Back to the hives after a three week vacation. What can we expect?
August 31, 2020

This is the longest time we have ever gone without inspecting our hives. We were last there on August 3. While we were on vacation, we wondered how they were doing: varroa mite increase? Hive beetle? Wax moth? Robber bees attacking?

When we drove up we could see that the Cecelio hive was very active with many bees coming and going. The other hives were pretty quiet (from our parking view) so we decided to inspect the quietest one, Leno first.

This hive has two boxes only so we weren’t anticipating to takeoff any more honey. We were right. The hive looked very healthy with a good amount of bees, capped brood, some larva, and actually, a lot of nectar. That’s the advantage of being in a nursery where there’s a great variety of things blooming including Plumaria, eucalyptus, pepper trees and other plants. I saw bees is bringing in white pollen and I wondered if that is from buckwheat on the hillsides.

We did an alcohol wash and found that there were 20 Varroa in a half cup of bees. Not surprising. We decided to treat with an oxalic drip which Jeff makes. We don’t plan on taking any more honey off the hive this year.

We then checked the paloma3 hive which had three boxes with a queen excluder for the top box. It’s interesting but the top box must have had the queen (or she squeezed through the excluder) because there was tons of Capped brood and larva. Under the queen excluder there were two boxes which basically had nectar some capped honey and many frames that were not filled out. I decided to move the top box to the bottom position and consolidate the two fairly empty boxes into one, taking the 8 strongest frames to make up the box. What havoc I made for their organized life!  As we move toward fall and then winter it’s not a good idea to have too much space for the bees to protect. It becomes an open season for wax moth as well.

Jeff reported “three boxes high but only about a box and a half full.” He decided to take the three boxes to two, moving the top box which had the queen to the bottom and consolidating his 10 strongest frames into a second box. It was surprising how similar his hive was to the Paloma 3 hive. Some honey, lots of capped brood and pollen.

We then went to work on the Cecelio hiveand actually did the same thing. Remove the strongest brood box to the bottom and consolidated the strongest frames from the two top boxes to one box. Since we had tested for Varroa mite in two hives we decided to treat the other two without testing. Usually if you have a high count in half of your boxes, you can assume you have a high count in all boxes. Jeff used in shop towel with oxalic acid and I used oxalic drip.

We will test again in ten days to make sure that our count is very low going into fall and winter. All is good!

Look at that nectar! They will fan their wings to dehydrate it… And then when it is perfect, those bees will cap it for posterity!