# Help....



## homemaid

We are very new to this beekeeping. We had a swarm come into a hollow spot in our tree. So we are trying to save them. We opened up the hive and removed all the comb we could get. We put some into frames with rubber bands and into the supers. There was some with larvae we put into the bottom super and some comb with honey we put into the med. super. We have 2 deeps and one med. stacked. The bottom deep we put 3 frames of drawn comb into also. There are many bees inside already. We do not know if we got the queen or not. The opening in the tree we have covered with a cone shaped screen pointing towards the hive. How long will it take before we know if we have a viable hive? Will the bees all just take off if they are not going to stay in this hive? We want to move it to the edge of our field it is now in our front yard. Any and all help or suggestions are much appreciated. Even if you think we went through this for nothing please let us know we are very new to this. We just figured we were not out anything but some time if they do not stay.


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## copperkid3

Sounds like you've done a fine job so far . . . highly unlikely that they

will take off somewhere else . . . they've got brood (young eggs and larvae stage)

that they will feel obligated to take care of. The cone on the bee tree is also a good

idea; keep a close eye on it to make sure that they are coming out and not also finding another

way to get back in. In about a weeks time, I 'd check those drawn combs that you placed

in the first deep and ascertain if there are eggs or young newly hatched larvae present.

If so, then you can be pretty certain that you managed to get the queen in the initial transfer.

Speaking of which, you can then start moving the colony to the edge of the field if so desired.

If you have a wagon or a hand truck, this can be accomplished over the course of several days

or weeks (depending on the distance), by moving the colony several feet each day. A little at

a time and they won't get too confused or lost and will quickly adapt to this migration.

Good luck and enjoy the wonders of the hive. From the way you've handled them so far,

I'm guessing you already have a mentor to assist you. If not, find a bee club nearby and

ask lots of questions and listen well. Otherwise feel free to stop back here and bend our

ears as well. BTW: Did you take pictures of the "great transfer"? If so, please share here!


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## homemaid

We have talked to several people about these bees, most of which said they would not even bother with them. We figured we were not really out much but our time. I have several pictures but I cannot figure out how to upload them. Hubby figures there are about 300 bees moved into the new hive at this time. Still a few inside the tree and several on the screen cone outside. We are just hoping for the best.


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## homemaid

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Here are a couple of the photos of our project.


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## homemaid

How close to the tree should we have the hive we are wanting them in ??


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## Andrei

The pictures look like a mess in the hive.
You have too many boxes and few bees that can not warm them up and the queen can not concentrate her pheromone.
Shrink all back to one box and do some feeding.
When I do an extraction like that I place the hive 2-3 ft away from the cone.
If the queen is still in the tree and you have only 300 bees in the box the transfer will fail.
You need 3000+ bees to start a new queen and to keep the brood warm.
Try removing more bees and then put the cone back.


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## homemaid

Thank you for your help. We are going to open the hive today. The mess that was in the hive during this process was not left in there. He was taking this from the tree and laying into the box, I was transferring what I could into frames. What was left we cleaned out. We will try to get back to just one box and we are feeding sugar water. Should we be feeding something else? I mixed 3-1 sugar and water. The rest of the nest inside of the tree we cannot get to. We are not sure how many bees are in our hive at this time.


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## homemaid

We opened the hive and put it down to 1 box and you said. Here are a couple pictures from today. There are a lot more bees than when we originally done this 6 days ago. Any more help is much appreciated.


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## Andrei

I would feed 1/1 sugar/water and instead of tap water I make a thyme tea.
I add some lemon juice and one raw egg per liter of syrup.
In the box you need the comb with caped brood and the one with some fresh eggs in case the queen get's lost.
After you remove as many bees as you can from the tree start filling the hole with sand to reduce the available space.


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## homemaid

We opened hive today to check for eggs or larvae. We did not see either but on the comb we installed from the tree are 5 or 6 queen cells. I do believe we are making a queen.


