Excellent Weather

(This post was lost by Blogger, and was promised to be repaired. Apparently I am one one the 0.16% of people who lost my posts. This was originally posted on Thursday).Finally some spring time weather has arrived. We are out in the fields cultivating to prepare for planting.
I opened up my hives and inspected them and treated them against American Foulbrood disease with a premixed powder.

Low activity, no pollen coming in!

Why are there no eggs dropping?

The green hive is quite disappointing. I am frustrated with the bees and the queen. She is not laying yet and the bees are not taking in any pollen.

Lots of activity, pollen and nectar coming in.

The white hive is doing very well. I treated them with the premix AFB treatment and I also reversed the top super (heavy) with the bottom super(fairly light). The idea is that the bees will better fill the hive when doing so. Some beekeepers disagree with doing so. In between the frames the bees had laid some drone larvae. The bottom picture has a varroa mite circled.

Can you guys see the mite?

The blue hive is just buzzing with activity. I took out some frames to inspect and this is what I saw. So many bees. They too have a few drones buzzing around the hives.

Lots of bees on the frames. The queen has been busy laying!

To my surprise, I found some swarm cells at the bottom of the frames! This is not necessarily an indication that the bees are planning to swarm. There were no eggs in these cells. Crazy to see though.

Swarm cups on the bottom of the frame.

Let's hope that this post does not get erased and lost!

Swarm Mayhem! Part 1 of 2

Sunday morning I went to visit my hives (in my backyard) and thought that it looked like a lot of commotion was going on. I then realized that my hive was swarming out. So I ran into the house and grabbed my video camera and took a video. I will have to figure out a way to post it on the internet; which will probably require getting a youtube account. More to follow on that front...

In the meanwhile, here are two swarms that I attempted to capture.

Largest swarm located 8 ft off the ground and around trunk.

Smaller swarm located 6 feet off the ground and dangling on a branch!

The large swarm obviously was the more attractive swarm to catch but it was right against the trunk of the tree and up 8 feet. I shook the swarm into a box half a dozen times but I never caught the queen. They kept flying out the the box and back to the tree. The weather was also incredible, with the temperature at 30C and with the humidity it felt closer to 40C. After spending an hour or more trying to get the swarm hived, I turned my attention to other things.

I did not have a problem to drop the second (smaller swarm) into a nuc box. It took two tries but then I set the box on a step ladder and the bees accepted it. I must have captured the queen on the second attempt.

I decided to inspect the hives which had swarmed. I noticed that my honey boxes were right full. Due to procrastination I am a bit low on frames; so I decided that it would be a good time to do an extraction session.

Lots of honey. Look how thick that frame is!

The queen excluder ironically had queen cells all over it! How did the queen lay in them?

Multiple queen cells located on queen excluder (between honey box and rest of hive)

When inspecting the hive I saw that a drone bee had a varroa mite on its back. This is not good news. It is definitely believable that the mite levels in the hive is very high, but it always bothers me to see mites on the bees. I will have to treat when the honey season is over.

Mite on a drone bee. Mite levels must be high!

While doing the inspection I noticed that there was no young brood in both of my hives. This is because the queen has swarmed out but it may cause a distruption in the mites' reproductive cycle as well. Time will tell.

To be continued!

Happy Earth Day!

Do something for the planet... keep bees. Or plant bee-friendly plants around your property to support native bee and other pollinator populations.

Today I did an inspection on the single box hives located at my parents farm. These are my observations:
The Blue Hive:
This hive is only covering 5 frames at most. This is a bit concerning because I am feeding them a pollen patty and extra sugar and they seem to have a slow build up. Upon further investigation; I noticed that the brood pattern is pretty spotty. This means that the queen may not be laying very well. My records show that she is a queen from mid summer. She should be well bred and I bought her from a reputable breeder. The workers have not built any supercedure cells; so that means that they still have faith in her!

 As a precaution I treated both hives with oxycet-25 which is an antibiotic Terramycin which is mixed with powered sugar and sprinkled on the top bars. This prevents American Foulbrood (which if you ever get; requires you to burn the entire hive).

As you can see, the powder is sprinkled on the top bars. The hive also had an indication of Chalkbrood disease which shows up in a damp spring. There is no treatment for it and the bees quickly get rid of it when their hive has more ventilation. I am not too worried about Chalkbrood.

The White hive:
This hive was a swarm capture from late summer and it is doing amazing. They cover all of the frames and they have a very good brood pattern. I have no history on these bees. I do not even know what breed they are. I have a feeling that they may be Italians. They have a very strong spring build up. Because of their limited space and the age of their queen (unknown but likely older than one year because the old queens swarm). They have build two supercedure cups in the top third of a frame. This means that one of these potential queens will replace the current old queen. But I have other plans for her and cut out the cells. I also found a potential swarm cell on the bottom of the frame; which I also cut out.

 Those cells are prefect spheres and are built offset from the rest of the cells. These particular ones are in early stages and did not have any eggs in them. If they would have eggs in them, the bees would feed them royal jelly so that they grow to be queens. As the queens grow, the workers would shape the cell to look peanut shell-like. The first queen to emerge would go around the hive and break all the other cells and sting the other queens to death; yeah, its' a harsh world.

Here is a picture of my queen as she scoots across some of her beautifully capped brood. Look at the size of that queen and her darker color!

I did all of my hive inspections without gloves. It was pretty liberating. It forces you to work more fluidly and for you to be a lot more careful. I must have done it right because I did not get a single sting and I did not even use much smoke.