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The second in a series of honey bee pathogens. Today we talk about mites and beetles.
BeetleJail.com – Innovative ideas for SHB control that I saw demo’d at this year’s beekeeping institute
Music: James Larson, Gaia Consort
PodCast Call in Line: 740-5-MYFARM
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Burning AFB Infected Hives
Join me on my way down to Baxley to pick up some bees. The first in a series of shows where we focus entirely on bees and beekeeping. We go over some interesting breaking developments in beekeeping amd discuss some of the microbial pathogens that our bees have to deal with.
Gardener’s Apiary
Baxley, Georgia
Music: James Larson, Gaia Consort
PodCast Call in Line: 740-5-MYFARM
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Bee swarm cutout. On this Bubbatube we’ll doing a small honey bee swarn cutout in Peachtree City. If you’re considering doing bee cutouts, do not watch this video as it will make them look easy.
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Salvaged Comb
A really disjointed podcast this week as I try to cram in some content between trips to the bee yard. We talk about swarms and how to get geared up to be on the local swarm list or even to do a small cutout.
Music: James Larson, Gaia Consort
PodCast Call in Line: 740-5-MYFARM
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Garden Harvest
Laura and I take some feedback, pontificate spring preps, talk about gardening, beekeeping, and other springtime activities. Laura would like to apologize for mistakenly referring to the Brandywine Tomato as a “Rutgers”.
Links from the show:
Roy’s Alaskan Homestead Blog
Ison’s Nursery
Murray McMurray Hatchery
Music: James Larson, Gaia Consort
PodCast Call in Line: 740-5-MYFARM
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A longer look at doing some hive manipulations. In this BubbaTube, we open up a hive with all intention of swapping brood supers, but get a surprise in the process. We also replace some hardware that has come to the end of its life.
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Today I’ll be swapping around supers at the Brooks and Woolsey beeyards. This is a swarming control technique that supposedly keeps the colony from feeling crowded. The idea is that bees constantly move up in the colony through the winter as they consumes their winter stores. By the spring, the bottom of the colony is basically empty. By swapping the top and the bottom supers, we open up another super of space above for the colony to move into.
I’ll also be putting honey supers on these hives. It takes a while for the bees to “get” that their hive has changed sizes and move up into the super. We’ve already got a light nectar flow going, which will quickly pick up in the next few weeks, so I want them up in there drawing comb ahead of the game.
My supers have top entrances too. I’m a big fan of top entrances for two reasons. They provide additional ventilation, but the air isn’t pulled up directly through the broodnest, and it gives the foragers a direct route to the honey stores – meaning they don’t have to walk all the way up the inside of the colony to get where they’re going.
For those of you that always wanted an observation hive but for whatever reason couldn’t make it work out, I give you Drapers Bee Cam. It’s a live cam of a bee hive just like it sounds.
Honey Harvest
This one goes out to our beekeeping friends. A full hour on springtime beekeeping practices and even a small taste of swarm management.
Links
Alaska Urban Farmstead
Increase Essentials by Dr. Larry Connor
Northern Kentucky Beekeeper
Beekeeper Linda’s Excellent Blog
Gardener Apiaries
Music: James Larson, Gaia Consort
PodCast Call in Line: 740-5-MYFARM
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Podcast Subscribe Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/bubbatanicals
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Here’s a combined write up for the PTC and Woolsey hives and what the findings were when we conducted our quickie spring inspection. This is not the full spring inspection. I conducted the inspections very quickly to avoid chilling the brood. The idea was just to get a general idea on how the hive was doing and to identify any obvious problems as early as possible.
PTC Hive
This hive is in awesome shape. It had been a month since I last visited this hive and the bees had hardly touched the Megabee patty or the sugar syrup. This is good because it tells me that they have a viable food source. Indeed they were storing honey on both sides of the brood nest. The only thing blooming right now is Red Maple, so I’m assuming that there is ample forage available.
The brood nest was good sized spanning 6 frames with brood in all stages of development. Brood pattern was pretty solid as well. Forager traffic was high considering the temperature (low 50s).
I removed one of the division board feeders and changed the syrup in the other one. I also added another megabee patty.
Woolsey Hive
This hive is also in great shape. Both feeders were empty, and the megabee patty was completely consumed. Broodnest was a good size (spanning 5 frames to the depth of the super) with numerous eggs and larve in solid patterns across both sides of three frames. There were also new honey stores over the brood nest, indicating that this hive had also found early forage.
I removed one of the feeders and added another megabee patty.
Spotted 8 small hive beetles in this one. I’ll be adding a beetle trap on the next visit.
Note: Many beekeepers would question the approach of adding pollen and syrup while the bees have available forage, but it is not unusual (especially during the spring build up) for a hive to completely consume its stores over a few days of bad weather trying to feed the expanding brood nest. We still have nights in the 20s so I look at taking these steps as insurance. If they don’t need it, they’ll just leave it alone in favor of available forage. But if they do need it and it’s not there, the hive could suffer.