September Hives Check
September 10, 2019
Altadena
Because of the heat, and because I have been feeling exhausted lately, we decided to split our inspections into two days so we do Altadena one day and the nursery on another.
This is kind of a critical time as we transition into fall and the bees prepare for winter. The queen will lay fewer eggs now because she does not need a full hive to get through the winter (because they will live on the honey that they have been gathering all Spring and Summer). We leave 50 pounds for each hive for winter.
Altadena has three hives. The first one is our nucleus hive where we were holding a queen in case we lost one. Today, we couldn’t find her and we discovered that she is gone and a big fat feral queen is now there. It’s so tempting to leave her because she is so strong. We will talk about it and decide if we’re going to swap her out for an Italian queen which is the best choice for a calm hive.
The bee population was kind of low in this one box but since the new queen is getting started with lots of larva, we did not do a varroa check. (We did a powdered sugar dusting when we tested the other two hives and found the mite count was high.)
Second hive: three boxes but the top box was pretty much empty of nectar and capped honey. We decided to take off the top box for winter and we removed the queen excluder since we don’t think will be harvesting anymore honey this fall. We did not see the queen but saw larva which is a good sign she is there. We did check for Varroa mites and found 10 which is pretty high for sample of 250 bees. We dusted with powdered sugar. We did not see a lot of pollen which is their protein so we will supplement next time with Pollen patties. There was a lot of capped honey but since we’ve harvested so much, we decided to leave it and we can also supplement the other hives if they need it. Honey is much better for the bees than sugar syrup.
The third hive also looked good with nectar, capped honey and bees but sparse larva and capped brood. This is not unusual for this time of year. Mite count: 6 of 140 bees. High! ☹️
All hives were dusted with powdered sugar. This is a method of controlling varroa without chemicals because the bees will groom each other and knock the varroa off their backs and they will fall through the screened bottom board. We hope. Tomorrow… the nursery…
Note: all hives are bringing in nectar, even though most people say we are in a dearth.
