Now what? Questions after my 11th hour hive inspection today...

[Ann Maria Bell]

Hello Bee Nerds! 

If anyone else is at home on a Saturday night thinking about bees, I have some questions. 

TL;DR version:
Q1) I have frames from parts of hives that were vacated or under attack from wax moths that have some honey and some stuff I don't recognize and I'm not sure how to deal with them, how to identify what is on the frames, how to clean them up, how to store them.

Q2) How much honey should be left in the hive for overwintering bees? (I know it probably depends on how many bees but I'm not sure how to know that.) Can/should little bits of honey on frames from vacated parts of a hive be scraped off and fed back to the bees?

Here's the longer version:

Today I had a look inside a small hive with just 3 medium boxes and a queen excluder that I had forgotten to remove. I was thinking of letting the hive go and harvesting the honey but thanks to some thoughtful and much appreciated suggestions I decided to see if I could get the excluder out today while the weather was warm. 

There were quite a few bees in the hive, the top super was completely full of honey and there seemed to be honey as well as bees in the middle one as well so I just scraped off the extra comb and honey where the excluder was and put it back in the top of the hive on a piece of newspaper, using another medium super to create the space. This hive was a secondary swarm that we caught two summers ago and that made it through last winter. (photo of where the excluder had been before I started scraping).

Right now they have a completely full medium super and however much honey is in the two other medium boxes. It's possible the bottom medium box had been vacated. I have honey from other hives that I could give them and I can feed them sugar, now and later in the winter. What are the chances for a hive of this size? 

The much taller hive next to it had seemed the strongest going into the fall despite evidence of an attack by yellow jackets (lots of dead bees and wasps in front of the hive.)  There was a lot of condensation when I peaked under the cover a few weeks ago, but there wasn't any today. The hive consisted of a deep, 2 mediums, a deep and a medium. The top medium was completely full of honey and no bees. The deep below had honey and was the only box with bees in it, though there really didn't seem to be that many bees. It was hard to see (photo). Some bees flew out but I couldn't really see where the bees were, in part because of how the hive got built with missing frames. 

All the boxes below that one were vacant, dark comb, a few dead bees, some patches of dark honey in the corners of frames, a few full frames on the edges. I took out the two medium supers but left the vacant deep on the bottom and put the deep with the bees in it on top of that. The deep with the bees is not full of honey because I could lift it. I put together a medium super with partial frames of honey from the lower ones I removed. I didn't put the full medium super back on because it was too heavy. (I didn't think to take some of the frames out.) Suggestions? I could put more honey back on.

 

The last hive had been doing great all summer but then seemed to get weaker as fall approached. I discovered that wax moths had been on a rampage. The bees were clustered in the very top medium. It looked clean but I didn't take it apart to look for moths. I took everything below it away. I put a clean medium above it with a few full frames of honey that the moths hadn't attacked. I don't have much hope for this one but wasn't sure what else to do. Maybe this hive should be abandoned? 

Meanwhile, I have 5 mediums and 1 deep that I took in today. Some frames are completely full of honey, others have quite a bit of honey but have been attacked by moths, some are just old drawn out wax and some of them I just have no idea what's on them.

Any late night or last minute suggestions would be hugely appreciated as the weather looks like it's going to hold for another day or two. 

Thanks again! 

Ann

[marvin]

I'll take a shot at some of this:  First off, you usually want to be done manipulating hives well before Dec. 1.  You want the bees to have their housekeeping set up for the winter by now.  We caught a break this year with the mild weather, but in the future try to have things squared up by Nov.1.  

Frames with wax moths?  Freeze them.   Either in a freezer or else store them in an unheated garage, shed, etc., for the winter.  They die fast.  If the frames aren't totally destroyed, you can put them on a good hive next spring and the bees will clean them up.  

Wax moths in an active hive?  That's bad news.  Usually, in a healthy hive, the bees will police the moths out.  If they're established, then your hive is probably not as healthy as you think, or you have too much room for your bee population to police.  Getting rid of some of the dead boxes and infested frames will probably help, but the moth larvae in the heated hive will probably continue to cause trouble if the bees can't keep up with them.

How much honey?  The number 80-100lbs is tossed around a lot, which is basically 1 deep or 2 mediums full of honey.  I overwinter pretty regularly with 2 deeps, 1 of which is full of honey, plus a shim with a fondant cake as emergency feed.  Some folks will go with 1 deep+1 medium full of honey for winter.  Like you said, it depends on how many bees you have going in.  I wouldn't scrape frames of honey back into the hive just because of the mess.  

If you had a condensation problem, try to get some sort of upper opening to get some air flow.  Even a popsicle stick under a cover can help.  Just something to let the moist air rise and exit the hive.  

Other than that, at this point in the season, just make sure they have a good quantity of honey on and let them go.  Good luck.