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

[soarwitheagles]

Babs,

We keep it super simple! We merely monitor the mite counts on the sticky bottom boards and we also do a careful visual when we are in the hives at this time of the year.

We simply do not have the time or patience to do the alcohol wash or the sugar roll. Compared to last year, we hardly have any mites at all! But just to play it safe, I will do the OA vaporization on all hives then check for mite drop. Any hive that has massive mite drop [300+ per day], then we will continue with a once per week treatment for 3 weeks.

Yes, it has been incredibly hot. Yesterday, Stockton broke all written records as in the hottest August 28th in recorded history!

For this very hot weekend, this is our plan:

Cut, assemble and paint all new bee boxes at night or super early in the morning. All varroa mite OA vapor treatments will be done from 10-12 at night or at 3-5 in the morning.

Babs, the farmers planting clover nearby has been a massive game changer for us. In the last three years, we have had to do massive sugar syrup feeding for months at a time. This year, none at all except for the queen builder starter and finisher hives and even they did not seem to need the sugar syrup, but top master beeks recommended it.

I hope you can find a nearby farmer that is planting something that will feed your bees all summer long!

 

[babsbag]

1000 acres of clover would be a bee and bee keepers dream...what a windfall.

I have only worked bees twice at night and they were super aggressive. Not something I care to repeat. You are braver than me but in this heat it is almost the only time you can work. Do your bottom boards have grids on them or do you really count the entire board. My bottom boards are out right now and was wondering if I should paint a grid on them. You might have said at some point but what do you coat the bottom board with to make them sticky?

 

[soarwitheagles]

1000 acres of clover would be a bee and bee keepers dream...what a windfall.

I have only worked bees twice at night and they were super aggressive. Not something I care to repeat. You are braver than me but in this heat it is almost the only time you can work. Do your bottom boards have grids on them or do you really count the entire board. My bottom boards are out right now and was wondering if I should paint a grid on them. You might have said at some point but what do you coat the bottom board with to make them sticky?

Not sure exactly how many acres of clover to be honest with you. At first, we only saw like 6 parcels of 20 acres each and we thought that was it. But we discovered a super large field less than two miles away that is over 2 miles long and about a .25 miles wide. So I fully believe that was a major game changer. Now we are praying that the Lord would influence farmers near us to plant more clover next year.

I too do not care to work bees at night. But when it comes to treating with OA vapor, I like night time when it is this hot. You simply insert the vapor wand in the front entrance, cover the remaining entrance with a wet towel, and let it rip! Presently, we are looking at two new versions of vaporizers on Ebay because I would like to do 3 hives at once. At 2-4 minutes per hive, we should be done in less than an hour with the entire yard.

No grids on SSB's. We used left over political signs made of coroplast obtained after the last election. Making grid lines would be easy to do with black electrician tape or paint. I simply glance at each board, take a rough estimate, and then proceed accordingly. Some people use vegetable oil spray to make their ssb's sticky.

Hope this helps!

 

[HomeOnTheRange]

@soarwitheagles I set at about a mile high (~5200 feet). We will get about 9 inches of rain per year. We are coming out of our "monsoon" season and we are still under 6 inches. You will hear people around here talk about our famous 8 inch rains, which means each drop of rain fell about 8 inches apart then stopped. We have to pull all of our water from the river to irrigate the fields, so all of the valued land sets close to the river.

We use the OA vapor and really like it. At night seems to be the best time to use the vapor.

 

[soarwitheagles]

@soarwitheagles I set at about a mile high (~5200 feet). We will get about 9 inches of rain per year. We are coming out of our "monsoon" season and we are still under 6 inches. You will hear people around here talk about our famous 8 inch rains, which means each drop of rain fell about 8 inches apart then stopped. We have to pull all of our water from the river to irrigate the fields, so all of the valued land sets close to the river.

We use the OA vapor and really like it. At night seems to be the best time to use the vapor.

Wow HomeOTR, that certainly sounds like quite a challenge to raise bees in that type of environment. I hope you live near the river! BTW, what river is it?

You are nearly one mile up. I cannot even imagine how many factors that changes...on the brighter side of things...this summer, as we drove up into the high mountains here, there were massive flowers blooming when most of the Sacramento area was in a full blown dearth! So I suppose there are both pluses and minuses when it comes to living up closer to heaven!

Good luck and please let me know if there is anything I could do to help you.

 

[soarwitheagles]

Scrambling to build 50+ new boxes, tops, and bottoms to accommodate all the new bees, queens, eggs, and larvae. After using a drill motor for pilot holes, then an impact driver for screws, life is so much easier with the staple and nail guns. Wife and I now are set up to glue, assemble, square and nail off one full box every 3 minutes. That is 20 per hour. Not bad for total rookies, but sweating like pigs working in 105+ temps!

Tomorrow we hope to prime and paint all new boxes. Appears as if one nuc may have already split and swarmed. We choose to monitor each nuc much more carefully after this. Tomorrow we hope to begin the transfer process of nucs to 10 frame boxes.

We will also look tomorrow for our first batch of new Carniolan queens to emerge. Then, time to make more nucs, and populate them with the new Carni queens. We hope to do a couple of more rounds of queen raising in the next few weeks. So far, all is well...still batting 100% on the nucs and becoming more and more convinced, splitting and making nucs is the way to go for our given situation.

