Expanding the hive

I was going to wait until next week, but being impatient, I had to to it today.

Expanded hive with Olea's hive

I added a second brood box to the hive. 
I didn't smoke the bees.  I did wear my suit and bee gloves, and a good thing, too.  The bees became very upset when I dropped the current brood box!  I was tilting it upwards in order to remove the entrance remover, when it slipped off my hive tool, dropping about 3/4 inches and banging onto the bottom board.  A few bees got squished and many more started flying around and apparently attacking me.  I then more carefully tilted the box up, took away the entrance reducer and moved the box forward on the bottom board.  It is now even with the front edges, not the back edges as I had placed it initially. (When it is even with the back edge, there will be a 1-1/2 to 2 inch shelf protruding into the hive.)  So now the front porch is even smaller.  I'm considering screwing the ramp onto the front of the hive to make a larger landing site.

Front porch in new arrangement

 At some point, I will also need to paint the newly exposed wood on the back of the bottom board.
Anyway, I moved the now bottom brood box and put the new one on top with its 10 pristine frames.  I then put the two supers and telescoping lid back.
Jeremy Rose said he would supply me with a nuc of  Russian bees.  It won't be ready until the week after next (he wasn't precise on the dates).  I figure I'll drive down to pick it up, and while down that way, stop by Otto and Sons Nursery and pick up a Barbara Bush. 
We really like this rose (it was the pink with white tips growing next to Karly's window), but it didn't survive being transplanted.  J&P were the growers, but they went bankrupt and the new owners aren't selling Barbara now.  It took some looking, but I found that Otto, etc. has her, but they don't deliver.

Expanding the apiary

With Noah's assistance, I put the new hive stand in place and put the old hive onto it.
First we had to move the old hive.  It was too heavy to lift intact, so we took off the supers and then moved the stand and brood box a few feet up and over.  We then re-assembled the hive. 

Although the hive was only over about a foot and ahead 4-5 feet, the returning foragers would fly right by it and buzz around the area where the hive had been.  You can see the cans in the ground where the hive stand had been, and if you look carefully, you can see some bees in the air above them.
I know that bees use landmarks to orient to their hive.  I had figured that they get close and then see the hive, but apparently not.  It seems that they depend on the landmarks the whole way to their door.  I'm trying to find some studies to do with this.  I may need to write to Tom Seeley again for a reference.  I'm sure he'd be happy to hear from me again.
I didn't want for us to be digging in the middle of a cloud of bees, so we waited a bit over an our until most of the foragers had figured out where to go.  We then used the smoker to keep the few lost girls away from us.

After a bit of digging and scraping, checking with a level and then digging and scraping some more, we got the new hive stand in place.
Then we disassembled the hive and inspected before moving it onto the new stand.  We didn't see the queen.  There were only a few square inches of capped brood on the drone frame, but I took it out and put the old one back.  It had previously been thawed out.  The workers will remove or eat all the dead larvae and pupae.
There were four frames with capped brood, only two of them reasonably full.  I don't think the hive is strong enough to divide.  I emailed Jeremy Rose today to order one nuc.  This will go into the new hive.  I'll let my current colony alone and see how it does vis-a-vis the varroa mite as well as general vitality.

We then put the hive onto its new stand.  The bees had no trouble at all with this moving; I assume that is because it was very close to its original location.
Here is the new stand with the old hive in place and the new bottom board for the new hive, soon to be filled with bees.
I'm still driving around with a box and looking for a swarm for Olea's hive. I sometimes take a circuitous route on my way home, slowly driving along, looking at bushes and trees and listening for the buzzing of bees. 
Ian Coulson, a local beekeeper, has agreed to let me know if someone from Aptos calls him about a swarm.  I have also asked a man I know who does garden maintenance to call if he runs across a swarm.

Getting ready

It's spring and soon I will be dividing my hive, that is if there is enough brood in by present hive. There should be 6 frames of brood, and on last look, I only had 1-2.  There are different ways of doing a split, but they all involve pretty much the same thing.  Often it is recommended that the new hive be moved several miles away to prevent drift of the bees back to the old hive.  But I read of one method that uses grass to block the opening, and by the time the grass has dried out, the bees have become accommodated to their new home.
I have decided, for the nonce, not to replace my present queen and to get a new one for the split.  I will email Jeremy Rose today to order one of his Russians. If my present hive is not robust enough, I'll probably get a nuc.

Olea's top-bar hive

I'm keeping my eyes open for a swarm to put in Olea's top-bar hive as I drive around.
 I even have a box and duct tape in my car in order to capture it- I truly (foolishly) expect to run across one.  I'm still hoping a swarm will find the hive on its own.
This week-end, I will be replacing the hive stand with the one I built some time ago.  This involves moving the hive, preparing the space for the new stand and then putting the hive back.  I'm going to need help to move it.  Noah will be here this week-end, but I don't know if he'll be free.

Guess what we found

Seth does the heavy lifting

Seth and I went into the hive today with Julie photographing and Karly observing. We made some very interesting discoveries.  But before I get to that, here's what Jeremy Rose had to say  in response to my last email regarding the capped brood cells I saw on last look: "Anything could have happened, but at this point I would say that if the brood is viable (sounds to me like it is all drone brood but I can't see what it looks like) you can requeen the hive.  If it is all drone brood then I would just let it die."  I would have liked to have had a photo to send him.

Italians among the Russians on capped honey

Upon looking into the brood chamber, one of the first things we saw was many Italian bees.  We guess that maybe 5% were Italians.

Capped brood with surrounding pollen and capped honey

There was still capped brood, perhaps a larger area than before, but still not a lot and only on one frame.

Close up of capped brood cells

I took out the drone frame.  There were lots of capped cells as well as larvae in varying stages of development and eggs.  There has to be a queen in there somewhere.  I brushed the bees off the drone frame and set it with the few remaining bees on the ground and put a new drone frame in the hive.
Because of the capped brood cells and the single eggs in the drone frame, I continued to suspect that there was a queen in there somewhere.  We looked at the brood frame, but couldn't spot the queen.  Time to get out of the hive.  We had some photos of the brood that I would send to Jeremy for his interpretation.
We put the hive back together and I picked up the drone frame.
There were still a few bees on it, and I was looking at a bunch of Italians when I saw her- the Queen!.

It was quite fortuitous that a) she had not fallen or crawled off the frame onto the ground and been lost and b) that I spotted her.  After Seth ran and got the camera to take the pictures, we brushed her off the drone frame into the top of the hive where she could work her way back to the brood chamber.
Before putting the drone frame into the freezer, Seth and I examined it, admiring the centripetal progression of egg to tiny larvae to gradually enlarging larva to capped cells.  We took out one pupa and it had no mites on it.  We saw one dead mite embedded in the cap of one cell.
So, it looks like I have a laying queen, albeit with some, if not all, Italian off-spring. I figure I'll requeen regardless with a Russian with mite resistance from Jeremy later this month.  I emailed Jeremy with the photos this time.