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## 1shotwade

I have done this a few times and I always duct tape my hose from the funnel to the opening on the inter top cover forcing the bees to identify with the box.If you have queen cells being developed by the workers,chances are they have discovered they no longer have access to the old queen and are replacing her.Keep feeding with a bordman feeder at 1 to 1 ,Just get into them when you want and they will do the rest.in about 2 1/2 to 3 weeks from now you should see pollen comming into your hive in the early morning. Once you see this you know the queen cells have hatched,a queen has gone on her maden flight and is laying eggs.
There is a good chance these bees will swarm.It's o.k. even if they all leave you still may be able to catch that swarm but if the do swarm chances are you will still have at least one queen.keep us informed!Wade


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## Andrei

The new family is too small to want to swarm and too late in the season.
I would not worry about swarming until next yr.
Now you need to wary about building them up.


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## homemaid

We are feeding, feeding, feeding. The weather here has been in the nineties with heat index of 104 with humidity. We have talked about buying a box of bees and adding them in with what we have.


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## Andrei

No need to spend $$ on bees during the learning period.
Just feed them an acid syrup and could add some egg protein too.
How is the brood pattern?
That will tell you the age and the health of the queen.


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## homemaid

What do you mean by brood pattern?


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## homemaid

Ok today the queen came out of the tree.. We caught her in a queen catcher. The other hive has a new queen. So we put the old queen from the tree into another super with some old comb. The remainder of the bees that were on the tree have gone to the hive with her. We plan to open the covering of the tree and extract whatever comb we can and put it in with her. There are not enough bees in either box to winter over. Now what?? Should we let her out of the catcher or leave her in there a day or so.


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## Andrei

homemaid said:


> What do you mean by brood pattern?


A young and healthy queen will lay eggs starting in the center of a frame and in a spiral pattern lay to the outside depending of the numbers of bees able to cover and warm the larva to 92F.
An older or sick queen will lay a spot here and a spot there and that will be visible after capping.
Based on this observation the beekeeper makes decisions that will determine the survival of that colony.


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## Andrei

homemaid said:


> Ok today the queen came out of the tree.. We caught her in a queen catcher. The other hive has a new queen. So we put the old queen from the tree into another super with some old comb. The remainder of the bees that were on the tree have gone to the hive with her. We plan to open the covering of the tree and extract whatever comb we can and put it in with her. There are not enough bees in either box to winter over. Now what?? Should we let her out of the catcher or leave her in there a day or so.


No problem at this time of the year if both queens are viable.
Feed a sugar solution 2/1 made with thyme tea and lemon juice/vinegar and add in a blender one egg per liter of syrup.
That will provide enough protein and sugar so the queens will lay like crazy and in 2 months you will have strong colonies.

PS. Soon I might not be able to give advise since the admin threaten me with banning. Sorry.


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## homemaid

About an hour after we put the queen into the new super inside of the catcher, we had a swarm if bees came in and went into the hive. There were only about 50 left hanging on the tree when we caught her. They went in with her within minutes. I will get some tyme to make tea and get some of that to them. Do I feed it in the same entrance feeder? When I asked hubby about setting up a bee hive I sure wasn't planning on all of this..LOL


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## Andrei

I stay away from entrance feeders because they are prone to robbing.
I like top feeders.
A 1 inch hole in the lid and a soda/water bottle with 4 pin holes in the cap.
That will provide 24 hrs feeding and no robbing.


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## homemaid

I made the feed solution you said and they ate a quart of it in about 6 hrs. They are hungry little buggers. Hubby said there is a lot in the new box with that queen we put in. He figures around 4,000 are in the hive. 2 frames full both sides and one side on the next frames. I hope you don't get banned and for what? You have been nothing up help to me.


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## Andrei

Frustration on the side of management and my refusal to stop posting the truth.
Anyway, feed them like that aprox 10 - 15 lbs of sugar each to increase the stock in the hive and the confidence of the queen of solid supply so she can lay 3 solid frames of brood.
After that you can feed a quart every 3 days to mimic a good nectar harvest to keep hey laying.
I do not know your area or how cold are the winters but for every frame of bees they should have a frame of honey to go thru the cold winter so you can feed to achieve that if needed. And you can not feed when it is 50F or below because bees will paralyze if the syrup is that cold.
This advise was just in case I am gone.


