Westover and Sons, Apiaries

(Dallas, TX) Given that my youngest brother Gerrit has partnered with my father in their beekeeping enterprise over the past year, it’s high-time to update the name of the website. From “Westover and Son, Apiaries” to “Westover and Sons, Apiaries.”

(College Station, TX) Our latest endeavor is to try raising some queens for the first time. So far it looks pretty good. The picture is of my youngest son, Gerrit, holding the queen rearing frame that he built. He also did the grafting of young larvae into the queen cups. We made the queen cups ourselves from dipping a dowel into hot wax several times.
The queen cells that were accepted by the bees have been fed and drawn out, and all except for one were already capped. They only remain in the open larval stage for 5 days. The nurse bees fill the cell up with royal jelly so the larva will have plenty to eat and finish its development inside the cell after it is capped. It then pupates and emerges. It takes all of about 15 days for total development. They are in the egg stage for 3 days, and on day 4 when they are about a day old, the larvae are grafted into the queen cells with the royal jelly that accompanies them at the time. We then put them into a queenless starter hive that had nothing but nurse bees shaken into it with empty comb for the bees to cluster on. After one day, they are then moved to a finisher hive that is queenright with the queen below a queen excluder to finish them off.
Today is day 11, so we need to either cage or remove them by day 15, 4 more days. We can then put them into small queenless nucleus hives so they can fly out and mate and we can start some new bee hives with the new queens.

My youngest son, Gerrit, and I went to Sugarland (part of greater Houston, Texas) on Saturday and did a bee removal from the wall of a garage. It was quite extensive. We cut out brood comb and honey and pollen and mounted them in empty frames with rubber bands. We used a bee vacuum to capture the bees and put them in buckets with screened lids.

According to the owners, the hive had been there since 2008, so it was very large. We got close to 4 gallons of honey from the wall. After returning home, we used my homemade honey extractor to press the

honey from the comb through a screen into a clean food grade plastic bucket. The honey is very high quality and tastes great. The honey press is made with a car jack. A mesh bag is hung between two plates which are pressed together using the jack, and a large glass casserole dish is placed underneath to catch the honey as it drips down. It is then poured through the screen to filter out wax and extraneous material. The screen has graduated mesh and the honey drips through.

I installed a honey gate at the bottom of the bucket so as the honey sits and clarifies it can be bottled from the bottom using the honey gate to dispense it into bottles. If needed, later the honey can be fed back to the bees to help them.

(Richardson, TX) Several things have conspired together to lead me to my current state of mind: to stop keeping bees. Due to my bees drinkings habits (like humans that way, you know?) I can’t keep hives at my house. That’s made things much less convenient for me. Then I had the disastrous hive failures that had never occurred before (I blame the West Nile virus-inspired aerial mosquito spraying). And finally, I’m more motivated to see my father and younger brother succeed in their bee enterprise in College Station, TX. That’s why I’ve given them all my captured swarms. So I am contemplating giving them my very last hive that is sitting at my friend Paul’s house in East Dallas. It’s a strong hive (5 medium supers tall). We pulled 2 medium supers last weekend, extracted 17 medium frames of light amber honey. It could be the last honey I extract from my own bees for some time.

I can report that my father and brother now have ~24 hives. They will harvest very little honey this year. The intention is to strengthen these hives in preparation for expanding to an even greater number of hives next year. The goal is to reach sideliner status with dreams of commercial status. Using natural organic beekeeping methods. No chemicals/pesticides. No plastic frames. No artificial feeds. The path from where they are at to where they want to be is daunting. Costs and logistics. And the risk of catastrophic losses looming every year. But the gamble is that the natural way of keeping bees will lead to less losses.

I can’t imagine that I will stay out of beekeeping forever. I mean, my wife would kill me for buying that Maxant motor-powered extractor if I never used it again. I do plan on expanding my efforts to bait swarms next year to help my family beekeeping operation.

Here’s a video I took today showing neighborhood bees “robbing” my wet supers in my bait hive. Plus a cameo from a (not so) friendly chameleon.

(Richardson, TX) I was moving stuff from my garage to my truck. Bee equipment actually. Made a trip to the truck (which was just 30 feet away), and returned and suddenly there was a cloud of bees. So I turned on my phone camera and this is what happened next.

