Bee Yard Update - August 10, 2012

Well, we finally made it to the yard! We opened up the hives just to get a look at how the girls were filling the second brood boxes.

Alistair appears to be full, but there is space on the brood frames for more brood and honey stores. Since the main nectar flow is over, we are not going to put another box on, but will keep an eye on it. The brood pattern is classic for a healthy hive! There was no evidence of swarm preparations.

Polly is filling in the top box quite nicely. We looked at some of the frames. The outer ones have not been drawn yet, so we moved them in a bit. There is ample room for honey and brood. We realized that that the inner cover still needs to have a piece of hardware cloth placed over the feeder jar slot, and the front has to be notched. Until now, we have raised the outer cover a wee bit to allow bees to move in and out of the top box that protects the feeder jar, but with colder weather coming soon, that will have to change.

Oh yes, we did remove the oiled paper from the IPM board. I forgot to mention that. No evidence of varroa, and the pattern of debris along it reminded us of the scrap board technique used by Werner Gysi.

Deanne’s bees are slowly starting to move up into the second box. I would like to see this happen more quickly (I’m impatient), but since we requeened it, we can’t expect this to be happening any faster. The good news is that, yes we do have a new queen! Almost all of the brood cells in the two frames that were moved up into the second box are capped. They are flat, indicating that they are workers, and that the brood wasn’t chilled by the move. Within days we should have a vigorous young worker population to help with comb building, brood tending and nectar collection, a good thing with the end of the season approaching.

Other jobs that will need to be done include construction of feeder boxes for the fall, as well as entrance reducers. We also need to look at winter hive protection.

There won’t be any honey taken off this year.

Until next time,

~JoAnne

Bee Yard Report - July 26, 2012

I picked up 10 pierco/wood frames from Barry Tabor to use to put a second box on our newest nuc – Deanne. The bees have filled the bottom box and we want them to work on filling another box with bees, brood and honey before winter. To encourage them to move up, I moved up two frames of brood and honey. I couldn’t avoid moving some brood along with the honey. I am hoping that the weather is warm enough that the brood doesn’t chill. (I read somewhere that the presence of drones helps to keep the hive temperature elevated? They do a lot of ambling over the comb.).

At least the heat is cooperating! I saw the queen again, but there are still a lot of drones and relatively few workers, as before. There are no newly capped larvae yet, although there are new eggs and young uncapped larvae. Because of what I am seeing, I do think this is a new queen and it took her some time to get mated. I can't think of another reason why there would be a lag in new worker bees. Ayla is feeding them, and we are watching for robbing. Haven’t seen any evidence yet, but as the nectar flow subsides it may start. Which reminds me - we should put on an entrance reducer, just in case. Anyhow, the new super is on, and we will wait for a couple of weeks to see the workers emerge! I left Polly and Alistair alone after a quick peak into the top.

~ JoAnne