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

[babsbag]

The person that said not to re-queen after Aug. 15 is the person I bought the nucs from. He has been doing this a long time so for now I will trust him but you are right about taking everything with a grain of salt. All eyes wide open is my motto.

What did you do with the extra queens? Just curious.

 

[soarwitheagles]

The person that said not to re-queen after Aug. 15 is the person I bought the nucs from. He has been doing this a long time so for now I will trust him but you are right about taking everything with a grain of salt. All eyes wide open is my motto.

What did you do with the extra queens? Just curious.

I am not sure what the reasoning is behind not requeening in mid-August babs!

Our extra queens...well...some, we made new nucs for them. Others, we gave away. The rest, I queen banked them for nearly two weeks to see what would happen...and they did just fine, then I simply let them go [which probably equates to killing them since they had no hive to return to...]

Please remember: this is the very first time we tried queen grafting so, for us, it was a total experiment. I did not prepare a lot of nucs because I wasn't sure how many queens we could raise this late in the year. What did we learn?

1. It is much, much easier than we ever imagined.
2. The bees do most of the work.
3. Still need to carefully proceed according to a strict time schedule, but it is much much simpler than the Nicot system.
4. You need a lot of nucs if you are gonna raise a lot of queens [we were short on nucs because we were under the false assumption that not many queens would hatch].
5. It was incredibly exciting.
6. I can now see how we could make up 100 mini nucs next year every month or so, and easily install virgin queens in over 100 nucs at a time.
7. Most important part is to be certain you have lots of nurse bees, well fed starter and finisher hive[lots of honey and pollen], and to be absolutely certain you cage all capped queen cells well before the 16 day emergence day.

As stated above, we made far more queen cells than we had nucs prepared, but it was all good, simply because we wanted to see how do-able it really was to raise strong, healthy queens. Now, we are so ready for next year! We have a brand new vision and goal as to what we can do now...

 

[babsbag]

Sounds like you are going to be in the bee business...good for you.

I put an internal feeder in my hive and today they were getting robbed. Geesh. Not hornets or wasps, but other bees. They have a top entrance and a robbing screen, I will close the top entrance tomorrow morning. I am thinking I might put some syrup out for all the world to eat and put it about 200' from the hive, on the other side of my house and see if they leave the hive alone. Might even pull the feeder out of the hive. Makes me sick to see this happening. Not sure what to do, I thought it wouldn't be a problem since it is an internal feeder.

 

[soarwitheagles]

Babs,

Please let us know how your bee feeder for the world works out!

I tried that once and will never do it again! I placed a sugar syrup half filled 5 gallon bucket about 50 ft. from our one and only hive two years ago! Wanna know the results? It appeared to us that every bee within a 5 mile radius showed up! Grandma bee, grandpa bee, uncle bee, great auntie bee, niece and nephew bees, dang...it was as if every bee within a few miles decided our bucket was the ONLY place to feed. It was a terrible choice on our part. You could see and hear a massive cloud of super angry bees for 2-3 days. The bees were so angry, we couldn't even get near the bucket for days! And I am saying, you could not get within 50-100 ft. of that bucket. The thing that bothered me the most was their anger. You could feel it, you could hear it, and you certainly experienced it if you tried to enter the 50-100 ft. zone.

 

[babsbag]

The robbing is over and the hive is still alive and I am betting that the feeder is empty so the free loaders went home. I have put out extracted frames in the past and they do get pretty busy but nothing I couldn't live with but I do make sure that they aren't in an area that I frequent. Weather should be a lot cooler for the next week so I am hoping to get the hives treated for mites. Maybe Friday morning.

 

[soarwitheagles]

Babs,

Hope you are able to treat for mites! I noticed about three of our hives had a substantial number of mites and clearly need treatment.

I am hoping to find some time this weekend to treat all hives.

Presently, we are doing our very best to prepare soil and plant all fall/winter crops here:

Italian Kale
Russian Kale
Beets
Turnips
Spinach's
Super Sugar Snap Peas
Etc.

If we wait too long, then everything is dwarfed and it is not even worth planting. So the rush is on to get all soil prepped and all seeds in.

Have a great weekend!

 

[soarwitheagles]

We treated all hives with the OA vapor yesterday. This morning, 5 of the hives had a few hundred mites dead on the SSB. All the hives had at least some dead mites, but only 5 had large loads of dead mites.

I used three different vaporizers and I like the Varrox Vaporizor the best so far.

Presently, I am debating whether or not to use some Apivar strips just to be sure...but they sure are expensive!

Temps are finally down to the 70's and 80's. It makes working with the bees so much more comfortable. Next week, we are suppose to be back up near the 100's.

Next week, we begin to plant massive amounts of crimson clover.

Last week we got in all our kales, beets, peas, mustards, etc.

Enjoying the nice weather while it lasts...

 

[soarwitheagles]

Wow, 2018 is here already! I still have not set up any swarm traps...the main reasons are:

1.Dismal amount of rain this winter >> dismal bloom >> dismal bee number growth...leads to dismal swarming activity I believe...
2. Last year, I do not think we began to catch swarms until late spring.
3. I still cannot find any drones in our hives, thus, no mating areas for virgin queens to mate...

Hoping to bait some swarm traps soon...

Will keep everyone informed!

 

[Happy Chooks]

I haven't been able to check mine and see if the queen was able to mate. Rain, cold and it's snowing right now. I'm just crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.

 

[soarwitheagles]

I inspected many hives this last week. Super surprised...Nearly all are filled with bees, honey, and pollen. So now the splitting begins in earnest...otherwise our colonies will begin to swarm within days.

Another shock was finding massive drones. Wow, 3-4 weeks ago there wasn't one drone to be found. So queen rearing season has begun for us here too.

I hope to bait and hang many, many traps this weekend.

Cheers!