I’ve seen swarms form from my own hives, I’ve also seen swarms leave for a new home (destination unknown). But this is the first time I’ve seen a swarm arrive at a new home. Pretty cool.

Yesterday and today I cut plywood boards and 2×4′s to make beehive tops and bottom boards but I have not put them together yet. I also got materials together to make inner covers.

Today I went through many of the beehives in my back yard. I removed frame feeders and replaced them with frames of foundation. I also added a super of empty frames of foundation to a one-story hive and moved two frames of brood up into the top super, replacing them in the bottom box with frames of foundation so the bees below can make space for the queen to lay in and she can also move up and down between the two boxes. I put a frame of foundation between two fully drawn frames of brood so they can draw the wax out and build a straight brood comb. I think this will help the colony grow faster. They look like they are doing very well.

Other hives seem to not be doing as well. I took a frame of open brood from one hive and placed it into another hive that had no brood so the bees can raise a new queen if they don’t have one. After looking through almost all of the hives, it was a little discouraging because so many of the hives were not doing as well as I had thought they were doing (in my imagination) before I looked at them. It’s not always easy to get the bees to be successful. I do the things that I think will help them be successful, but they then have to do their part too in order for my work to help them. It is a cooperative venture between me and the bees.

I didn’t see any mites, but I did see some hive beetles. I killed the ones that I saw. I only got stung once. The bees in one of the hives were particularly unhappy that I was bothering their hive, but I was well-protected, so did not have much trouble outside of getting hot and sweaty.

My youngest son and I drove down to Katy, Texas, and picked up a nice big swarm this morning. The homeowner got them to go into a cardboard box and set it at the side of their house, so all we had to do/could do was just pick up the box and bring it back to College Station. They had cut a little entrance hole in the box and the early morning bees were starting to orient, so we had to leave a few behind, but it was a nice heavy swarm. We put it on honey super cell (HSC) that we had smeared honey into the center frames, a queen excluder underneath to keep the queen from leaving, and they seem to be doing fine. So in one month and one week, that’s one cut-out from a tree and two swarms since returning to central Texas. It’s an hour drive to Katy, but we need the bees. Going to Austin to pick up 5 nucs this weekend and do a removal in Brenham too.

Since returning to Texas from Japan, my youngest son and I have split two hives, melted beeswax and dipped foundation sheets, milled about 50 4.9 small cell foundation sheets from our own wax using our own foundation mill, trimmed and mounted them into frames and installed some of them in hives. Yesterday we got a swarm call and successfully collected the bees and installed them on honey super cell frames with a queen excluder on the bottom.

We have made tops and bottoms and put together precut boxes that were purchased previously. It’s hard work, but my son is a hard worker so things are going well. Today we went out and cut out a feral colony from a dead tree. My son got stung around 20 times (he was running the chainsaw), but it was a successful removal and we saved brood comb, using rubber bands to hold them into the frames. We also used a plastic bucket bee vac in the removal. At first the bees were very defensive, but as we progressed, they became less and less defensive and more demoralized as we took apart their nest and reconfigured it in a hive box.

We are now seriously implementing the things learned from this list and Dee, working hard, and busy as bees.

Layne Westover
South Central, Texas (formerly of Fukuoka, Japan)

Today I was able to get a pretty good photograph of the queen bee in the observation hive surrounded by her attendants. This hive is in my office and is comprised of one frame. They seem to be doing well.

Here is a short update on the nucleus hive I put together: it has been raining quite a bit the last several days, so today was the first day I was able to open up the nucleus hive of western honey bees on the roof of the building to check on it.

I opened it to look for the queen and see how everything is going. When I opened it, I could not find the/a queen and the bees seemed irritated and were moving around a lot. On the comb furthest from the comb on which the old queen should have been, though, I found many capped queen cells. I did not count them, but it looked to me like there could have been a dozen or more. I was kind of shocked to see so many queen cells. Either they killed the old queen or I accidentally did not get her into the hive or killed her without knowing it, or they decided to replace her, or something else I haven’t thought of triggered the decision to make a new queen. Actually, I am disappointed, but that’s the way it goes. I’ll just have to accept what the bees decided to do and go with the flow.