I gave all 4 hives a good looking-over on Sunday. The North Apiary’s hives have been named and labeled “3”, “1”, and “4”. Hive West got labeled “∞” but I think we’re still calling it “Hive West”.
Hive “4” (or “hundredths”, if you prefer) is a little experiment I’m trying, running a hive with all Westerns. I put the package into 2 Westerns, and added a third one at the one-week mark, when it looked like they might already need it. This inspection (at the 2-week mark), things are looking like they should — top box is nearly untouched, bottom 2 boxes have solid looking capped brood and a bunch of stored sugar water and pollen. I saw the queen roaming around; I assume it’ll get harder to spot her once the babies start filling out the hive. Without really thinking about it, I moved a frame of sugar water from the 2nd box to the 3rd, to get the bees to work more in the 3rd box. This is where I think the power of the all-Westerns hive is going to manifest — everything’s the same size! This hive is out of sugar water. I need to make some more up.
Hive “1” (“tenths”) also looked good. I’m worried about swarming, so I popped a second deep onto the stack before the babies are born. It’s possibly a little early, but this is what I did last year, I think, and I was glad to stay ahead of the bees a little. I saw the queen here, too, and pulled a small amount of burr comb, but other than that, I can’t really remember anything else about the inspection. This hive is out of sugar water, too.
Oh, I put slatted bottom boards into both of these hives — it apparently gives the bees a place to hang out that’s not standing on the brood, and helps ventilation during the winter. We shall see.
I had a slatted bottom board ready for Hive “3” (“ones”), and a second deep, but when I got in there, I started noticing something … amiss. I couldn’t find any eggs, and I found a *lot* of queen cells (there was one cluster that I photographed that had 3 or 4 queen cells all in the same spot — very alien looking). I looked back through, and found one larva that was pretty small (3 or 4 days old), but that was the youngest brood I saw. In short, the hive was acting queenless. Bummer. So I decided not to add the second deep, nor the slatted board. I called Alaska Bee Products, and they essentially told me that they were not going to support me in any way (“I”m out of queens, and I’m in Alaska right now”) — they suggested I combine Hive 3 with another hive to strengthen it. Grr! Nice waste of $95. So I had to wait until Tuesday for Bee’s Knees to open so I could see if they had any queens. More on this later, obviously.
Finally, I checked Hive West (“∞”). It does not look as strong as it did earlier in the spring. I think that the winter workers have dwindled a little as the queen has started laying again. This hive has 2 deeps and a super on, but the super is empty, and the upper deep only has about 4 or 5 frames working. Unexpectedly, I saw the queen in the lower deep. Plenty of eggs, first brood hatch has definitely happened, but I think I need to start feeding sugar water again, because this hive does not look that much stronger than a package at this point. I also noticed an even bigger problem — this hive has mites really bad. On every frame, I noticed mites on several bees; I could probably have gotten a dozen mites off of the bees on a given side of a given frame. So I knew that a mite treatment needed to happen, but I again needed to wait until Tuesday to talk with Bee’s Knees about it. I added a slatted bottom board to this hive, too.
So the plan, after Sunday, was:
– requeen Hive 3
– Mite treatment (if possible) for Hive West
– more sugar syrup required! All 4 hives need it.
While waiting for Bee’s Knees to open, I also decided to render out the wax from last year. We had split it into two sets — the burr comb and drone comb tailings from all the inspections last year (which almost filled a gallon bag), and the cappings wax from the honey harvest (which looks to be about another 1/2 to 3/4 gallon). Mostly for expediency, but later because I wanted to see if there was a difference in quality, I decided to render these separately (do the bodies and the cocoons affect the final wax?). My wife has a nice setup for doing wax, a dedicated thrift-store pan, a metal coffee can (although apparently a food-grade plastic bucket also works), and a strainer (I saw a YouTube where the guy uses a cheapie handled strainer over the bucket). After a few fits and starts, I figured out how to make sure you don’t overflow the coffee can — you put all the wax bits you want to render into the can (cold and dry), then fill the can partway with water. Then you dump all the wax and the water into the melting pan together, and voila! No overflow. The first straining mostly gets out the bee bodies and cocoons and dirt and stuff. Further ones really start filtering and refining out the wax quite a bit more. Totally worth the extra time. The filtered out gunk from the first straining is “slum gum”, which apparently is great for baiting swarm hives. I saved and re-froze that stuff. The rest is hardening up after its second round. Once this stuff gets done, I will move on to the cappings, and also melt down the candle we made our first year — we’re done with it.
So, when Bee’s Knees opened today, I confirmed that they had queens, and headed up there. They also confirmed that HopGuard is safe for spring mite treatment, so I’m doing a full 3-week cycle on Hive West. I got an unmarked queen, because why bother? I picked up some cotton smoker fuel and a frame lifter tool, too.
When I got home, we suited up and headed out to the bee yard. I discovered that the best starter ever is the paper towel I wiped out the wax melting pan with! Wow. I put some green grass in there to cool down the smoke, and it stayed lit through a decently long inspection.
We HopGuarded Hive West first. That went pretty easily. Let’s hope I didn’t mess anything up. I put a mite board back in there, so hopefully we’ll see some mite drops.
Then we checked each frame of Hive 3 to make sure that there was no queen and no eggs. Not finding either, we killed all the queen cells, and put in the new queen. The bees seemed to be interested in her, and did not seem to be acting aggressive, so we sealed everything up and we’ll see how it goes. We moved the bees to a freshly painted deep box, and added a slatted bottom board.
So, the current state of the apiary is two hives looking like they should for this time of year, and two that need a little TLC.