Part of my journey into being apart of the Indiana bee keeping culture this year has been involvement in monthly meetings of my local bee keeping clubs. The central Indiana Bee Keeper’s Association (CIBA) meets monthly at Holiday park, which is a stone’s throw from my neighborhood. Holiday park is also the home of 3 hives that my mentor from the club has been having me help out with as he’s trained me on the finer points of bee keeping.
Each local club rolls up to a state level club, The beekeepers of Indiana runs a booth at state fair every year. Beekeepers from around the state send in bottles, jars, combs, lip balm, soap, really anything they can think of to make from honey or honey by products to sell at the fair. The booth is also home of 2 delicacies, honey ice cream and honey lemonade. Both items are sought after by the masses each year at the state fair.
The booth is staffed by volunteers from the local clubs for the state organization. In exchange for this sweat equity, proceeds from the sales at the booth go back to the local clubs as well as the beekeepers who sent in their wares to be sold.
last Sunday was my shift, and while it was brisk, it was nice to chat with fellow beekeepers and answer questions about bees from folks that visited us. I also could not have left without a representative sample of my fellow hobbyist’s wares.
Right before the fair this week, I received a email from my mentor, David Hocutt. the observation hive we installed earlier this summer at the Holiday Park nature center needed some attention. The girls had been busy and thriving. David put out a call for someone to come take some of the girls away to pre-empt any thoughts they might have to swarm on us.
Swarming is behavior that occurs when a colony feels its outgrown its current house for whatever reason. When that time comes, they start to grow up a new virgin queen in a queen cup, a good chunk of the colony will start to store up extra pollen and honey while scouts will start to look around for a new place to go to. When the girls decide it’s time, they push the queen out the door, and they then take off. They don’t even leave a forwarding address at that point. for beekeepers who have put significant money into their girls, this can be a disheartening moment.
I pointed out to David that my lone hive that I have been working on had room, and I could take on those evicted bees from the Holiday Park hive. Now an added degree of difficulty was that David had to leave to attend the annual Eastern Apicultural Society‘s conference and he couldn’t do the split out. One of the other CIBA members volunteered to help out and we worked out a plan to execute. Part of the plan was some detailed texts with pictures from David to me on how to perform a merge of bees from two different hives together.
If you didn’t know, bee’s perform most of their magic of communication through scent glands. The queen emits a pheromone that sets the tone of the colony, when a bee’s stinger is pulled out, a pheromone comes out to let other bees know to come attack something, when the colony moves into a new hive, workers stand at the entrance and excrete from their Nasonov glands to guide their sisters to their home.
The plan David put before me was to perform what is called a newspaper merge. To achieve this, you place a limiter board on top of your existing hive and place a sheet of newspaper on top of it. You then poke many holes into the paper. This allows for the pheromone from the colony and queen below to come up and gets the transfer students from the other hive a chance to become familiar with their new sisters.
After 3 or 4 days you will start to find chewed up newspaper outside the hive. that is your sign that the girls have worked it out amongst themselves and you can then set the frames from the old hive into yours and drive on with a beefed up labor force.
Don and I met up on Saturday at the nature center, we commenced to our work on the observation hive, to the joy of several families who were visiting and wanting to check out what we were doing.
we were soon done, and put the bees back in place in the nature center with less girls, and new frames for them to fill out and work on.
If you want to know how the bees get in and out of this thing, in the picture above you can see some bees on the wall in the background. that’s attached to a tube that goes into the building that the hive hooks into. that’s the bee expressway.
We cleaned up everything, made sure no bees were left in the nature center, and I headed for home to perform my merge
my procedure took a lot of moving parts, and there were no shortage of honked off bees up in my grill, but at the end I was able to get it setup and now I wait for them to talk amongst themselves and work it out.
Neonpenguin 