How much space does a beehive need?

"I'm thinking about starting beekeeping. How much space does a beehive need?" asked Skylar. It's a great first question but I feel like there are so many other questions a budding beekeeper should ask before that one. Hindsight's 20/20 I suppose. Only after you've kept bees for a while do you realize that the space requirement is not the #1 consideration. Nevertheless, I'm going to try to answer the question in as short a post as possible. 

 

Continuing my #GoodToKnow series of posts, I'll assign this #7: Know Your City Ordinance

 

Aurora city ordinance allows only two hives per one-quarter acre or less. A hive must be at least five feet from an adjoining property and any colony within 25 feet of a property line must have a 6' high, 20' wide wall or fence that alters the bees' flight path. It's important to know the codes so you don't find yourself fighting the city like Denver Bees founder Marygael Meister did in 2008. A useful tool for learning your local codes is www.municode.com/library/

Extrapolating the flight path of the bees in this video by even just 10 feet should give you an idea of how much space a beehive needs.

Young bees learning the location of their hive.

Older bees returning to the hive with nectar.

Essentially, a beehive needs as much airspace as you can offer. 

P.S.: If you're buying bees for 2017, Colorado bees from Grampa's Gourmet go on sale Monday the 9th!

Wednesday Want: Bloggie HD

This Casio EX-S10 video is OK but I bet a Sony Bloggie Touch HD video would be awesome. Note that the bees have begun to reduce the entrance with propolis.

I put a quart of syrup into the hivetop feeder last night and it was gone this AM. We've been feeding since early August, in a late attempt to stimulate comb-building. But nothing's happening in the second box. I hope they're not just storing all the syrup, 'cause that would take away space for the queen to lay eggs, in which case the colony is going backwards.

At the Hive Entrance

Silly Ol' Bear

One can never be too old for silly ol' Pooh.

Wings of Life

"And Chip Taylor, our monarch butterfly expert, he replied, 'Nothing lasts forever. Everything in the universe wears out.'

And that blew my mind. Because I realized that Nature had invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward, as a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life. Rarely seen by the naked eye, this intersection between the animal world and the plant world is truly a magic moment. It's the mystical moment where life regenerates itself, over and over again.

So here is some nectar from my film. I hope you'll drink, tweet and plant some seeds to pollinate a friendly garden. And always take time to smell the flowers, and let it fill you with beauty, and rediscover that sense of wonder. Here are some images from the film."  -- Louie Schwartzberg, Filmmaker


A spellbinding HD motion-picture to be released by DisneyNature in the US as WINGS OF LIFE: A love story that feeds the Earth

Here is Schwartzberg's full talk at TED and a trailer for the US release.

Indian Summer

"We have been enjoying the delightful stretch of warm, sunny days known as 'Indian Summer'—perhaps the nicest weather of the entire year. Brilliant blue skies, highs in the perfectly comfortable seventy-degree range, light breezes—in other words, ideal! Indian Summer is loosely defined as the warm, dry, quiet period of weather that follows the first killing frost. There really is no meteorological significance to Indian Summer—it doesn't portend anything about the upcoming winter or reflect on the summer just past. Indian Summer is simply a time to try to slow down and savor the good fortune of living in Colorado!"—Ch7. Chief Meteorologist Mike Nelson

From A Minute at the Hive

Advice Anyone?

Apologies: my camera couldn't find the Queen

By chance, we ran into Marty at the Delaney Farm apiary this weekend. He was checking on a nuc that he's going to overwinter. It was "light" and he brought combs of honey for the little colony. He thinks the colony, being small and unable to defend itself, got robbed. That, or they ate all their stores because the Fall was so dry, he said. I imagine the Delaney bees forage where our girls forage: at the City's Xeriscape Garden which was rife with rabbitbrush through September, and the open fields by Kaiser-Permanente which had alfalfa up until very recently. Yes, it's been incredibly dry with no appreciable rain since the 4th of July, but I'm leaning towards the robbing. Marty put an entrance reducer on and called it a day at the apiary.

Marty's been keeping bees in top bar hives since the mid-70s, so before he took off, I asked for his advice on something that's been bothering me. What to do about the combs in our hive, between the honey stores and the brood nest. Combs 14 through 10 should've been backfilled with honey as the brood nest shrunk but, for whatever reasons, the bees neither filled them nor moved the cluster onto them.

Now, Marty doesn't know our hive is in a greenhouse, allowing the bees to break cluster occasionally, but he said we should take the empty combs out and move the food stores forward, up against the cluster. Problem is, I don't want to pull the empty combs out because 1) there are older ones in the hive that should come out first. Unfortunately, the bees are actively on those combs. 2) We'd have to do a major manipulation, breaking the propolis seal and cutting all the honey combs loose from the hive walls to move them forward. We're asking for advice on the biobees forum. What's your advice?

