I noticed the other day that there were quite a few dead bees in front of the “Bees Rules” hive. This got me a little bit anxious to see if there were more serious issues going on. It was 47 F. today so I figured that I could take a look at the hive tops […]
What an interesting year. It has been a real learning experience. I’m fairly confident that there are more interesting things to learn during Year 2. I have to say, year 1 exceeded my expectations. The weather has gone unseasonably cold early in November this year. I have not gotten into the hives this month and
Last pass through the hives before we get into Winter. I had feeders on all four hives up through October 7th. Each hive seems to have a solid medium of honey on the top box. The Misty nuc is heavy on top. All of the hives are loaded with bees. Pretty much solid from side
I’ve had two tasks that I wanted to get done with the bees before winter sets in. These were to lower my hive stand by about 10 inches and the other was to treat the main hives for mites with formic acid (formic pro). Formic Pro should not be used it the temperatures are expected
Ran out this morning and bought a replacement queen for the “Bees Rules” hive. Very carefully went through every frame multiple times to find the queen(s). Only found one nicely plump queen with all of her bits and pieces in place (on the 23rd frame I checked). Caught her in a clip and went through
I did an inspection of the Bees Rules hive on the 15th and, once again, didn’t find the queen during the inspection. In reviewing the pictures of the frames taken during the inspection I did find a beaten and battered queen. Plan is to get a new queen for this hive over the weekend. We’ll
The Tardis hive seems to be real active and healthy. Time to tear it down and see how things are really going. While I have observed what I think are good quantities of wet brood and capped brood, I haven’t found the queen the last couple of times I’ve done an inspection. Today’s plan was
The little NUC that I split off of the “Bees Rules” hive with a couple of the supercedure cells raised a new queen in July. After she had laid up all of the available space in the NUC, the bees – once again – sperceded her. Not sure if it was a problem with the
One of the current problems that bee keepers are having relates to low hive survival rates, particularly over the Winter. A lot of hobbyist bee keepers just accept the losses and buy replacement bees in the Spring. I think I need a more sustainable approach. I would prefer to just have one single beehive. Unfortunately,
Need to catch up here a bit. Had a bit of excitement this summer. I tried to replace the queen in my “Bees Rules” hive. The process had gone so smoothly in the Tardis hive that I actually thought I knew what I was doing. Wrong! Went into the “Bees Rules” hive a week after