Honey Flow!

Thursday of last week I placed two more brand new short honey supers onto both of my hives in my second yard. These frames were brand new and undrawn.

These are the pictures of the frames when I went to go see the hives this evening. It has been 4 days and there has been two days of partial rain in that mix.

Hives with honey supers on top of brood chambers.

This is what my hives look like now. That is a lot of honey on the left side!

A honey frame after 4 days of work. (Blue Hive)

Close up of honey bees filling in cells with honey (Blue Hive)

Top cover lifted and honey bees at work! (White Hive)

I cannot believe how much honey was collected over the last 4 days. Two of the days had rain!

Drone Layer: Detect and Remove

When inspecting my white hive at home, I found that their were many tell tale signs of a drone layer.

How do drone layers come about?
Sometimes old queens run out of stored sperm from their initial mating flights and can no longer lay fertilized eggs. The hive typically will supercede this queen before it ever happens. Another way that drone layers come about is when there is a prolongued absence of a queen (due to swarming, death, etc). The queens pharamones suppress the development of the ovaries in all of the female workers. Without a queen around, some of the workers will have their ovaries develop. These workers will then start laying eggs. Since these workers do not go for mating flights, they can only lay drones (unfertilized eggs).

How to tell you have a drone layer?
- Consistantly multiple eggs per cell
- A large number of drone bees in the hive or a large number of drone larvae (when capped, they have a pertruded dome shape)
- eggs in the honey super (the regular queen cannot fit through the queen excluder)

What happens when you do not get rid of a drone layer?
The hive will suffer greatly if the drone layer is not removed. In the two cases that I had a drone layer; I had purchased a new queen and the drone layer was also around. The bees will try to supercede the new queen because of all of the drone laying and that will not work because the queen is not the problem. Waiting for the drone queen to die may also take too long.

How to get rid of a drone layer? (See slideshow below)

1. Capture the queen and store her in a safe place near the hive
2. Take the entire hive (except for the landing, an empty box, the queen and the cover) and bring it 100m from the location and ideally in tall grass.
3. Dump/Sweep all of the bees into the grass. You may have to sweep each frame several times.
4. Return to the hive location and put the hive back together. The foraging bees will return and the drone layer and other nurse bees will be left in the grass.

Hive Health: Mites and their effects

It looks as though the green hives queen is laying lots of eggs and that the hive is slowly repopulating. This hive had swarmed on me and I let them reqeen themselves with some queen cells that were present at swarming.

Honey, pollen and larvae eggs (From outside to center)

The summer is nearing its' end and the mites have once again taken their toll on the bees. Below are some tell tale signs of a mite infestation.

Deformed wing on honey bee

The deformed wing virus is more expressed in a population of bees when mites are present because the mites suppress the bees' immune system.

How many mites can you spot? Too many...

Mites present in drone larvae which in this case was in comb between the supers was exposed when I pulled off the top box. It is a good indication of how bad your colony is infected. This colony will without a doubt have to be treated before winter if I hope to see it alive in the spring. I will likely treat with apivar strips, which is a new product and has proven quite effective. The strips will be placed into the hive once the honey supers are removed. 

Come together... (Automatically please)

My strong hive is continuously needing additional frames. I recently finished off a bunch of new top bars. Now, I just had to assemble them and throw another box on my one hive.

Pine top bars for frames.

If only things assembled themselves!