Neighbor Ernie with 29+ years bee experience

Finally I took the time to connect with Ernie, a neighbor who has two commercial type hives in his yard and who has many years experience as a commercial beekeeper in California. Wow! what a wealth of information and he's willing to do a hive check with me and Jody..that will be priceless. He has the Langstroth box hives with two brood boxes and two "western" supers that are filling with honey; he estimates there is about 140# there already. These hives were brought in as established hives this spring.

Ernie is not familiar with top bar hives but he knows bees. We talked about my smaller hive being a "swarm hive" which means the bees will swarm next spring and I need to be ready with another hive for them and be watching for their swarm because they will not automatically move in. We then talked about basically moving this colony to a larger hive (which I had already planned to get) and starting another colony in this hive.

When we examine the hive, Ernie will show us how to identify eggs in the cells, determine how much honey we can remove, and more. Ernie showed me mites on the sticky boards of his hives and talked about the acceptable level of mites in a hive and what will be done if it gets too high. I haven't seen mites in the pictures of bees from my hive but checked the bottom board with a magnifying glass when back home--none there fortunately. Also, while talking at Ernie's hives I saw a drone return to the landing board and get taken down by a worker bee--she was on top of him for maybe 5 seconds and then dropped him to the ground. Ernie picked him up and showed me that the wings were off and told me that indicates that honey flow is ending. A yellow jacket quickly came to 'clean up' while the drone was still alive--goodness, nature is efficient. Although there is no landing board on a top bar hive and the bees fly directly through the entrances, I'm going to watch to see what's happening here.

When I pulled out the sticky/bottom board today to check for mites, I saw several bee body parts that were being moved out of the hive through a small crack between the board and the hive sides. We planned to close the crack off with bungee cords--now I'm debating about that.

And I got another bee book to read as well as received my first issue of the American Bee Journal so this will be one bee filled day. Between the bees and beginning kayaking and being in this area during summer, life is soooo good here...oh, and family and friends of course!