Trouble in Olea's hive?

Yesterday I looked through the observation window into Olea's top bar hive.  I was dismayed to see a marked decline in the population.  After the swarm 3 weeks ago, only 2 combs were free of bees.  Now there were four exposed combs.  I tried to get a picture, but the reflection on the window made viewing the inside impossible.
I was worried about the viability of the colony.  I imagined that the queen had not successfully mated.  I was trying to figure out how I could put the bees from the nuc into the top bar hive.  This would involve doing something to make sure the queen is not killed, that the bees from the two hives do not fight each other and cutting the frames from the nuc to fit into the top bar and then wiring them to the bars.
But first I had to see what was going on in the hive.  Today I did a thorough inspection.  There was very little honey, a lot of clean, empty cells, some capped brood and some largish larvae.  I didn't see any small larvae, eggs or the queen.  Being pessimistic, I assumed the worst.  But before taking any action, I emailed Kathy Niven for advice.
She soon wrote back to me.  She pointed out that the hive swarms about 3 days (2-4) before the new queen hatches.  The queen goes on her mating flight about a week after hatching.  So it is possible that everything is fine.  Kathy usually waits a month to check the hive after it has thrown a swarm.  I'll keep an eye on the girls through the window and do a quick inspection again after Labor Day.

But wait, there's more.  When taking out the first bar, the comb broke off.  This time it wasn't because of my torquing it; it fell off as I was lifting the bar.  In the comb was a small section of capped honey and some surrounding ripening honey.  On the other side was an area of drone cells.  I had previously seen these after the colony swarmed.  All but seven of the drones had hatched.  I cut out the section with the honey and examined the drone pupae.  They were dead, somewhat dry and turning black.  I did a bit of research and deduced that they had died from being chilled.  This makes sense because after the swarm, I could see the area clearly since there were no nurse bees on it.  There was on mite which you can see in the photo.  It had crawled off one of the pupae.

On looking into the box, I could see a lot of debris on the floor of the hive.  I used some propolis on the end of a stick to pick up some.  Just as we all figured, mites.  I'm a bit disappointed in the mite tolerance/susceptibility of my new queen.  I plan to  re-queen both the new hive and Olea's hive in the spring with queens from Honeybee Genetics, where I got my first bees.

Back from Las Vegas

I went to a medical review class in Las Vegas earlier this week, getting back Thursday evening.  Before I left, I went into the hives with Mickey.  We took a look around the old hive first.
We saw lots of capped honey in both the supers and the deep boxes.  I expect there will be a harvest this fall.  (Seth, I hope you can come down and help.)
There was a lot of brood, mostly in the lower brood box, but also a bit in the upper brood box.  We didn't spot the queen.  There was nothing happening on the drone frame, so I left it in.  In retrospect, I probably should have replaced it with a regular frame since drone season is over or nearly so.  Next time I go in I plan to replace it.
We also took a look into the nuc. We didn't see the queen there, either.  There was a lot of capped brood and larvae of all ages.  There was drawn comb on all the frames.  There was capped honey as well as nectar.  The nectar appeared clear and I assume it's mostly sugar water honey.  I decided to stop feeding the girls.  I won't refill the bottle again.

I went into the new hive today to replace the Apiguard.  One is supposed to put the new pack in after 7 days, but as I said above, I was in Las Vegas.  I noticed a few drones buzzing around.  For fun, I caught a couple and inspected them for mites and there were none.  I had intended to would replace the drone frame with a regular frame.  But the drone frame cells were filled with nectar and even some capped honey.  I deduce that drone season is over as I had suspected.  (I suppose I could just look in my books or online to confirm the end of drone season.)  Much of the thymol gel was still in the tray, although dried up.  I put a new tray in and broke up the old stuff onto it.

While I was away, Maidi took this great picture of the bees in Just Joey.  Can you see all five?
I did write to Jeremy Rose about the swarming  and apparent mite tolerance.  His response: 
Thank you for that information... that is very interesting!  Makes me very curious as to what is really going on.  Sometimes I have seen hives swarm and then actually recover from the mites, maybe that is what yours attempted to do unsuccessfully.  Maybe sometime I will give you a call and try to come by if I am in the area and look at all of those hives.  I am happy to hear that it is still alive, at least.  Sorry they aren't holding off the mites like I thought they would... I produce such a variation of queens that it is hard to know which ones are survivors and which are not.  Sometimes I don't find out which ones are resistant until the following season, and it is not black and white in many cases.  I hope he does come by.
I also wrote to Tom Seeley asking about studies pertaining to the propensity to swarm.  His reply:

I'm sorry, Tom, although I agree with you that there are probably genetic effects on the tendency of a colony to swarm, I don't know of any published work on this topic.  The best that I can offer is a study done by one of my students that looked rigorously on "personality" differences between colonies of honey bees (see attachment).   As you will see, this phenomenon is real, and is now well documented.   Yours truly, Tom Seeley 

The study is Collective personalities in honeybee colonies are linked to colony fitness, in Animal Behavior 81, 2011.  I will send you a copy if you're interested.  What professor Seeley should have said is: "What an fascinating question!  I will suggest it as a thesis topic for one of my graduate students."

