splits and swarms

I split almost all of my hives this weekend.... Most were more than ready for it as the honey flow is comming early. I was very supprised to find a hive with swarm preps. they were clingy and they had several uncapped and capped queen cells..... found it too late I guess. I still split it and used the queen cells in the splits.

pollen and drones

On the nice days, my bees are bringing in tons of pollen. I have had to do some major movement of hive bodies. Almost all of the lower brood chambers were empty and needed to be moved on top for the queen to lay in and the beed to store food.

I have tons of mature drones and drones in various stages of life. This is great. In about a week, I am going to split all of my strong hives and try to recouperate some of my losses.

I am also waiting on a call from Larry Tate for when we can start instrumental insemination. Should be fun!

cool happenings

I discovered I have lost yet another hive today. I will be spending my spring making splits and recovering my losses instead of being able to sell nucs.

I will also be officially starting artificial insemination this year. More to come on that in the future.

I have 2 bee hives in a country club and they needed to be moved. The people there love them so they built me an awesome stand/platform for them. I am amazed at how involved the people at the country club are with nature. They wanted them near the gardens, so we decided on the location and I told them about my requirements. And this is what they built for me:

A neighbor where I have some hives took a bunch of pictures and asked a bunch of questions about bees last year. She has entered an art contest with my photo.... Pretty cool! It has some iridescence in it that the camera cant pick up.

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Motivation

All of my bees that are still alive are doing really well even with the recent cold snap. The candy boards and mountain camp method really helped.

The problem is now me. I have a bunch of comb with dead bees in it from my losses and I am starting my rotation out. I will be removing 2 frames from every box, making the bees make new comb and then processing the wax. I am just really lazy about it and have quite a few supers in need of processing.

Does anyone have a good way of processing? The way I have been doing it is: boil everything in excess water. Once cooled but still hot, I take a cheese slicer and remove the underside that has all of the trash. I then use a double boiler system on the good wax. This workd well, but takes a really long time. Any suggestions?

Lost more hives and pollen

It was 60 degrees yesterday and I was able to go into all of my hives to check them. I have lost 2 more. All of the hives had queens from strachan and were carniolians. They all absconded or underperformed and froze. I had heard nothing but good about them. Oh well.

A bunch of the hives had already worked through their honey reserves and I had to put candy boards that had a pollen party embedded for this spring. By the time they eat through the sugar block, they will be needing the pollen for buildup. I will have to post a picture later of what they look like.

I also noticed 2 different types of pollen they were bringing in. I can't figure out what is blooming for tem to use. It is gray and dull yellow.

losing bees left and right

I had an extraction call in an apartment complex.... Turned out to be yellow jackets. I was not too thrilled to find them in the attic space above the heated apartment. I informed them they needed to call a pest control company.

I still have 12 hives. It is wierd as some of them are only half way through their rations and some are onto the sugar I put on top (to make sure they didnt starve over the winter). We are having a really warm winter and I think a few hives have not figured it out......

Either way, I will be concentrating on recouperating my losses and making honey to sell instead of selling nucs. I will probably end up selling 2 or 3 extras anyway. But, this year I am planning on honey and removing old comb and replacing it with new comb.

I replace 20% of my hives comb every year. That equates to about 1/2 a brood chamber. It takes a lot of sugar or honey to replace that. I am hoping that we will have a good honey flow and I can get them to replace it fast.

Been a couple of months

I have not forgotten about any of you out there who read my blog. I have been busy with the job search and life.

I decided to not do my regular powdered sugar shake this fall for three reasons. First, I forgot. Second, I decided a long time ago that I wanted stronger bees and I didn't want to help the weak colonies. Third, by the time I remembered I was too busy to do it.

Well, I have already lost 4 hives out of my 16. I have no nucs left to replace them with. They all absconded with brood in the comb which all died. I do not think it was foulbrood as it did not pass the ropiness test or the smell test that confirms it. I think it had to do with mite loads or CCD. While feeding and preping for winter I noticed a few hives that had LARGE numbers of bees with deformed wing virus (a condition caused by mites). More bees were like this than usual. I think the sugar shakes helped last year (and I will be doing them from now on if I want to keep my hives).

I have fed out all of the honey from those hives and am storing the frames in the garage. The ones with dead brood will be culled and turned into wax blocks next year.

I have the entrance reducers on and all of the hives should be ready for winter.  I will be placing candy boards on top of some next month around christmas, and sugar on newspaper on the tops of the frames on the rest. I just want to make sure I have some bees this spring to make splits from and try to sell.