We made a run for the nursery and had a great inspection! But… FIRE!
July 3, 2020

Sorry I’m a bit behind…
My honey and the bees July 3, 2020

Although it was going to be a hot day, we decided to run to the nursery because they will be closed for two days. We have heard that nectar sources were drying up along the coastline and in the valley, so we were worried about bees robbing our hives’ honey. (At this time of the year you close down the opening to about one inch so that the guard bees can easily protect the hive.)

We opened up the Cecelio hive which has only two deeps. This is the hive that we harvested some honey from already so they had several frames to fill out. No problem with nectar here… The bees are bringing in tons of new nectar and filling up all the frames. The queen has been busy and there was larva, capped brood, tons of colorful pollen and capped honey. We did a mite test of 1/2 cup of bees (250) and only found two mites! Excellent. No hive beetles in the trap, no wax moths.

Although this is not unusual for this time of year, it’s always good to see a low count. We decided to harvest one frame of honey that was solid packed on both sides.

We then checked the Leno hive which has three boxes and we decided to take one frame of honey from the top box. I had taken the queen excluder off of that box last week. It didn’t seem like they were moving up well into the third box and they seemed crowded on the first and second boxes.

The queen decided to go up to the top box and lay some eggs but only in one frame, so I decided to take that frame out and move it down into the brood nest.

a full frame of capped honey!

Another very healthy hive: Great bee population, larva, capped brood, pollen and nectar. Another varroa test and only 2 mites per 250 bees. Good!

Jeff’s hive has three deep boxes, ten frames each. The bottom box is filled with bees, brood, pollen and honey. The top two boxes are about half full; Strong larva, capped brood, nectar, capped honey and pollen. He did not test for varroa. (We were rushing.) he took two frames to harvest.

We then checked our new nucleus hive “Paloma 3” and the top box was filled with capped brood and the bottom box had a low bee population so we did an AB switch, moving the solid brood box down. Apparently a queen likes to move up but not always back down. After we moved the brood box, we realized we forgot to check for mites, but since the other two were only two mites each, we felt fairly safe and will test next visit. No hive beetles, no wax moth…

All of our four hives are so gentle and now that Jeff has requeened his hive, the bees no longer follow us back to the car. We want to be especially careful so that the bees do not bother the nursery workers.

We took some jars of honey for each of the workers and for our host Cecilio and his wife, Maria, their bee-loving daughter, Paloma, and her sister Magali.

We were taking our bee suits off at the car when we noticed a helicopter flying overhead and circling around. Jeff noticed smoke just to the east of the nursery. A brushfire had just started along the wash… between the nursery and some homes.

We decided to get out of there quickly to make room for the fire trucks that were on the way. An hour later, Paloma texted me that they got the fire out and that it was the second recent fire incident with the homeless encampment. It was adjacent to the nursery so it was very scary!