Also began bucking and splitting 30 cords of eucalyptus wood this morning. Weather felt like Hawaii or southeast Asia...sweating like piggies again!

09/04/17 UPDATE: Just opened up our queen finisher box and was pleasantly surprised to find 100% success rate in creating brand new Carniolan queens.

Here are the last three queens...ran out of nucs, so had to make some more up, will leave the nucs queenless for a day or so, then install these new Carni's.

Whoooooopeeeeeee!

 

[babsbag]

You are have a good bee year for sure. How much honey have you taken from them?

After reading about someone supposedly setting their hive on fire with a vaporizer I am a little hesitant to use one. With my luck I'd set the entire county on fire and the bees would be the only thing to survive. I think I will pass on that method of treatment. The smoker has me worried enough this time of year. I wish our temps would drop so I could treat for mites. I haven't seen any robbing this year which is good. The one hive that I requeened doesn't have much activity going on, I need to go in for another visit but it is just too hot.

Also, no wasps this year. I think I have seen three or four in the barn the entire summer, last year I had an electric fly swatter and could spend hours killing wasps. Maybe the bait I put out at the end of last year really did work and killed the colony.

 

[soarwitheagles]

You are have a good bee year for sure. How much honey have you taken from them?

After reading about someone supposedly setting their hive on fire with a vaporizer I am a little hesitant to use one. With my luck I'd set the entire county on fire and the bees would be the only thing to survive. I think I will pass on that method of treatment. The smoker has me worried enough this time of year. I wish our temps would drop so I could treat for mites. I haven't seen any robbing this year which is good. The one hive that I requeened doesn't have much activity going on, I need to go in for another visit but it is just too hot.

Also, no wasps this year. I think I have seen three or four in the barn the entire summer, last year I had an electric fly swatter and could spend hours killing wasps. Maybe the bait I put out at the end of last year really did work and killed the colony.

Hi babs!

We lost count of the honey harvest. But I do know we used a lot of the honey to make nuc after nuc after nuc. Each 5 frame nuc required 2 full frames of honey, one full frame of pollen, and one frame of day old larvae.

We have done the OA vapor treatment for two years now, so we feel very safe using it. I just purchased two more vaporizers, so we hope to vaporize 3 hives at a time now. Good to hear you have less wasps this year. We are still having a major epidemic of wasps.

I hope your queen does better!

Have a great weekend!

 

[babsbag]

I checked on my weakest hive today and all was well but not much honey. I fed them some sugar water and will check again next week. I saw the queen and capped brood and a lot of bees bringing in pollen but I think I will have to feed all winter. I will do a combination of syrup and winter patties and hopefully get them through to spring.

As soon as temps drop I will treat for mites...a few more weeks. I will check the other hive then too. They always look busy and a lot of bees on the front porch. I should have requeened that hive this summer but never got that far so next spring. I could buy a new one now but I was told not to do it after Aug 15; I'm guessing due to the break in the brood cycle???

 

[soarwitheagles]

I checked on my weakest hive today and all was well but not much honey. I fed them some sugar water and will check again next week. I saw the queen and capped brood and a lot of bees bringing in pollen but I think I will have to feed all winter. I will do a combination of syrup and winter patties and hopefully get them through to spring.

As soon as temps drop I will treat for mites...a few more weeks. I will check the other hive then too. They always look busy and a lot of bees on the front porch. I should have requeened that hive this summer but never got that far so next spring. I could buy a new one now but I was told not to do it after Aug 15; I'm guessing due to the break in the brood cycle???

Babs,

Sure hope all your hives make it through winter! We too are still seeing the high temps here [today is 99F]. Makes it a bit uncomfortable working with bee-suites and sweaters underneath!

So sorry you were not able to re-queen during the optimal part of the season...I am not sure why people would tell you not to requeen after the Aug 15th. But I am a total newbie, so I will not contradict their advice.

I do know many seasoned beekeepers give great advice and that is why I am an avid reader on some of the best bee forums in the world. I also ask lots and lots of questions too.

On the other hand, I am learning to take all advice with a grain of salt and to have an openness to try things outside the box. Example: a number of local beekeepers told me to not even try making new queens in August and that we would experience very poor results. That advice was the furthest thing from the truth. We were able to make new queens not only in August, but also here in September. That kind of bothered me. Taking advice from a beekeeper that has over 40 years experience, yet he has on numerous occasions given really poor advice.

So I suppose we need to be careful when we ask for advice. We need to check out the advice given by bouncing it off of other beekeepers and also by trying things that perhaps they do not think would work.

Another example of this: most beekeepers I know recommended against us mounting nucs in trees throughout our property. We did it anyway, and experienced a 100% success rate! Last year, I kept all our nucs on beehive stands and experienced a shocking 10% success rate!

Babs, I am still a total rookie when it comes to bees and sheep, but we are learning very fast in these adventures. So we are happy.

I wish you had asked me for queens last week or during the tail end of August, for I would have gladly given you a few virgin queens for free [we were thinking nearly none of our queens would hatch, but it turned out, nearly all of them hatched and we had far more queens than what we needed].

We wish you well in your bee adventure this winter and next spring.