I also wrote to a professor at UC Davis, Eric Mussen.  He sends out a quarterly newsletter to which I subscribe.  It is scholarly and interesting.  He emailed me (My letter regular, his reply italics):

 Hi, Tom, I'll deal with your questions in order, but I am going to be short on
answers.
In mid-May this year I purchased and hived a nuc of Russian bees from Jeremy Rose in Santa Barbara. 16 days later the hive cast a swarm.
It takes 16 days for a queen to be reared from an egg to an adult. However, the old queen will be forced to leave before the new queens emerge. I think that your nuc had queen cells in it, already. 
I captured the swarm and put it into a top bar hive. (The original hive cast a second swarm just 9 days later.)
The colony cannot produce a second queen that quickly from scratch, so what left the second time was an after-swarm. Commonly, they leave with a virgin queen from the first swarm session. 
The bees in the top bar hive were doing well, building lots of comb and still had plenty of room as the box was only half-full. Then the top bar hive cast a swarm just 33 days after being placed in the hive. 

That was adequate time for them to rear a new batch of queens. 
It seems to me that the queen I purchased in May, and her offspring, have a strong propensity to swarm. I read in beekeeping sites that some strains of bees are more likely than others to swarm.
That is true to a certain extent. Africanized honey bees are much more apt to swarm than European honey bees. But, I think it runs more along individual lines than being a trait for a specific stock. Russian bees tend to produce tons of queen cells compared to our typical European bees, but they also tend to chew most of them down and do not swarm excessively. There were some early Russian lines that swarmed frequently, but the Russian Bee Breeders tried to remove those lines from their stocks. 
What I would like to read are any studies pertaining to that. I haven't been able to find anything online, yet.
I am not going to be much of any help with that. 
Since the trigger to swarm isn't entirely clear and is probably multifactorial, I would think that a single "swarm" gene hasn't been identified.
I believe you are correct, that many genes are involved with the swarming process. The process is not just a single step, but many. Many genes would be involved throughout the process. 
Is the propensity to swarm dominant or recessive?
I am not sure that anyone has studied that, specifically, but being recessive seems to be too dangerous to the species. 
In time, as the new queens mate with wild drones, will the tendency become weaker? 

It sounds like it should, given the fact that "normal" drones will outnumber your high test drones and genes. I wish I could give you a better answer, but there still are many things that we do not know. Eric. 

I guess I'll just have to do my own study.  Maybe I can use Joshi's lab. 

Mites, mites, mites

I took out the sticky boards I had placed three days ago. 
The good news- old hive count: 3
The bad news- new hive count: 123!
I immediately put on my bee suit, grabbed a container of Apiguard and opened the hive.
I took out four frames of the top deep box to make room for the pack, scraped the wax off the top of the exposed bottom box frame and placed the Apiguard.  It's supposed to be removed and a new one placed in a week, but I'll be in Las Vegas at a medical class.  It will have to wait a few days until I return.  I actually wanted to use the formic acid Mite-away quick strip, but the directions say to use it in a hive with 6 frames of brood.
Furthermore, I dusted the bees with powdered sugar.  Previously I had used a sifter to do this.  This time I tried a floral duster I had bought sometime ago for this purpose.  Good idea, but it doesn't work well and the dusting was not thorough.  In the future I'll use the sifter.
It seems that the new hive is not as mite-resistant as I had hoped.  Since Olea's hive and the nuc are both direct descendants, I expect that they are also mite susceptible.  (You may recall I saw a mite on a drone from Olea's hive a few weeks ago.)  This, along with the propensity to swarm, leads me to consider re-queening.  I don't know if it is too late in the year to do so.  I intend to write to Jeremy Rose, who supplied this queen, and let him know of her and her queen off-spring's performance.

Into the hives with Kenneth

Kenneth stopped by on his way home from China and we went into the hives yesterday.

The old hive bottom brood box

First we looked into the new hive.  Not much going on in the medium super or top brood box.  There were a lot of bees and brood in the lower deep box.  We couldn't find the queen.  It had been over 4 weeks since I had put in the drone frame.  I has intended to take out the frame every 3 weeks, or so.  It takes 24 days for a drone to mature and hatch.  The frame was mostly hatched today and there were a lot of drones in the hive. We even saw a couple of drones hatching.  We just left the old frame in place.  More below about the drone frame that had been in the freezer.

