We installed our bees on a Saturday. The installation went great and without incident. It was a great learning experience for me and for Courtney and I was thrilled to finally have our bees here. To me, the journey could finally, truly begin! During the first week or so, any book or experienced beekeeper will tell you to leave the hive alone and let the bees become accustomed to their new home and to become acquainted with their new queen. So that's what we intended to do. While we did leave them alone, I will admit I found myself routinely being drawn down to the hives to just watch and observe. It was almost hypnotic in a way. Seeing the methodical way of the bees coming and going to and from the hive was exciting and kept me wondering about the drama may or may not be taking place inside each hive. Almost immediately after the installation I noticed that one hive behaved differently than the other (reason #692 that all beginning beekeepers should begin with at least two hives!) Hive #1 seemed kinda laid back, relaxed and relatively calm while Hive #2 seemed much more active and busy...almost rushed. Being a new beekeeper I wasn't sure what to make of the difference but I knew that in a week I'd get to peek inside the hive to really inspect the two hives and admire their handiwork.
Fast forward to Wednesday (four days after installation) when I just happened to step outside and discover this:
This is what I not so lovingly described as a "change in plans for the day." The bees from Hive #1 (the calmer hive) had absconded their box and were on a branch about 8 feet up in our live oak tree. The term absconded in the world of beekeeping means that all of the bees leave the hive in search of a new home. Hmph....An inspection of the inside of the hive box revealed this:
The frames were all empty, the queen had been released and some burr comb had been built around the queen cage. Here's a closer look at the queen cage (after I removed it):
The bees had been originally installed into a 10 frame box with wax foundation, an entrance reducer and a screened bottom board. The frames revealed the bees had begun drawing out comb on two of the frames and the queen had actually started laying a few eggs as you can see in this next photo (look for the small dot like grains of rice in the middle of each cell):
Thinking that the bees may have been unhappy with their new home for some reason, I opted to get the swarm and place it in what is called a "nuke" or a nucleus hive box. A nuke is just a smaller box that will only hold 5 frames (versus the 10 I had.) The idea behind a nuke is that the bees can stay warmer and don't feel quite as overwhelmed with the huge amount of space of a larger 8 or ten frame box.
So...we caught the bees, put them in the nuke and stood anxiously while we waited to see if they would give us some indication the queen was still present. After about 10 minutes, we saw this:
If you look closely you can see several of the bees standing at the entrance of the nuke with their rear ends "up in the air"...this action tells the other bees "This is home. The queen is here. Come on in!" Since I saw this, I was fairly encouraged. I felt like we had caught the bees attempting to abscond their hive and moved them to a smaller, cozier hive in time...but I was wrong.
By Thursday afternoon, the bees had absconded again and this time they were long gone. We had lost a hive. $80 just flew away after five short, honey less days. Hmph. I consider this my official initiation into the wonderful world of beekeeping.
So, after standing outside feeling totally discouraged and wondering why in the world I had talked myself into this expensive hobby I pulled my boot straps up (so to speak) and went inside to research what may have happened. Here's what I've learned:
Newly packaged bees abscond for many different reasons. Sometimes it's a lack of food, sometimes it's overheating and sometimes it's because of frequent disturbance. Other times they just don't like their new home for some reason. Our hive boxes were brand new and since we are new beekeepers we had to use new wax foundation so there was no real reason for our bees to "know" this was home.
When bees abscond, they will likely swarm together while scouts are sent out to search for a new home for the colony. Information I've gathered advises that perhaps we should have physically moved the nuke to a different location from where our original hive was so that when the scouts came back to tell the colony where their new home was, the bees would have been gone.
Other sources have suggested that it would have been a good idea to recage the queen or to have used a queen includer in the bottom of the box itself so that it would have been impossible for the queen to leave the hive. This would have given the bees a greater chance to build comb, for the queen to lay eggs and for everyone to have some time to make things feel like home.
Either way, this has been a great (although costly!) lesson in beekeeping. I am super thankful however for this lesson. It has given me the chance to learn more about bee behavior, to connect with other beekeepers and to understand a little more about what a new package of bees requires.
Ultimately, Courtney and I plan to keep bees for the long haul and so even though this was a painful loss so soon into our journey we are not deterred! We've learned our lessons and are moving on to the next adventure...
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