Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen...

If this picture from last year is bearding, what is the pic below? Werewolfing? I have noticed that my second hive beards like crazy, with bees covering the entire front of the hive bodies (the white supers are just concealing a feeder jar). I wonder if this is common among Italian bees?

This hive was started with four frames and a caged queen. They are on plastic foundation, and were not drawing it out very quickly or very well when they had only one box. Before I added the second hive body, I coated the plastic frames with beeswax and they drew that box out in no time flat. They got so strong that I took off the hive top feeder and am just using a feeder jar. My other hive, although healthy, is much weaker than these guys. Of course, I am not feeding the other hive, but I have not removed my only honey super yet either. I fear that this hive may swarm early next year.

Plastic frames

Earlier this year, I purchased a whole bunch of Pierco plastic frames. I bought 40 black deep frames for the brood chamber and 40 white medium sized frames for my honey supers. I was very much attracted to the "no assembly required" benefit of plastic frames. These frames also have a slightly lower price and the bees do not seem to propolize them as much as wooden frames. Furthermore, they resist wax moth damage to the frame itself.

The only draw back of plastic frames is that bees just don't seem to want to draw comb on them as readily as bees wax frames. Last year my hive drew a medium super of plastic frames pretty easily, but I was feeding them very heavily with a hive top feeder when they were drawing comb on these frames. This year, my second hive is all on plastic frames, but they did not seem to want to draw them out. When they did draw comb, it was shallow and not what I consider to be quality drawn comb.

Although plastic frames are advertised as "beeswax coated", I could sneeze more beeswax on them then what they come from the factory with. I had read in various bee magazines and heard from other beekeepers that coating plastic frames with beeswax will entice the bees to draw them out much better. I tried this, and boy did it work. The frames I had coated in beeswax were drawn out quickly, and the comb looks like the kind of high quality comb you see drawn on frames with bees wax foundation.

Below is a pic of a deep frame before and after being coated with beeswax. Keep in mind that the frame on top was advertised as "beeswax coated". I like Pierco frames, but I criticize them for the scant amount of bees wax in which they put on these frames. I would even be willing to pay for these frames if they came with a decent amount of beeswax on them.



If you are having trouble with plastic frames, purchase some beeswax that you know is disease free, melt it down, and spread it on your plastic frames with a paint brush. Your bees will draw it out much better.

Marking the queen

My new queens are unmarked and I wanted to mark them. This makes them easy spot, easy to determine the age of, and you know in an instant if the queen you are looking at is the one you put there. Due to an unfortunate incident involving paint and a home renovation project, I am not allowed to paint anything within 100 miles of my house. Therefore, my Omniscient Beekeeper marked the queen for me.

There are 5 colors to paint your queens, the color you use depends on what year the queen was born in. Years ending in 1 and 6 are white, 2 and 7 are yellow, 3 and 8 are red, 4 and 9 are green, 5 and 0 are blue.

"When You Read Good Books" is how I remember this.

You can buy queen marking pens, but we just used child safe paint (i.e. non-toxic) and a small paint brush.



Not too shabby for a first mark.

So far so good

As we approach the tail end of the main nectar flow in my area, both of my hives are rocking along just fine although I am worried that the swarm from my established hive may have eliminated any possibility of a crop of honey this year. Since I now have two unmarked queens in both hives, I need to get my hands on a paint marker so I can mark them. Marking is a good idea so I know that the queens I see are the ones I are supposed to be there. Here are a few tidbits from last weeks inspection that I just now transferred from the camera to my laptop:

This is a frame from the established hive that is full of eggs (the white specs). The eggs contrast nicely on the black plastic foundation:



Below is a frame from hive #2 which shows some eggs if you look closely. This queen, which is Italian, is doing fine also. This hive just needs to draw out two boxes of comb this year and they will be fine.



Here is a pic of the Italian queen that I installed myself in hive #2:




Below is a pic of the Carniolan queen that my establish hive raised themselves after they swarmed. She is laying nicely as the first pic on this post shows. Notice how much darker the Carniolan queen is when compared to the Italian queen:

Just another Tequilla Sunrise...

A gentleman who retired from beekeeping 15 years ago gave me some unprocessed wax cappings and let me use his solar wax melter to process the wax. If you have never seen a solar wax melter work, you would not believe how hot it gets. I put my beer making thermometer in the melter along with the wax, and it got up to 180 degrees F. It was not even very hot today, but the sun was shining. This goes to remind us how much energy the sun sends us for free each day, but the plants are the only ones who seem to be able to harness it effectively. We humans resort to paying $135 for a barrel of oil!

Sing for the moment...

Above is a video of two queens in cages piping at each other. Piping is what queens do to alert each other of their presence. They can do this even in cells. The piping in this video only happens once and very quickly at the beginning.

Hornets!

First of all, hornets are not bees. They are hornets. But they do have wings and a stinger, so I am somewhat interested in them.

I found a hornet's nest in a flower bed, and I put it along with its sole inhabitant (the hornet queen) in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer so I could inspect the inside later.




Below is the hornet queen after she spent 24 hours in my freezer. She looks pretty mean.



Below is a photo of the hornet larvae. I am not an expert on hornets, but I assume that the queen starts building the nest, laying the eggs, and gathering food all by herself until the "worker" hornets are born to help her out.