UPDATE: LESSON LEARNED
Everybody else was right. The bees would not abandon a small patch of brood. Actually it was two small patches. The divided cluster died from isolation starvation. Always remove empty combs and move the honey stores right next to the brood nest. And never be afraid to break the propolis seal or do any manipulation. The seal is a much smaller concern than the bees needing help. If they need it, give it without delay.

Eviction Notice

The girls are clearing saying, "Brothers, your days are numbered."

Echinacea 'Magnus'

What a difference water makes! Big color-saturated blooms, and the girls are finally interested!

Have I mentioned that the new Queen looks just like her mother? We've been staying out of the box so she can lay eggs for nice "fat" Winter bees, and she sure has been busy. There are cappings to the very edge of the combs, easily seen (but difficult to photograph) through the observation window. Lots of young bees are taking their orientation flights, and they'll be ready to forage when the last of the flowers bloom this Fall.

Meanwhile, the house bees have been busy building, filling and capping the honey stores. The 20th comb is almost complete! It's time to do an inspection to see exactly how much room they have to work with (and how S-shaped the combs are). I'm not exactly sure when the Fall honey flow is, but we may need to pull a comb or two out before then so they don't feel cramped. We have to wait 'til the weather is settled, though.

It's hailing right now - I snapped this picture just in the nick - the Magnus and Black-Eyed Susans are pretty much shredded to bits now.

What's Blooming in the 'hood:
Lots of yellow flowers. Which one is the source of the bright yellow pollen coming in copiously?
'Moonshine' Yarrow
Gloriosa Daisy
Cinquefoil
St. Johnswort 'Aaronsbeard' (Hypericum calycinum) – very cool flowers – let's find out if this plant will survive a CO Winter!
Coreopsis 'Moonbeam' and 'Zagreb'
Things that aren't yellow:
Queen Anne's Lace
Russian Sage
Dahlias
Hollyhock
Gladiola 

Inside the Bienhaus

:30 video of the Electron Cloud 

It's typically not advised to place a hive inside a greenhouse, for a variety of reasons, but we need protection from Raid-equipped cable men and irrational neighbors. So by carefully controlling solar gain and providing maximum ventilation, we've created the Bienhaus to protect our new bees. The concept of the "bien" [a play on biene (German for "bees")] is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A 3# package of bees, about 10,000 individuals, is really one organism. Michael Thiele explains it best.

Outside the Bienhaus, the "electron cloud" in this video is normal traffic. These are bees from the original package - we miss them already - coming and going on foraging trips. Some are hovering, studying the hive to make sure they recognize home when they return from foraging. But for the most part, they already know their way around the neighborhood and are either zipping out or zipping in. (I just checked and can hardly believe that almost a month has gone by since we shot the video!)

The new bees can be seen taking "fun flights," every afternoon sometime between 2 and 4 pm. These bees have never seen the outside before, so they take their sweet time studying their surroundings. They hover, facing the hive, and when their cloud forms it's more like a Plutonium Cloud! We'll post that video another day.

Sneak Peak

:30 video of Normal Hive Activity

Since we provided our package bees with combs, our queen was able to start laying eggs the very day she was hived. She probably started slowly, maybe a few dozen the first day. Then a hundred. Then more and more each day. A good queen can lay more than a thousand eggs a day! The more combs the workers can build for her, the more she can lay.

However, they seem to be content with the first 10 bars for the brood nest. The newest combs have been allocated to honey storage. There's been a slight slowdown in construction, but there is a new comb about 6" deep on the 13th bar, and they've been measuring Bars 14-15 for a few days. The slowdown is attributable to the original package bees being mostly gone now, and the new bees just becoming mature enough to produce wax. Since there's plenty of brood comb, the queen can continue to lay uninterrupted, but this could affect the colony's honey-storing capacity.

To be honest, I'd really enjoy a honey crop this year. We're just about out of the honey we harvested from last year's bees, and it works way better than Claritin. Here's What's Blooming in our backyard that might be causing all the sneezing:

Late Lilac (Syringa villosa)
Purple Sage (Salvia nemorosa 'Mainacht') – this intensely purple perennial will bloom all the way into late Summer!
Coral Bells (Heuchera sanguinea)
Columbine (Aquilegia 'McKana's Giant')
Silver Edged Horehound (Marrubium rotundiolia)

Elsewhere in the 'hood:
Hawthorn (Crataegus spp.)
Vanhoutte Spirea (Spiraea x vanhouttei)
Scotch Broom (Cytisus scoparius)
Mountain Bluet (Centaurea montana)
Yellow Iceplant (Delosperma nubigenum)

:30 video of Incoming Pollen

Someone has dropped her pollen load and a sister is trying to pick it up.

• to rear one worker bee requires 0.14g
• an average load weighs .014g
• 27kg (61 lbs.) is required to sustain an average colony each year
• that's about 2,000,000 foraging trips!

Pollen Facts from Keeping Bees and Making Honey p. 61

Video: Serious Eats