Bee Buzz Around the Web
 Grafting one day old larvae from a frame of brood. She is using a Chinese Grafting tool. It looks like a pen. It has a little tongue that can scoop up the larvae and some royal jelly. She then deposits the larvae into the queen cup. Each one of the cups will become a queen cell.
Right now the package bee supplier is raising queens. They start in early March. The Almond trees are blooming and there is lots of pollen available from the good rain they have had. The rain is great news being that they have been in a drought for the last four years. The temperatures have been around 65 degrees and that is adequate for proper mating of queens. Everything seems to be on schedule. My first load is almost sold out. My second load is still wide open for any bee orders.
 I pulled the heavy bar out very gently, it was a warm day and the wax comb was soft - the last thing I wanted to happen was the whole lot collapse into a sticky mess on the floor of the hive !I did rest the bottom of the comb lightly on the bars, luckily a friend arrived and I persuaded her to take some photos.  I was thrilled to pull this bar out and find brood and nectar, the queen is obviously laying well with the pattern being healthy - click on the pic and you can see the larvae ready to be capped - exciting stuff !!  Beautiful wax comb being built from the end bars, note the bright red propolis. Yesterday was the perfect day to open my TB hive, warm with little wind and busy bees out doing their thing .
I had been abit worried that there was not enough room in the hive after I had made it smaller using the divider board - but on taking the end bar out discovered 2 empty bars still waiting for comb. The hive is absolutely humming, I am thrilled to bits at how it has turned out, better then what I expected, so beautiful to look at, even for afew minutes ! The bees were quiet and co-operative, I did wear my veil but didn`t light the smoker as I think smoke tends to send them into a panic which must add stress, (I like to avoid stress of any kind), but with only taking afew bars out at a time the temp stays pretty much as it should be in the hive and the all important pheromones from the queen are not totally lost into the air - the wonderful natural TBH allows for much kinder treatment of your bees - thats my opinion, for what its worth !! I noticed on opening the hive the bees had been doing a fair amount of propolising with a bright red resin or gum. I do wonder where they are getting it and from which plant or tree. I know there is a large stand of Australian gum trees not far from here which could be the source. One of the (many)things I want to do, is build up a list of local flowering flora in this area, where it is and when it flowers. A friend of mine down-loaded off a BBC programme, the story `Who`s killing the Honey Bee ?`, a doco similar to `Silence of the Bees` which I already have, but made by people in the UK. It is very good, if you get a chance to view it, do, as it really makes you think about what is happening to bees and how we can do something about it. We don`t have CCD here yet, but it will come if we don`t take notice now of what is happening overseas, learn from what has happened and care for our bees. But I am afraid that the big chemical companies and the like won`t give a fig, it is very hard to fight huge corporations with their endless budgets. We hobbyists all need to unite as one large voice and YELL for the bees, 0k ? Enough of my ramblings . . 
 News like this and other updates from The Beekeepers Connection, a group on Linked In
First, for those of you who have been losing sleep over my difficulties in establishing a laying queen in my second hive, rest easy: she's there and she's laying. I checked over the weekend and the two brood chambers are full of good, healthy brood. I pulled over the top feeder and added a honey super. All's well. The first hive is doing well, too. I checked up on them last week and saw that the second honey super was getting close to full, so I added a third. I decided to try an experiment, though.  I know that every little bit of extra work you make the bees do can come out of your bottom line, even making them climb through two extra honey supers to get to the new empty one I'd put on top. So I tried a little swap: I reversed the positions of the honey supers. That is, I put what had previously been the bottom honey super on top of the stack and added the new, empty super to the middle of the stack, just above the brood chambers. Since it's not a true, controlled experiment (how will I know whether it "worked"?), I decided to ask the advice of Karen Bean of Brookfield Farm, the beekeeper selling at our local farmer's market who I have drafted as my mentor. Karen gave my move the thumb's up. She said she doesn't bother with all that switching, mostly to spare her back (a wise woman, indeed), but she did recommend one easier switch: When adding a new super, she suggested taking two center frames from the top-most honey super, which would likely have some brood in them, and placing them in the center of the newly added super. (The presence of brood on those frames is predicated on the notion that you're not using a queen excluder, which we don't.) Then take the displaced empty frames from the new super and place them in positions 2 and 9 of the almost full super (that is, not outermost, where they may be ignored, but close to it). The goal of the maneuver is to give the bees some encouragement to start moving in to the new, empty super. She noted that if there is brood present, it's best not to shake off the nurse bees that will be tending them. I'll give that a whirl next.
 The new WarreBeeHive.com just launched! So, to celebrate the big launch we are doing a free beekeeping webinar on June 11th, 2009 at 6:00pm PST.
It will be a Natural Beekeeping Q&A Webinar for anyone and everyone interested in natural beekeeping and the Warre hive. We will also be discussing top bar hive beekeeping and of course how to keep bees in urban and backyard settings.
I will be going over 3 principles of Natural Beekeeping, and then we’ll open it up for your live questions. There is a chat feature on the webinar, so it is easy to ask questions.
Here is the deal, I only have 200 lines available, and the webinar is first come first served. You can sign up here:
http://warrebeehive.com/webinar-registration/
So get your questions and comments ready. I hope to see you on the webinar!
     
It’s been a good start to the year but the honey season is far from over. Here is my bee yard, from left to right my Top Bar hive…  I’m in complete awe on the progress this colony is showing, can it have something to do with the type of beehive?? There are too many variables to really make a call. What I do know is that I provided 3 partially drawn out frames to the TBH and they have, in 2 weeks, pulled 5 more. I didn’t forget to remove the queen’s shipping cage this time, and I removed it causing minimum damage. I do need to be more careful about lifting the top off. It had glued itself to a few bars and when I lifted the top a few bars also lifted. Luckily there was no damage done to anything. Below are a couple of the new Top bars.   Next to it is my original hive. These guys started it all. Last time I looked in here I notice a lack of stored honey. Until this weekend I was a little apprehensive. I almost pulled my back removing the bottom super. The top is about 75% full and 50% of that is capped. I hope it can wait two weeks until I return from vacation. Here is the outside frame of the top super.  Next to my original hive is one of my NUCs from last year. One of the supers I robbed last week came from them. There’s not much activity going on in the current super. Palmetto and Palms flow is about to begin so maybe then it will pick up. No second super for them since they haven’t touched the one they have now. Next we have the new Nuc of the year. I’m not feeding them but I decided to leave the feeder to block the entrance some. I want to keep these gals small and in the NUC for the rest of the year. They right now hold my emergency queen. If anything happens in the established hives these gals with their queen will step in. I like to take pictures while inspecting to catch and review what I may not see. I was worrying about not seeing any eggs in the Nuc. The pictures proved me wrong. There are plenty of eggs in 3 frames, it’s just hard to see with all the bees over them.  Finally my ex-angry hive with a whole new hard working pleasant attitude. No idea why they like to hang out as much as they do. The bottom super is 75% full, and the top super I placed on today. It’s one of the supers I extracted last week. Maybe this will give all the slackers hanging around some work to do. I’m hoping to have 2, maybe 3 supers to extract in a couple of weeks. Oh yeah, I didn’t get stung stealing honey supers, but I got stung replacing empty supers. I’m glad the reactions are getting milder and milder. 
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