A quick show on swarm prevention.
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Music: Gaia Consort
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We extract a honey bee colony from the floor cavity of a second story bedroom.
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Here’s some pics from my weekend spent sweating in a beesuit. Early for swarms, but there sure seem to be more this year than last.
A sizable swarm in a tree
One of my hives threw this swarm on a warm saturday afternoon. I eventually managed to hive it up, but I missed the queen the first time around.
On my second attempt, I managed to locate the queen and put her in a screend box. Knowing they won’t abandon the queen, I left them to their own devices and came back later that night to pick up the cluster. Easy peasy.
A wacky two-parter where we take some great feedback and discuss beekeeping on a budget.
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Music: Baba Brinkman
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A follow up from last week’s show, on this BubbaCast we discuss some of the more practical aspects of harvesting and processing honey for the hobbyist beekeeper.
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Music: Natalie Germann, Vicki Larnach
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Although I know it’s a fluke this early, but there is a nip of coolness in the air. What a welcome relief from the blistering heat we’ve had recently. I decided that it was a perfect day to look in on the girls. Today we’re beginning our fall preparations. Some of the hives look great, and some not so much so. My goal is to get them beefed up enough to get through the winter to next spring. I’ll be saving several frames of honey from this year to feed them if I need to early next spring.
Brooks 1
The last time I checked on this one, I thought it was a goner. No queen, and tons of drones. Multiple eggs sloppily laid – all pointed to a laying worker. To my astonishment, I opened the box this morning to find the number of workers increasing and a working queen laying out a pretty solid egg pattern. How that happened, I have no idea. None. I’m grateful, but perplexed. Added 1/2 a megabee patty and 1/2 gallon of syrup.
Brooks 2
Still a dead out.
Brooks 3
Brood in various stages, but didn’t see queen. Added 1/2 patty megabee and 1/2 gallon of syrup. I’d like to see this one put more stores on.
Brooks 4
Pretty good and perfectly staged for the fall honey flow. The top deep is full end to end with perfectly drawn, empty comb. Same regiment as the others with megabee and syrup. Saw some eggs in the top super, but nothing significant. Most of the action seems to be down below.
Brooks 5
One of the strongest hives. I saw several bees still working honey in the honey super I left on from the spring. Didn’t see a need to add any supplements at this time.
Nuc 1
Pretty much the same as last time. 3 strong frames of bees. I split the brood nest with a frame of freshly drawn comb from Brooks 4 in hopes that the queen would expand her laying. Same addition of megabee and syrup.
Brooks 6
Looks really good. Chuck full of bees and honey. Didn’t add any syrup, but they did get 1/2 a megabee patty.
Brooks 7 and 8
These are doing okay, but are going to need to beef up before winter. Each had 4-5 frames of bees and mediocre stores. Added syrup and megabee. These two may get combined – possibly with the Nuc thrown in too. Wintering Nucs can be challenging.
We’ve managed the mite levels pretty well this year, but I’m going to try using one of the essential oil based varroa treatments this fall to knock the mites down more than just using a powdered sugar program. Probably looking at apilife var.
So yeah guilty as charged. It’s been a while since I’ve had time to post a hive log, but I figure that since we’re about to roll into the fall busy season it’s a good time to pick up the torch.
Some background:
The Peachtree City yard is no more. There was only one hive there, and while it was pretty robust in terms of overall health, it was not productive at all – nothing in the super in the spring. I suspect that was largely due to another sizable bee yard being less than a mile away. So I moved it to the Brooks yard, which is actually at my house. I’m thinking that and the Woolsey yard will be the only ones going forward for the foreseeable future.
So without further delay –
Hive updates –
Brooks 1
Popped this one open and there were tons of drones – which generally means one of two things – a laying worker or a drone laying queen. I didn’t see the queen, but I did see eggs sloppily laid. I believe it to be a laying worker – indicating that the hive has been queenless for a while. In either case, the hive is doomed unless it’s requeened. Unfortunately, requeening a hive with a laying worker is difficult. There were two queen cells – one of which was capped, but under the premise of a laying worker and the time it takes a queen to hatch out, there is very little chance that those cells have fertilized eggs in them. My intention is to do a shook swarm and requeen it. The idea behind a shook swarm is that you take all the bees out to field a few hundred yards away and shake them off the field. The idea is that the laying worker is too heavy to fly back and she gets left out in the field. When the rest of the hive returns, a new queen cage is in there and hopefully they take to her.
Brooks 2
Dead out. This hive is toast and filled with wax moths. This was a hive that deaded out before and I restarted with a few frames from a nuc. It concerns me that it’s croaked twice so I suspect some kind of contamination in the wax or hardware. I don’t have enough bees to restart it right now and time is running out to get a new hive going and prepped for the fall. We’ll see. If I do get it going again, it will be on all new hardware and foundation – and will probably used only to combine with another smaller hive.
Brooks 3
Looks ok, but should be in much better shape. Found the queen, but she was very small and gimpy looking. Gonna requeen this one.
Brooks 4
This one looks good – solid brood nest with a good egg pattern. It’s a single deep, and it starting to get some honey in the super. Probably wouldn’t hurt to requeen this one before the fall honey flow to beef up production going into the fall. This one may be a candidate to combine with Brooks 3 later on.
Brooks 5
Solid colony – probably the best looking of the bunch. There were ants in the jar super which I moved out.
Brooks 6
This is the former PTC hive, and is doing better already – showing alot of honey storage in the 2nd deep and even some storage in the honey super. The only problem is that the foundation strips in the honey super have gotten all wonky since the spring so they were building comb all over the place. I pulled the super and am going to redo the foundation on the frames before putting it back on there.
Brooks 7
This one looks pretty good for a single deep started in late summer. There were about 5 solid frames of bees and a large consistently laid broodnest. With a little feeding, this one should beef up by the fall.
Brooks 8
Just about the same as Brooks 7, but with fewer bees. Gonna start feeding these to get them beefed up for the winter.
Nuc 1
This was a split from a colony that was requeened, and was later used (unsuccessfully) to bolster the population of Brooks 2. It’s presently got three frames of bees with a 2 frame broodnest so I think it’s recovering well.
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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
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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
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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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