I’ve been remiss in bee updates this year, so here’s the quick catch-up:
All three of our hives died during the winter. It looked like they just swarmed out last summer; there was plenty of food still in the hives, and they appear to have frozen to death during the week of hard freeze in January (it went into the 20’s and stayed there for about 10 days).
We decided to put a couple of hives out in Clearwater this year, so we picked up parts for another hive, painted everything up, and split out the drawn foundation between the 4 hives.
The new bee packages were purchased from a new vendor this year, based in Sequim. There was a whole process of picking up the bees as the guy drove up from Oregon with them, which makes for an early drive down to Tacoma to meet him, and a good story (which I guess I’m not telling, here, but there you go).
All four hives are rolling pretty well at this point; the first generation of babies has hatched, and all the hives I’ve looked at have had a strong second / third wave of babies on the way.
We seem to have been feeding the bees for a little too long this year; they never really seem to stop taking the sugar water, but they just store it as nectar. They did the same thing last year, but I didn’t really put 2+2 together until now.
So, in response (in hopes of preventing a swarm), I put a honey super on each hive yesterday. Normally you hold off on the first super until a nectar flow, but essentially, they’ve just had a “nectar flow”, even though it’s a fake one.
So, we’ll see how it goes. I’ll be interested to see if they end up capping off any of the sugar water honey.