Adding Honey Supers & Queen Trouble

Hello Folks,
We are halfway through the 2018 beekeeping season.

Adding Honey Supers
I will be adding medium honey supers over the next two weeks. I no longer use a queen excluder so the bees don't have a barrier to storing nectar in the super comb. At first, the queen may lay some brood in the middle frames however with two brood boxes under the supers, most of the brood is laid in those. June is the month notorious for swarming so I am meticulously checking my hives every 10 days to remove queen cells.

Queen Trouble?
If you lose a queen this late in the season the best thing to do is let the bees create their own queen so don't remove queen cells until you have determined you have a queen. You can physically see the queen or see eggs to determine a queen exists. It's really too late to re-queen and the chances an established colony will accept a new queen is pretty slim. I just did a hive check with Peggy out in North Pole because she was quite sure one of her five colonies was queenless. We checked all the comb for eggs and found no eggs, some larva, lots of pupa, and more than ten queen cells. We determined all five colonies had plenty of drones for successfully fertilizing a new queen. Peggy chose the most mature queen cell in its pupa stage and we destroyed all other competing queen cells. We hope to perform a hive check in ten days to find a new queen, new eggs, and larva. I will give a report after we do the check.

I have tried to re-queen my top bar hive twice this year and the bees would not accept a new queen. I expect this colony to die off within the next couple weeks.

When local beekeepers are out of queens I like to order extras from https://www.koehnen.com/

https://www.koehnen.com/queens

Keep Grass and Weeds Short in Front of Hives!

Ant Problems?

If you discover ants in your hive or near your hive you can sprinkle cinnamon around the base of the hive. Cinnamon is water soluble so you will have to keep repeating this. Another thing to do is place your hive in the middle of a kiddie pool on foundation bricks. The ants will drown on their journey into your hive. Make sure to put rocks, moss, and twigs into the pool to keep the bees from drowning and keep your eye on the level of water especially after a hard rain. The water level should be kept about a quarter inch or less deep.

Drawing a queen into the 2nd brood box.

A trick for drawing the queen into the 2nd brood box is to:

• Place the box on the top of the two brood boxes;
• Pull a couple frames with all stages of brood (eggs, larva, pupa, and adult) from the 1st box, into the center of the 2nd box;
• Worker bees will work harder to build the nest larger to encompass all brood frames
• The queen will lay in both boxes;
• The newborn bees hatching out of the pupa stage will work on the frames around the area they hatched from.

This needs to happen now, before the honeyflow!