Eight days a week… Is the queen released? Alive?
August 4, 2020

We came out to the Paramount Nursery on August 3rd to check on our hives before we leave on vacation.  Jeff is particularly concerned that his newly-installed queen has been accepted.  You may remember that Bill advised us to put some wax on the sugar candy to delay her release from the queen cage.  Even 10 days caged is good, he advised.  Because we are headed to Washington to the family compound, we needed to release her after 8 days.

We first opened the Cecilio hive which is three boxes and we found that the queen is laying in all the boxes, including the honey super on top.  We put the queen excluder back on and inspected the other boxes:  they look great with tons of honey and they’re still bringing in lots of nectar and pollen.  Tons of pollen this year which is great.  That is one busy queen! We did an alcohol wash to test for varroa.  One 1 varroa in 200 bees.  This is outstanding.  I’m fine leaving this one for three weeks.

We then checked the Paloma3 three hive which is our new nucleus hive this year.  They bees do not seem to like the old frames that came with the nuc.  Dark comb.  Still there’s honey and nectar and some capped brood so I’m leaving them but I will definitely swap them out with new frames when we return.  We checked for varroa and in a sample of 200 we had results that were unclear.  At first glance, no significant varroa.

When we checked the Leno hive, there was an unusually large amount (20) so Jeff mentioned that I put in too much alcohol so that “waters were not clear”  when he checked the last hive.  He may have had a false count.

We continued with the Leno hive and that only has two boxes. We have taken frames of honey off this hive and put empty frames in.  Good strong brood, nectar, honey…  We decided to do an oxalic drip into these frames to knock down the varroa.  We will leave the honey for the bees.

Lastly, Jeff checked his hive.  This video is over 4 minutes long but you may enjoy seeing it so I will post it on facebook.  (It exceeds the size limit here). I can always send it to you..  By the time he gets the queen installed, the bees are not happy and are mad!  They will settle down hopefully! He checked for varroa…