It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since I got my bees – I remember the anticipation and the nerves as I started on the crazy adventure of being a “backyard beekeeper”, now it feels quite normal and I often think about how funny the top of the garden would look without the hives.
I promised I would write a couple of blog posts after my initial one last June, but never did – so a quick overview of how the season went.
After the first few weeks of having the bees, I finally persuaded my dad to take the beekeeping course so that I had some help at the hive. We did hive inspections every week or ten days when the weather was decent, a very important part of having urban bees – for the health of the hive, but also the safety of the community. It never gets old going into the hives and seeing the amount of work the bees can do in a week or two. Over the summer we saw the bees bring in a lot of pollen and nectar, make a lot of honey, the queen continued to lay eggs, and more and more bees were in the hive, all really good signs. I really can’t believe how much a frame of capped honey weighs.
In August we were doing a hive inspection and noticed queen cells – which is an indication of one of two things. The bees have run out of room and are going to swarm, or something has happened to the queen. Keeping bees is a bit of an investment, but you also get extremely attached to them, so I was quite nervous seeing these cells. Was our queen sick? Had she died? Were they going to swarm? The swarming scared me the most, because it means that the hive naturally creates a new queen and the old queen will “swarm” taking half of the bees with her. This is dangerous for many reasons in an urban setting, and something you want to avoid. I called Dustin to see if he would come and help us investigate. He was able to find the queen and tell us she was healthy, so although it was super late in the year to split the hive, we did. What does this mean? We found the original queen (the new queen hadn’t hatched yet) and moved her with about half of the bees, and some resources into a new hive. There is always a chance that a split won’t work, or they won’t be able to build up enough resources (pollen and honey – food for them for the winter), especially with a late season split. A few weeks later the new queen had hatched in the original hive. This meant we went from having one hive to two hives. This is where it gets a bit confusing.
Hive 1: Original queen, some of the bees and resources from the original hive, in a new hive
Hive 2: New queen, half of the bees and resources, in the original hive
We watched and checked both hives until the weather changed and temperatures started to consistently drop below zero which meant it was time to wrap the bees for winter. We insulated the hives and said “see you in the spring” to our bees. I was hopeful both would survive the winter, but had a gut feeling we would lose Hive 1 because they lacked the resources that were in the original hive, even though they had the original queen. Over the winter on warm sunny days we were sometimes able to see signs of bee life – whether that was bees coming out of the hive to die (one or two at a time) or bee poop in the yard. Fun fact: bees won’t poop in their hive. During the winter they’ll come out on warm sunny days to do this before going back into the hive. This spring there was a really warm day where the snow was dotted with bee poop, a sign that the hive was alive. Who knew you could get so excited about bee poop?
As the days got longer and warmer we saw signs of life from hive 1. A relief as that was the hive I didn’t think would make it. Hive 2 seemed to be warm inside based on snow melting on the top, which gave me hope. We saw lots of signs of life with bees coming and going as the weather warmed up from hive 1, but nothing from hive 2. I saw signs of life coming from hive 2 at one stage, which gave me even more hope. We unwrapped the bees towards the middle of May. One afternoon I was in the garden and noticed ants going in and out of Hive 2, which was a sure sign we had lost the hive. I quickly ran up (without a suit) and opened it up to see a whole lot of dead bees. A sad moment for sure. We cleaned up that hive, seeing just how much honey was left in the hive, we know we lost them early on in the winter, we aren’t quite sure why. When I saw bees coming and going from this hive a few weeks prior, it was likely the bees from hive 1 “robbing” honey.
Fast forward to today – we picked up a second nuc at the beginning of June, these bees are in what was hive 1, and although weaker, numbers are starting to grow, and they are busy bringing in pollen and nectar. Hive 2 is so busy, and there are SO many bees. This weekend when we did a hive inspection, we saw queen cells – which I know are there because of the number of bees, it’s a strong hive and they are going to swarm if we don’t deal with them soon. So, we will split this hive and my friend will take our original queen with some bees and resources to fill her hive as bees were in short supply this year due to covid. One positive if I can say that about losing a hive early in the winter is that you have a lot of resources to use in the case of having to split a hive.
So many of you asked last year did we harvest honey? We took two frames of honey, which gave us about 2L. I wouldn’t have taken any honey in our first year, but we had these extra two frames and my niece and nephew were eager to try the honey from our bees. I’ll be honest, I don’t really like honey, but somehow when it’s made from your bees, it tastes really good. It was super pale in colour and very floral – quite delicious. Some of you maybe even got to try it in a workshop over the winter. Something I didn’t realize, or perhaps never thought about when it comes to honey, is that honey is the food for the bees over the winter. Taking too much honey from the bees leaves them with little food for the winter. More than that, the bees work so hard all summer to build comb onto the frames (to store honey, pollen, for the queen to lay eggs), when we take the honey (as a small backyard beekeeper) from these frames, we also get rid of the comb that takes them so long to build. After a few years of having bees we will have frames of comb from overwintering the bees (as they eat the honey, the comb stays intact), which means they will be able to build up the honey supply much quicker as more bees can be out foraging and less in the hive building comb. Perhaps this year we will take another litre or two, but really, I keep bees to learn from them and of course the benefits of pollination, any honey we get is just a bonus.
If you are eager to learn and see more about my backyard bees, be sure to follow along on Instagram stories.
To read about this all got started last year, click here.