It’s May Day for my honey and me…and the bees!
May 1, 2020

We went out to the nursery to check my two hives because it’s now been two weeks. “Cecilio” is our third-year hive and it is very very strong now with two boxes. They are bringing in tons of nectar so we took out the feeder. (The feeder helps when things are not in bloom and through the winter. But they are on their own now. I did not see the queen but I saw that she is actively laying… tons of larva. Two weeks ago I put in a green drone frame which encourages the queen to lay her drone eggs there. Today I took it out and will take it home to clean. The idea is that when you remove drone cells, you remove mites because they prefer to fall into the drone cells. They have the same gestational cycle of 23 days.) Last year it seemed to help a lot.

After inspecting both boxes carefully, I could not find the queen but she’s been there within 6 days since there is a lot of larva. I removed a few queen cups.

Jeff applied oxalic acid drip to the hive which should take the mite count down. It is non toxic to the bees or the honey since it is a naturally occurring substance in vegetation.

We then opened the “Lino” hive and saw at least a hundred earwigs under the top cover. None in the hive… We added oil to our hive stand cups that the legs sit in. Luckily they don’t seem to bother the bees much. This hive seems to be queenless since I saw no larva throughout the two boxes. I saw just a few queen cups so they were getting ready to start rearing their own. No way. I’ll buy an Italian queen and get her in there Monday. This hive is already capping honey and it was so heavy with nectar. Wow. Another great year!