restricted to the space b/n existing combs, and therefor new comb wonkiness would be mitigated.

The only remaining problem would be the falseback. I think it should be designed to mimic the face of another comb. Since it's more like a piece of foundation, the bees have ample room to make a nice fat comb next to it, before beespace becomes tight.

Fat combs hold more honey - no complaints there - but the falseback is so close to the actual back of the hive, we barely have room to get our fingers in to work the hive. If the girls put up honey right up to it, it could get really messy in the Spring when we do our first inspection. To prevent that, we decided to put a finished (i.e.: already capped and not being expanded) comb there.

mid-summer inspection

Update 9/1:  tapping on the top bars, the blank ones still give a hollow sound. We'll give them 'til the end of the Fall flow – according to my allergies there's a lot of something blooming out there – to build and fill a comb there. If they don't make significant progress, the bar will have to be pulled out to reduce air space that needs to be kept warm through the Winter.

Eventhough the Farmers Almanac says it's an El Nino year, we're not too worried about breaking the propolis seal or cold drafts. BackyardHive.com says the latest to move the false back into position is Halloween. And besides, the greenhouse will keep them safe.

Wild Combs

Linden Honey is pale yellow and has a minty finish.

In the picture above, the combs toward the left are honey combs. You can tell, not just because you can see honey, but because the brace comb is white. The smaller bits of brace toward the right are golden because those are brood combs. So nice of the bees to color-code things for us, don't you think?

17th Comb: the last generation of the former Queen's daughters are producing wax now and comb construction is booming.

The top bar hive is a frameless system, so often the girls'll go wild with the comb shapes (and sometimes orientation). Luckily, we haven't had any combs built perpendicular to the bars, but we do have a few that are off-center, bulgy at the top, with a slight wave here and there... Wild combs are difficult to manage, and when a comb goes wild, subsequent combs conform to that shape and most often are progressively worse. It's best to nip it in the bud and make corrections as soon as possible.

The 14th comb is so fat – much fatter than honeycomb is "supposed" to be – that it's causing alignment problems all the way to the newest comb. We've been inserting spacer bars to accommodate the extra width of honey comb and to mitigate misalignment issues with some success. The 17th comb is only slightly off-center; it's in good enough shape to leave alone. Unfortunately we're out of room for more spacers.

We have to use what's already in the hive to make sure the last few combs are manageable. The comb hanging off the Hardison bar (labeled 15) is really nice and straight. The comb just after it (#16) is off-center and bulgy on one side. But the space between is plumb, so we're taking advantage of it. We took a blank top bar – there are only 4 left – from the back and put it in that space.

The 13th comb was a brood comb, but it's been converted and is being backfilled with honey.

The new comb the girls build to fill the gap will be restricted to that space. Even though it won't be as fat a comb as they'd prefer, they're sure to fill it with honey. The plan is to leapfrog the few remaining blank bars into that plumb space, as each new comb becomes stable enough to push back. The bulgy/off-centered combs will get pushed toward the back and eventually out of the hive altogether. At the rate they are working, we'll be able to pull honeycombs out in just a couple of weeks!

Update on 7/14: the new comb is almost complete already! It'll probably be braced to the window tomorrow. There's also a small new comb on the 20th bar, right on center – so far.

Late Spring Inspection

Capped and open brood in various stages, from barely hatched to brown-eyed pupa (should not be uncapped!). Day-old eggs (right edge) and a bee emerging (bottom center).

The Dummies book recommends a third inspection to look for congestion and swarm cells 5-6 weeks after hiving your bees. We weren't planning on going into the hive, since we can see all that through the window and everyone looked happy; the Spring Build-Up is on, but they're only up the 14th bar so still have lots of room to work (7 more bars). But then we found a mummified larva and began to suspect a brood disease.

Chalkbrood is a fungal disease that typically happens in the Spring, when a sudden cool and wet spell follows warm weather. Temperatures in the 80s preceded a rainy Memorial Day weekend. Mummies are usually left on the landing board, which is where we found ours, so we think we have a textbook case.

Another key factor is your colony has to be stressed. Could it be that ours feels short on food? We stopped feeding them when the Maples came into bloom. They were followed by Cherries, Mountain Ash and Buckeyes. And the Hawthorns and Lindens are in full stinky bloom now. These are major food sources, but we're thinking we should've kept feeding them. The population has been on the upswing for 4 weeks but our earliest emerging bees only became mature enough to forage about a week ago.

It doesn't make sense to start feeding again at this point but, after finding two more mummies, we decided a mini-inspection was in order.

Third Inspection

Diagnosis: both chilled and chalkbrood. Chilled brood is another springtime disease, similar to chalkbrood but it's not fungal. It happens when the broodnest is bigger than the colony can keep warm when a cold spell hits. The bees cluster for warmth, but they don't cover the entire brood nest, so the larvae on the edges die overnight. These girls seem pretty hygienic and there's daily bee debris, but the Dummies book says it's not a concern unless the count is high (more than 10). We're guessing it means per day, but that's more guidance than any other book provides so I'm even gladder that I kept it.

Slideshow: Second Inspection

Four Weeks after Hiving the Package
The girls didn't seem to mind our intrusion, but newly emerged bees aren't good flyers (or stingers), so that could explain why they seemed so calm. Then about halfway through, a few started to head butt us – we'd reached the center of the brood nest. Bees pinging off your veil is a bit unnerving, so we tried our best to hurry up. Still, it took us about 45 minutes start-to-finish.

Second Inspection

Click on the arrow to start the slideshow.

Update 05/18/09: this comb is almost full-sized now. There hasn't been a lot of traffic across it so it is very white, but it is most likely a honey comb anyway.

Day 13: Comb Repaired and Then Some!

Larvae and Capped Brood

This is the comb the queen cage was supposed to hang from. The right side of it was cut off during the honey harvest, which made it the perfect bar for attaching the cage. We accidentally direct-released the queen, so the girls were able to get right to work in reparation. The new comb is white and the old is yellow but they match up seamlessly!

Another upside to our mistake is that direct-releasing the Queen enabled her to begin laying immediately. These brood cells were probably capped 3-4 days ago, so new bees may emerge as soon as the first of May!

The brood on the comb shown below is much younger, none capped. The girls that are growing here are less than 8 days old and probably won't emerge until May 5 or 6.

Second comb, brand new this year, has a nice tight laying pattern on both sides.

Close-up of Larvae

Lesson Learned: 80° is too warm to inspect comb that is only a few days old.

The plan had been to inspect each and every comb, and to photograph both sides. But when we pulled out the first comb — and it was completely wobbly and fragile — the plan went out the door. We skipped past bars 8, 7 and 6. We knew these were primarily honey that we'd given them (but forgot that we wanted to see how much they'd eaten) and instead moved on to the 5th bar. I can't remember what we found on the 4th bar, but I know we didn't pull it out either (or there'd be photographs). The 3rd bar was the Queen Includer and, a little panicked by the heat, we moved it without photographing it or first checking for brood. Whoops. Turns out there is capped brood there!

We shall see what ramifications splitting the brood nest has on the colony. For all we know, there's brood on all those combs we skipped past, and the nest isn't really split. The girls have been maintaining the hive at about 90°F, so the larvae should be fine. But we'll pull that comb for sure, during our second inspection (in another 10 days or so), just to confirm. With any luck, we'll see new bees emerging.