Adventures of a Beekeeper: Colorado

Last summer was a very exciting year for me. Without a doubt, the highlight was in August, when I traveled to Denver, Colorado and completed a bee inspection on a roof in the city.

This was my first bee inspection on a hive other than my own. Going into the inspection I was not sure of the species or what was going on in any of the hives or the history of inspections that have been previously done on the hives. But from the movement in and out of the hive entrances, I could tell there was a lot of bees bringing back tons of pollen which meant they were in good standing.

All the hives were langstroth hives with either all deeps, all mediums, or a mixture of deeps with mediums on top. The height of all these hives gave me the clue that they were doing very well. It took a couple of minutes to successfully light my smoker, and once it was lit, I dove right in.

Observing the bees in the first hives entrance, I noticed the bees were a lighter color which meant they were most likely Italian or a Carniolan breed, and a not Russian breed which are usually darker brown. Opening the inner cover, the bees came out more aggressive than what I was used too. It was clear from the wax on the inner cover and the tops and in between the frames, that the previous beekeeper had either not cleaned the excess wax throughly or had not been there in a while. It took a lot of pressure and scraping to get a good enough working environment to be able to remove the frames to start looking at the bees.

The top frames were tremendously full of honey, so much so that they were very heavy to pull out and detach from the wax build up on the edges. I had to use every ounce of energy to pry one out which would allow me to have some extra space to move the additional frames around. I eventually had to go searching for additional tools that would help me lift the frames, I came across two heavy duty spring clamps used in wood working that made great clamps for lifting out the remaining frames without destroying the wax or disturbing the bees.

Being a beekeeper also means being a problem solver. Every time you open a hive, there will be different situations where you have to react quickly and solve the problem at hand, and determine the next steps to ensure your hive is healthy and has a strong survival rate.

Looking through the top medium box of the first hive, the bees were very close to running out of room with all 10 frames in the box being completely filled with honey on both sides. The next steps would be to remove the frames out of the top medium box and replace with new frames if it were mid to early summer, that way the bees would have enough time to build out the comb and fill it back with more honey. But since it was the end of summer, the next step would be to switch out some filled frames with empty ones that the bees can continue to fill and add a bee escape board in between the second and third box on the top to prepare for a fall honey harvest.

The Bee Escape Board for a 10-frame Hive gives the bees an exit to leave the top box but not an entrance to go back up. This would eventually over a week or so, clear all the bees out of the top box so the beekeeper can come back and just grab the top box without worrying if there are any bees inside of it. This is an important step because having the bees run out of room in the hive pushes the bees to swarm. Swarming this late in the season would cause the swarmed colony minimal survival rate in nature.

There were one or two queen cups in development on the bottom of the top medium frames, which you can slightly see in the image above. A swarm occurs when a hive decides they are getting too crowded and running out of room they will start to build a new queen cell to make a second queen and eventually leave with her to find a new location. The original queen would remain with half of the colony still in the hive. Queen cells are larger than regular worker cells because the queen has a much longer abdomen (to hold all her eggs). However no queen cups were built out too much to be worried about.

Looking through the rest of the hives on the roof, they were all in very good shape. Its amazing how much pollen and nectar bees can find and come back with in a city setting, especially a rooftop.

For the rest of the remainder of the inspection I took a look at the other hives to see the room they had as well as trying to find eggs, larve, capped brood cells and the queen.

Overall this was a very exciting adventure and am so grateful to learn more about different bees and see how they perform in different environments. On to the next adventure…

Blog

Adventures of a Beekeeper: Colorado

Last summer was a very exciting year for me. Without a doubt, the highlight was in August, when I traveled to Denver, Colorado and completed a bee inspection on a roof in the city.