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## homemaid

We are in Michigan so we get pretty cold winters. I heard somewhere to make a sugar patty to put in and feed them in the winter.?? Not sure how or what about that I really need to keep reading all I can. Should we put a queen excluder in and add a med. super on top of the deep or wait until they fill the frames in the deep first?


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## Andrei

I would stay away from sugar patty's at this time because solid sugar ages the bees faster and you end up with a higher mortality. You still have time to build them up I think.
No need for you to use queen excluder because it could do more harm then good in this situation. It would prevent the queen to stay with the bees in a cold night.
Add a supper only when 8 out of 10 frames in the deep are full of bees. If you add before the colony will develop on the vertical and leave the sides frames empty and then colder in the hive. You want the side frames built and filled to keep warmth in.


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## alleyyooper

Real Michigan help.
http://sembabees.org/

Some fourmlas to use in the spring winter and fall.
http://sembabees.org/nonnavpages/recipes.html

In Michigan you want two deeps to over winter the bees.

 Al


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## homemaid

We actually have 2 hives going. There are about 2000 in the first one that made a new queen. The second box that (we caught the queen on the outside of the tree and put her into) has about 5000-6000 in it. We have put a board in to cut the super down to a 5 frame Nuc. We are in the process of making the other one smaller today. We are I guess extremely lucky to end up with 2 hives from one mess inside of a tree. Most people we talked to told us not to even try it would not work. I feel even if we don't get them through the winter we have had success in what we have done so far.


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## Andrei

The experience is the important part and the understanding of bee life.
Bees are very resilient and in your situation I bet on 80% success.
Feed them and give them space as they grow and if the queens are right they will make it thru the winter.
Where I am I can raise queens all year long with no problem.
Bees will fix human errors.


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## homemaid

Is it normal to have dead bees on the ground in front of the hive. There are few dead ones on the ground? The weather has been cool here for about a week. Rainy the past 3 days. If it warms up today and nt raining we want to open the hives and check things out.


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## copperkid3

The correct answer to such a question is: 

It depends on the hive and other "conditions".

Some colonies are more hygenic than others and

will carry their dead for some distance away before

disposing of the bodies. Others haul them to the doorway

and give them the ol' heave ho! You may also have the beginnings

of poisoning or disease. You also may just have a normal amount 

of bees who have been given the equivalent of obamacare's

"having outlived your usefulness, there's the door . . . see yourself out please!"


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## AverageJo

Are these dead bees in the first hive? The one that made their own queen? If so, I wonder if these are just the old worker bees at the end of their life or got injured during the 'move'. Keep and eye on it. Sweep up what's there and see if the amount lessens in time. Like said above, there may be a number of reasons.


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## alleyyooper

You always have the option of collecting a sample of the dead bees and sending it to Beltsville to the USDA bee lab. It is a free service for American tax payers. Go to their web site to learn how the sample should be handles and packaged.
OK!! There is a cost for the USDA flat rate shipping. But for the piece of mind is worth it.

Also SEMBA has a mentor program. You can lear more about it on the *sembabees.org* site


 Al


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## Andrei

homemaid said:


> Is it normal to have dead bees on the ground in front of the hive.
> There are few dead ones on the ground? The weather has been cool here for about a week. Rainy the past 3 days. If it warms up today and nt raining we want to open the hives and check things out.


Just as normal as having human cemeteries in or around cities. But it is normal too for the birds to come and pick them up for snacks.
Is it above 50F?
If it rained it is understandable for the mortuary workers not to carry the corpses too far from the hive.
Check and look for larva, pattern, nectar deposits, beebread deposits, comb coverage.


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## homemaid

The dead bees are about 10 or so at the second hive. The weather has been COLD and rainy for about a week. We opened the hive again today and made the box smaller. There is pollen, nectar, and some cells with royal jelly. They are building comb on the new plasticell and the old drawn comb we put in is where the nectar, jelly, and pollen are. We can see bees crawling around with pollen on their legs. We are still feeding a lot.


