It’s been a cold and rainy month…no foolin!
April 1, 2020
It’s been a month since we’ve been to the nursery where we have three hives. The weather has been rainy and cold and so we were waiting for a nice warm day to check on them. As Jeff approached the hives, he shouted that all three had activity with bees coming and going. This is always good news!
Jeff’s hive now has three boxes and as he inspected he was surprised that there was so little honey. He did find frames with good capped brood, larva, pollen, nectar. One frame had an unbelievable amount of drone brood (half the frame!). It is spring so it’s time for the mating of queens but it may also be an indication that the hive is getting ready to swarm. He also had three peanut shaped cells at the bottom of the frame (middle box). He removed the cells as well as 90% of the drone cells. Next time we’re going to bring our green drone frames to encourage the queen to lay drone eggs there and then we will remove them and in doing that we also remove a lot of Varroa.
Mary Ann’s “Cecilio hive”made it through the winter so it now it is going into its third year. This is the only hive that we are taking into its third year. We are now in our fifth year of beekeeping.
This Cecilio hive is just one box and we saved it by Jeff helping me with the frame of capped brood and honey. It now has a good amount of bees and the queen is very active with visible larvae on many of the frames. You have to remember that’s been cold and so the bees have been hunkered down but they’re now bringing in lots of pollen and nectar. We decided to give them a boost by feeding them a gallon of 1 to 1 sugar water.
Our third hive we named after Sweet Lino. His friendly face greets us as we go into the nursery. This hive looked really strong with all frames busy with bees, capped brood, larva, nectar and a little capped honey. We anticipated the single boxes would need a second box and this one definitely did. One of my favorite things is to put the box on top of the single and then look through the frames and I can see the bees quickly populating the new box. They were happy!
One thing we fight at this time of year are the earwigs and they are always on the ground and under the top of the box. Jeff replaced all the little cups under the legs of the hives and he refilled them with vegetable oil and hopefully that will keep earwigs ants out until the next rain!