By Farmer Shaun
Hurricane Irene has come and gone. The Urban Farm and the Early Street Community Garden did not suffer too much damage, but the GIG bees sure did.
Before the storm, I put fifty pounds of weights on each hive, but that was not enough for Irene and her mighty winds. When I came back after the storm had passed, it was a sad sight. It looked as though the wind sent the hives up in the air like a rocket and threw them back down. The hive bodies that once stood vertically were a few feet away from the hive stands, split open and upside down.
The hives had been left exposed to the strong rains for many hours. There were wet bees and dead bees in piles inside and outside the hive. Even though most of the bees were dead and most of the frames were too wet to be saved, we still had some dry bees willing to fight and make it. I still had hope.
The next day I returned to the hives with a mission to find out what I could do to save them. I started by observing the bees activity. Though the bees didn’t seem to have their usual energy in defending their hive, they were still flying in and out of the hive. I had hope that there was something left to save.
I went through each hive body box and inspected each frame. I had to scoop out thousands of dead bees as I went through. If I left the dead bees there, the living ones would not be able to clean out and repair their home.
As my inspection continued, I realized I couldn’t continue to use any of the frames in the hive. This meant that all the work the bees had done to create the comb and fill it with honey and brood (bee eggs) would be a waste. But I still had hope. In my car was a dry hive body with 8 frames of drawn out foundation—the basics for starting a colony again. The hive could be reborn.
The new hive body was set up and the bees began building right away. Their activity flying in and out of the hive increased. Sadly, someone very important was missing—the queen bee. Without the queen the colony would not survive, and neither Myra (Bowie McCready, Grow It Green Founder) nor I could locate her or confirm that she was alive. Myra suggested that I call the apiary that supplied us with bees earlier in the season, Harvey’s Honey, and ask if they had any queens for sale.
Luckily, Harvey’s had a couple of queens left and agreed to put one on hold for me. The next day, I made the 200 mile roundtrip to retrieve the new queen and deliver her to our newly repaired hive.
A healthy hive will replace its queen itself, but a hive that has experienced trauma relies on the beekeeper to step in when such an important task is at hand.
The queen comes in a cage, closed with a sugar plug which gives the colony time to accept the queen as they eat at the plug and release the queen. After I replaced the queen, I added four frames of honey to help the hungry bees gain strength. Boy, were they happy when I put that food in there! Three days later I confirmed that the queen was released from her cage. She has begun the mating process and we can all hope to have new bees born within the next month. If the hive is strong enough, she might make it through the winter.
So the hive without a name before now has the most fitting one. Phoenix. I hope my next post reports that she has lived up to the legacy of that name.