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## Andrei

You described a hard working colony in the development stage.
Except "some cells with royal jelly"
Have you seen the queen?
Are they queen cells or royal jelly stock cells?
Have you seen any larva?


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## homemaid

I believe he is talking about stock cells of royal jelly. I have not been out there but he said he seen the queen the last couple times he checked. This hive was started July 21st from scratch. We put new frames with plasticell and 1 frame of drawn comb. We just put a divider into the super and made it down to 5 frames. How long before we should see larva? We sure are trying to keep these bees going all your help is much appreciated.


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## Andrei

You can see larva after 3-4 days from laying the eggs.
Or let see the queen making schedule.
14 days from the egg to a new virgin queen.
7-10 days for queen to mate.
2-4 days to lay eggs.
July 21st - Aug. 5 = 15 days.
A queen was born yesterday.


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## homemaid

We had a death in the family on Sunday morning so the next couple days are busy busy. We will probably check it again tomorrow afternoon after the funeral.


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## Andrei

Sorry to hear that.
And bees need very little human intervention but educated intervention is very important.


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## Andrei

Take care.


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## homemaid

I am thinking of signing up for the fall seminar by the Michigan Beekeepers Association in Flint,the end of October. Hubby will be on the sugar beet haul but I can go. I read and talk to everyone about bees. I even found a beekeeper at the funeral. She has 9 hives herself. She was very informative, she told me she could talk bees for hours and hours.


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## homemaid

Ok an update hive #1 is very week a lot of the bees are huddled in a clump. Hive #2 is thriving... There is capped honey, capped brood, larvae, and a queen with her butt in the cells. there are about 7-8 thousand by guess in hive 2. Hive 2 was the queen we caught when she came out if the tree. Hive 1 made a new queen.


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## TxGypsy

Wow! What a way to get into beekeeping!

You mentioned using plasticell. In my experience...bees do not like that stuff! I know some folks that have good luck with it, but I don't know how. My queens have generally avoided it. It is always the very last foundation to be drawn out too.

The first hive sounds like it may be hungry. You might spend some time sitting to the side a little ways from the hives and observing. It is pretty easy to figure out when one hive is robbing from another. Robber bees will dart in at the corner of the entrance to the hive....unless the hive being robbed has become so dis-spirited that they have quit trying to guard the entrance...at that point they fly in like they own the place. Then when the robber bee leaves, they will generally fly straight back to their hive. You might try to make your entrance smaller on that hive. It will be easier for the weaker hive to guard. 

I visited a friend that had a few hives and after a few minutes of watching I told him that he was going to loose one of his hives to robbing. He told me there was no way I could know that and that he had just worked that hive and it was fine. He called me a couple of weeks later and told me that he should have listened to me because sure enough he lost that hive. I just love to sit and watch bees and you can tell so much about them before you go into the hive.

I use feeding stations rather than entrance feeders. Entrance feeders promote robbing so badly that I feel they are more negative than positive. I try to work with what a bee does in nature. In nature that bee has to fly away from it's hive to gather nectar. I like to make a feeding station by taking a shallow container and placing several clean rocks in it. Then I pour syrup in the pan up to halfway up the rocks. The rocks give the bees a safe place to land and sip up syrup. I generally place these a pretty good ways away from the hives. The bees will definitely find the syrup and by making them fly to go gather it, it will generally disrupt robbing behavior. I do end up feeding some wild hives as well, but I don't begrudge the wild bees a bit of sugar water during the dearth.

Now that you have 2 hives you have something to compare. When you first started this thread, you wondered if you had a queen. It's pretty easy to find out if you listen to the hive. A hive without a queen is stressed and desperate to get everything back in order and queen-right again. A queenless hive makes a different sound. The workers will also display stress behavior. Watch your strong queen-right hive to get familiar with normal bee behavior. I have a good idea of the health and temperament of my hives before I ever open them because I watch the hive entrance for a while first. LOL...it's also a good excuse to sit and watch bees, which I could do all day.


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