Late July check on hives at Paramount Nursery
July 20, 2020
Today we left the house about 745 in order to escape the heat. When we arrived at the nursery, all the hives had activity so that was a good sign.
Jeff checked his hive only to find that his Italian queen is gone and he has a feral queen who has returned from her mating flight and now she’s laying eggs. He put the feral queen in a clip while he looked to see if there was an additional queen. He did not see one so he released her back into the hive. He thought later that he should have kept her caged so that he could easily find her in a few days. He will quickly purchase another calm queen and replace her.
Other than that, everything looks great with larva, capped brood, lots of nectar, lots of capped honey and pollen. Once again, they are very aggressive and they chased us back to the car and just wouldn’t leave us alone. Even after ten minutes, they were circling around us. Jeff finally got the idea to walk down the rows of landscape plants. I rubbed against them, many of them mock orange, just starting to bloom, and they lost attention on us and got busy again.
That feral queen will be history soon!
I then checked my Cecilio hive and I was amazed to see how full it was beautiful capped brood throughout (darn! I forgot my queen excluder!) and strong pollen stores everywhere I looked. There was also a lot of nectar and I noticed that the nursery has put mock orange right next to the hives, and those plants were just coming into bloom
Because there was so much pollen taking up the hive as well as so much capped brood, I decided to put on another box. We did a varroa alcohol wash check and I only found two mites. No hive beetles and no wax moth. Wow! A great year so far! Note: it will be interesting to watch since our queens are now all varroa sensitive hygiene bees. They are much more aggressive in their own treatment of mites in their hives and on their sisters.
The Paloma3 “first year nucleus” hive (three boxes) is great! Lots of capped honey, capped brood, tons of larva, unbelievable amounts of pollen. The queen was in the third box and next time I will bring my queen excluder. I had taken it off because they weren’t wanting to move into the top box but I now regret that. I took the top box which was filled with beautiful brood and moved it to the first (lowest) position and then took the third (Top) box that is filled with brood and moved it to the middle position. I then took the first (bottom box) with very dark comb from the nuc box and moved it to the top. We had brought some extra frames from home so I swapped out some of those dark frames with the nice frames from our honey harvesting, wax present and remnants of honey.
Jeff checked the Lino for me while I was working my other two, and he found that the queen is very very active with very strong brood, larva, tons of pollen and nectar. We did mite checks on all hives and none was greater than two. We next time we will bring an additional box for the Lino hive because it’s clear it is still growing.
All hives had honey but since they are rearing so many bees (Tons!), we thought it best to wait until the nectar flow stops. They might need that honey down the road. Traditionally, in Southern California, you have a deep brood box and a medium full of honey as you head into winter. They will not survive without it.
One other note. Bananas. The VERY first thing we learned when we first went into a Honey Love bee yard, never eat bananas when you are going to work the bees. Guess what I started to eat in the car on the way to the beeyard. Yep! I only ate half until I remembered and then scouted around the glove box for something to mask it’s smell. I found a protein bar and peppermint mento gum. It seemed to help! The smell of the banana to bees is very similar to the alarm pheromone from the queen!
For more information: https://www.vatorex.ch/en/why-you-shouldnt-eat-a-banana-near-bee-hives/