2017 Bee hive swarm information, history, lessons, successes, etc.

[Latestarter]

They may be placing brood in the center box simply "because" you gave them the three deeps... Don't know, but maybe if you scaled it back to only two, they'd start using the lower one like they're "supposed" to... No matter really... as long as it's working the way you have it.

 

[soarwitheagles]

Happy, I am not so sure what to say about when queens begin to lay eggs in different places in the hive...it happens here too. I am sure someone knows what causes it and what can be done to alleviate the problem...but I have no clue why it occurs.

We have had a number of hives where the queen decided to lay eggs in various boxes...I don't stress, I am glad she keeps laying!

For removing honey, we must remove honey manually on frames that have a mixture of brood and honey, or we simply leave the honey there for the bees.

 

[babsbag]

In the past I have left the honey with brood for the bees. But when it is in a super then I have to leave the super for the winter or put the frame in a deep and they build comb around it. Not good.

@Latestarter I gave them 3 deeps this year as they kept putting the brood in the top of two and no where to store their honey reserve. The bottom was always pollen. They are happy and I have the boxes to spare so all is good. They didn't swarm this year either, maybe because of the extra room?

 

[soarwitheagles]

Babs and HC,

I am still a total beginner when it comes to raising bees, but I noticed in our hives, when the flow is not very strong, then the bees concentrate more on building brood than bringing in honey. Due to the severe drought, and the fact that no one planted and grew any nectar producing irrigated summer long crops nearby, we had a very, very weak flow for the last 4 years...and our honey production was so small, we never got any honey at all, instead, we had to feed every hive the sugar syrup and the pollen sub.

Fast forward to this year, we have had a totally miraculous, non-stop super strong flow since February...the result:

Massive honey harvest as in 2 full supers per hive...honey harvest of 120 pounds per hive at times...

I also noticed recently that the brood production went down in a lot of hives and the bees focused much more on filling every nook and cranny with honey! We have never seen this here ever before! It is unprecedented. I also recently discovered another massive field nearby that some farmer or rancher planted some type of flowering plants that go nearly as far as the eye can see...yup, as in over a thousand acres of it, and it is irrigated. Our bees just will not stop filling the hives with wax, honey, pollen, brood, etc. I install new bare frames, with nothing on them [no wire, no plastic, etc.] and within one week they are completely drawn out with wax and beginning to fill with honey...and this is in August!

All the swarms we caught are now in boxes and they are producing like gang busters. We are hoping for one more set of splits, and if we can find the time to do it, we will be over 60 hives. We started with 5 this spring. Somehow we have had a 100% success rate with our nucs...each one produced a wonderful mated and laying queen. We chose a lot of unorthodox methods...as in placing each nuc in a separate tree! We went from a 90% failure rate on our nucs on bee stands last year to a 100% success rate this year.

We are incredibly happy now...

I am posting a pic of one of the frames that has no wire, no plastic, no nothing...and it is only two weeks old.

Other pics are of our mistake yesterday...we painted one of our new queens and got too much paint on the poor girl!

Pic two is of a queen we successfully painted!

Enjoy!

 

[soarwitheagles]

Nucs, nucs, nucs, and more nucs...with beards, beards, beards, and more beards...

Happy to share we are batting 100% on the nucs we made up from the swarms...each one has a brand new, home grown queen bee that is laying like crazy...

To be 100% honest, I never would have imagined this level of success in splitting hives and making nucs...perhaps my paradigm was affected by all of our Nicot system failures...

Now we are trying our hand at grafting queen cells too. It is totally exciting. We did some hybrids last month, this month, we are focusing upon raising Carniolans. Can't wait to show the results.

Anyway, I took a pic of some of our nucs early this evening.

Enjoy!

 

[Latestarter]

That is pretty awesome!

 

[soarwitheagles]

LS, Yes, the bee explosion we have experienced here has far exceeded our expectations.

Thank you!

Now we are hoping our queen grafting will work too!

 

[HomeOnTheRange]

Nice! It is great to see you are having such great success. We are having a hard summer due to the lack of rain (even for us), plus a die off of 60%+ this last winter. I am going to try your nuc in trees next year. Keep on growing those bees!!

 

[soarwitheagles]

Nice! It is great to see you are having such great success. We are having a hard summer due to the lack of rain (even for us), plus a die off of 60%+ this last winter. I am going to try your nuc in trees next year. Keep on growing those bees!!

Home on the Range,

So sorry to hear about your lack of rain. We too know that story...the worst drought here in many, many years...but last year, we were so fortunate to have massive rains and supposedly it completely wiped out our drought. I hope you too will obtain the rain you need there.

High Desert of NM? Wow, may I ask what your annual rainfall is? And what is your elevation? We are in the flatlands here...

We will begin to move all nucs now out of trees and into regular 10 frame hive boxes with covers and SSB's hopefully in the next few days or weeks. Then, we hope to experiment with a few more of our newly bred Carniolan virgin queens by making up new nucs with them.

Have you considered OA vaporization for mites? It is one of the organic methods to treat. Many folks lose their bees due to heavy mite infestations.

We hope to began our OA vaporization this weekend if we can find the time. We are not presently experiencing heavy mite loads, but this is the time of the year when their numbers can grow incredibly fast.

Other option that is incredibly effective but is not organic is the Apivar strips.

Hope this helps and best of luck to you!

 

[babsbag]

What method to you use for mite count? You did see the temps for this weekend right? I don't know how you can work bees in this weather.

I love the pictures of the bees, you have certainly been blessed. I just don't have the agriculture up here that you do, my bees are really not bringing in much right now at all. I am planning on feeding them some syrup as soon as I go and buy some sugar. I wonder what the crop is that was planted...Fairfield used to have acres and acres of safflower or rapeseed or something yellow, LOL, I never knew for sure what it was but it was thick with bees. I didn't raise any bees back then but it was still nice to see them. I am looking for something I can plant that blooms right about now that doesn't take water once established. I have a stream bed to plant but it is pretty rocky, of course. Looking at coyote bush if I can afford to buy some plants.