Feeding Pollen Patties--Pulling Honey Supers 8-17-10

Tim, Dean and his brother Darren came to visit the hives today. Darren came from California where they have 600 hives. Their hives are moved from crop-to-crop and serve as pollinators for many of the commercial crops across California (melons, nuts and others). Thank goodness they are supplying bees to help pollinate the foods we all want!


We opened my weaker hive. Thankfully, the queen is active. She is either a new queen (not very productive or just beginning) or a weak queen. We think she is a new queen as the old one was very weak and there are lots of larvae now.


I cracked the lid so that we could feed the bees extra pollen. They need to store sufficient pollen and honey to survive the winter--and a little boost will help. When we opened the hive, it pulled some comb/cells apart. You can see the larvae laying on top of the frames. The queen is laying drone cells in burr comb. The professionals advised me to make sure my frames were closer together---a tight lay-out will discourage the queen from producing too many drones. If the frames are close together and the spaces small; the queen will produce more workers.


The food is laying in a square patty on the super. It is a mixture that Darren and Dean make for their bees: lemon grass, spearmint, an egg mixture for protein and BEE Healthy (a soy protein). You can also buy pollen patties pre-made.


The stronger of my two hives seems to be storing pollen well. You can see the various colors--lots of different kinds of pollen from a variety of flowers.

One of their objectives today is to remove some of the honey supers. When they open up their hives and check to confirm that they honey supers are full, the bees are still working inside the honey super. To remove them, they brought a fume board and a spray called BEE GO. It is a non-toxic, almond scented spray that helps remove the bees from the honey supers.

Dean is sprayin the fume board with the BEE GO. He then let it set in the sun for 15 minutes--and all the bees left the honey super.

This is a shot of the materials they brought today: BEE GO, pollen patties and mite pads. Dean was smoking the bees. Tim said that smoking the bees is important, if even you don't think you need to. Bees may "ball the queen" and kill her if they are agitated and you aren't using smoke. He encouraged me to use my smoker when I'm working inside the hive. And another professionals trick: they took fresh grass and shoved it in the spout of the smoker to kill the fire, when done with the smoke. We were checking the weaker of my two hives to see if other queens were being formed; since my prior queen had been so weak. We found queen cells, but they were empty. The Royal Jelly was very old inside the cell, so their is no danger that another queen will come from these cells.