[enjambres]

I am in upstate NY, too (north of Albany.)

Late swarms are chancy if you don't have the critical resources to give them: drawn combs, both empty and filled. Which of course you won't have as a new beekeeper.

Here are some basic tips:

NEVER feed them any honey except from your own disease-free hives. Honey is a prime way to transfer brood diseases into your colony which is a very serious problem. And honey that's safe for humans to eat often can contain spores of the worst disease ,American Foul Brood. Feed them only granulated white sugar (liquid or solid form) or winter patty. Your use of honey as a lure, while well meaning, may have put them at risk. But it's done. I just wanted to make sure you know about the problem and won't repeat it by giving them honey again.

You can pull frames and inspect when the temps are over about 65 F, and there is no wind. But there is little need to inspect, and some risk to the queen,. Next spring, when you could fix the problem of an injured queen, you can inspect more frequently to learn the skills of frame manipulation. If you have ever seen evidence of brood, that's all you need to know for the rest of the year: that the swarm is queen-right and the queen is laying.

Do not add another box this season. They won't fill it and it will be just empty chilling space.

You will be lucky if they have time to fill more than a modest number of combs in the first box.

I would recommend reducing the space in the box even further by removing some undrawn frames and replacing them with wood follower boards and then foam insulation spacers to take up the empty space. In effect tailoring the cavity size to the size of the colony and the amount of combs they have drawn. I will help you figure out how to do this, if you'd like.

You can also apply insulation panels to outside of the box.

For now, get a piece of 1" foam insulation (you can buy 2' x 2' project panels at Lowes or Home Depot.) Cut it to fit tightly up into the telescoping cover. This will help keep them warm at night now and can be left in permanently. To get the measurements right, take the cover off and replace it with some temporary solid material (cardboard, plywood, plastic political sign material) to keep the heat in the hive while you fabricate the panel.

When you go out to replace the cover, pop off the inner cover (the one with round or oval hole in the middle) and count the number of undrawn frames that you see. You don't have to pull any frames, just look down from the top. Then get the IC back on and add the newly insulated telecover.

From your comments I assume you have a second box and the frames that would go in it, right? Using those frames and the box, determine how much space needs to be filled if you remove the unused frames from the box with the bees in it. Post back and I will help you get a space-reducing project underway.

Keep feeding them. If it gets chilly at night feed them only what they will take in a day and give them fresh and slightly warm syrup every morning. What kind of a feeder do you have?

Get the entrance reducer in and leave it open only with the small notch clear.

Get a small piece of 1/2" mesh hardware cloth about 4 " x 18" to make a mouse guard to go over the entrance - you'll need thumb tacks, too. The best ones are large and nickel coated and sold at Home Depot (not Lowes.)

I would also buy (and install) a robbing screen, since if you plan to eke out the feeding season as long as you can eventually your small weak hive will be the game in town and other nearby bees will try to rob it out. That will be fatal to your colony.

Wintering them in a shed is one solution but it is not as simple as it may seem.

Moving bees is best done in one fell swoop (not the staged moves, which being 15 feet are as difficult on them as moving them 50 feet. Repeated, short moves of 2 - 3 feet are OK.) But if you a considering moving them to a shed for the winter and if it is not closer to where you would like to have them next summer, stop moving while you decide what to do.

The bees don't need 40 lbs of honey (which would be six or seven fully capped deep frames) they may need even more. So you see what the challenge is for these bees.

But you can help by continuing to feed syrup for awhile longer than the natural supplies last. And by provisioning them through the winter, you may be able to get them through.

There are two kinds of "bee patties" one is supplemental pollen and the other is winter patty, which is largely just carbohydrates. The latter is what they need during the winter. Supplemental pollen is harmful for the bees when they can't go out to poop. (Though a small amount of it now might be useful.)

All of my bees came to me as swarms to my farm, so I am partial to swarms. I added a small new one last month. It has about half a box drawn and filled. But since I am an active beekeeper, I have resources from other hives to boost it up.

Still, your swarm was lucky to choose your peach tree to cluster on, and luckier still to find a person who would step up and provide them with an initial home and help this first winter. Even if they don't survive, you have given them a much better chance at success than leaving them on their own.

Nancy

 

[enjambres]

TheresaLynn,

I am at work now, but will reply with more details when I get home.

You're on the right track.

Nancy

 

[enjambres]

Yes, remove the inner cover when the feeder is on. Or if you leave it on, make sure any notch in the rim is securely covered to keep out robbers. Having the feeder closer to the bees will improve uptake, and maybe keep the syrup a little warmer.

Defensiveness of the hive doesn't guarantee queenrightness. Only evidence of brood will do that, i.e. eggs, larval or capped brood. Can you identify those and have you seen them?

To be effective a robbing screen has to have a sturdy frame on all for sides. The open-topped designs aren't effective enough to be worth the trouble, IMO.

A full, capped frame of honey will weigh less 8, or at most, 9 pounds. Wait until you have to lift a whole box of them! I am an old lady, and my doctor's nurse told me I should buy five-lb hand weights to exercise with and keep my bone strength up. I cracked up because I am a beekeeper who uses 10-frame deeps as supers.

Yellow jackets are pests, but they are not primarily after the syrup - they are carnivores and they are after the larvae.

To have perfectly nice frames, you need to keep the frames pushed tightly together so that the little "ears" on the ends of the frames are smushed together tightly. That is if you are using foundation. if you are foundationless (open frames with nothing in the center of them) you can expect a round of misshapen, wonky combs until you get things squared away. I wouldn;' worry to much about it now. Shortly you won;t be doing any inspections and the bees will be left on their own to cope with whatever "mess" (from our point of view) they made. The real risk of non-straight, uneven, weird combs is that it hard to manipulate them safely, and thus they are a great risk to the queen. It may seem that each box has an immutable "set" of its own frames, but in fact you will always be buying new frames, moving some out of service for overhaul, etc. So if they have got off to a bad start this year, you can correct it in the spring. All you'll need is a supply of fresh frames and some determination to go do it. Next spring they will be wild to draw comb. Under the right circumstances they can draw nearly a box of deeps in a week's time.

The two weeks left that they have to forage will not produce nectar or wax at the same rate. Keep feeding if they will take it. If your nights are cold (40s) the syrup may cool off too much for them. (They won't take syrup that's below 50 F.) The fix for that is warm syrup delivered every morning, and only as much as they will eat during the day and early evening. That way it isn't below their temperature uptake threshold.

You are feeding 2:1 syrup, right?

OK, I think that's all your questions tonight.

So back to you'r earlier one about setting up a hive with internal insulation to reduce the size. The easiest foam to cut is 1", in multiple layers to take up as mush space as needed. This also makes things easier next spring.

Which bee-box supplier are you using? Getting follower boards is easiest from the same supplier. Both MannLake and Betterbee sell FB, but you can't count on interchangablity between them.

I will try to post a picture of what I am talking about, this weekend.

Don't worry about asking questions - we love 'em!

Nancy