It’s November inspection time
November 2, 2020
My honey and the bees, November 2, 2020
I’m going to have to do a summary of the last two inspections because I guess I got busy and I forgot to post them but here is the post for today.
Cecilio: Last Tuesday, I installed a pol line queen from Jay Weiss and today we came back to release her. There she was in her cage and she was surrounded by attendants who feed her and care for her. And I removed the cork, I unfortunately dropped the cage but when I picked it up she looked fine. Within seconds she was out and settled into the hive. We filled up the feeder and put on The pollen and Spirulena patty I that I made last night. We did not check for varroa due to the low bee population. If you remember, we did treat this hive for three weeks in a row with an oxalic drip (October).
Lino: We then checked the Lino hive and when i opened the top cover and set it on the ground I almost jumped! There was a beautiful praying mantis ready to strike. I’m not sure how she got into this hive because I have a robber screen on the outside. I wanted to check this hive for some unusual larva I saw a week ago. It appeared that the queen was laying eggs on the side of the cells, not in the center. Some of the larva was stringy and loose.
I was worried that this hive might have European foul brood, a serious virus. It may be that this queen who is VSH (varroa sensitive hygiene) is rearing bees that pull varroa infected larva out of the cells. It looked possible.
Today, all looked great and quite normal. Interesting. Most of the activity was in the top box where I saw the queen and eggs and capped brood. The bottom box had quite a bit of nectar and capped honey so I took off the robber screen and switched the two boxes. I was reminded of a lesson learned long ago; it’s not good to put a box on the ground. It should be on top of something else because the sticky bottom picks up rocks. When you go to reassemble it, it doesn’t fit tightly. We had another blooper in that when we were trying to get the rocks off the bottom of the box, Jeff tipped it, forgetting that we had a feeder inside; the sugar water spilled out of the hive. We will keep that in mind when we check in 10 days to see what damage it did inside, if any. We added the pollen patty and replaced the oxalic sponge we were using for mite treatment.
The Paloma hive had capped brood in top box and probably a dozen larva. We couldn’t find the queen nor did we see any queen cells. We will watch this hive carefully. Normally the queen shuts down some of her laying activity but it seemed way too sparse. This hive has tons of nectar and quite a bit of capped honey but we still added sugar water to give them a boost. Note: We returned the next day and installed a queen from Jay Weiss, a pol line VSH queen.
Jeff’s hive was calm as compared to when there was a feral queen in there. It is amazing what a difference an Italian queen can make. This Italian queen was from Bill Lewis. When we needed one right away, we drove across the freeway and up Little Tujunga canyon where he had some queen cages in his pocket! That was about eight weeks ago and we replaced the feral queen with a nice Italian queen. Jeff reported lots of honey, pollen and capped brood as well as a strong bee population., He decided to feed with sugar water just to give them a boost. If you remember, this hive, like the others were low on honey and it may have been attributed to to the forest fires that raged in the local mountains for over a month. He tested for varroa with a count of two or three, he saw his queen so he felt pretty good as he closed up his hive.