Looking in the nuc

Then we took a quick peek into the nuc.  There was quite a bit of comb drawn and also nectar.  The nectar was clear because it probably came from all the sugar syrup they are drinking.  They're going through almost a quart a day.  When Maidi and I were out of town in Boonville and Mendocino with Laura, Cathy took care of filling the feeder. (While in Boonville, we met a couple of nice young men.  One of them, Brooks, makes Bite Hard Cider.  We bought a few bottles.)  We didn't look at more than one frame in the nuc.
We left the old hive alone and took a look into Olea's hive.  I was very careful this time to cut the brace comb before removing the bars and didn't break any combs off.  We saw capped brood but didn't see the queen.  I remembered that a new queen will be shy, and this hive swarmed just 8 days ago, so the queen is new and even may have not yet started laying.  I'll have to take a look again in a week or two.
The bees had not yet rebuilt the comb I broke.  The bees were hanging in chains which they do to build comb.

Yum! Honey!

 I had brought the drone frame from the freezer down to the apiary to have on hand if I wanted to swap out the one in the hive.  The bag it had been had a lot of honey in and on it.  I left it on the steps.  I put the drone frame on top of the old hive.  When we were all done and went back to the house, there was a small cloud of bees around the plastic bag.  I moved it to the top of the recycle bin where the bees continued to feed.  Better already processed honey than nectar.  There was also a lot of action on and around the drone frame.  Some honey had dripped onto the porch and the front of the hive, and the bees were slurping it up.

I discovered the bees on the Moraea.  I didn't know they liked them.
Here is a video of a bee getting pollen from a rose, Touch of Class.  Look how she rubs her fuzzy body on the stamens.

Olea's hive swarms! Apiary expands!

Admiring the swarm and the roses

Yesterday, while I was in the yard getting ready to feed the roses, Olea's hive swarmed.  The bees came flying out making a buzzing cloud in the yard.  As before, we watched to see where they would settle.  As I stood in the cloud, bees would land all over me.  This time, they flew into Paul's yard, and I went over there where I watched them buzz around.  They landed on all the bushes, finally clustering on an iron fairy decoration.  Note the clump on the ground.  I used the bee brush and a dust pan to get them into the box.

The cluster on the fairy

The fairy without her bees

Some had become caught in a spider web in our yard, but don't fret, Maidi saved them.

I called a couple of beekeepers to see if they wanted to capture the swarm, leaving a message with the first and speaking with the second, James.  (The same James who got the last swarm.)  He suggested I keep it myself since he hates to give away his bees, the more the better, etc.  When I told him I had nowhere to put them, he proposed putting them in the top bar hive.  I could divide the box in half with the back board and drill a door into what is now the back.  As I was hesitant to do that, he next offered me a 5-frame medium nuc.  He lives on the west side of Santa Cruz and getting there then would be impossible with the traffic.  He told me he would leave it on his front porch and I could pick it up last night or this morning.

I went into Paul's yard with a box that had once contained Bump wine.  I had punched many holes in it.  I shook the bees into the box and after they had settled down a bit, taped the box shut and brought it into our yard.  Laura and I weighed it on the kitchen scale- about 4 pounds!  Now I had a box of bees.

 Then I went to look through the observation window of Olea's hive.  It was obvious that a lot of bees had left.  The two endmost combs were bare of bees and there were clearly fewer just crawling around.  I also noticed a dozen or so drones crawling around on the rocks.  Maybe they had been forbidden to travel with the swarm- girls only.

I drove to the west side this morning and James was true to his word, leaving the nuc on his porch.  Unfortunately, it had only a bottom board, no inner cover or lid.  So I built them today.

First, let me say it's a good thing I don't try to do carpentry for a living.  I did get them built, though, with only a couple of incorrect measurements and re-cuts.  Fortunately, I had cut too long rather than too short.  I even used the router to make a groove in the frame to fit the inner board.
The weather was overcast with even a few splatters of rain.  An internet search assured me that I could safely (for the bees) hive in this weather.  I placed two frames in the nuc and dumped the bees in.  I brushed a few bees from the box into the hive as well, in order to be sure that the queen was in the nuc.

Right after hiving

45 minutes after hiving

 I left the box by the hive and in about half-an-hour all the bee s had left the box.  Over the next hour, they all crawled into the nuc.

When they were all in, I put the entrance feeder on.  I figure they'll need all the sugar they can get to build comb and store enough honey to get through the winter.  Of course, they'll have the eucalyptus to help, come December.

My apiary now

I don't know what to do with these bees.  If one of my other hives doesn't survive this year, I can use these as replacements.  Otherwise I may have to have a fourth hive (four is the maximum county regulations allow) or sell it or give it away.  Do any of you want to start beekeeping?