Sunday, June 17, 2018

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!

2 comments:

  1. Dawn,

    Have you, or anyone else for that matter, noticed their bees being significantly more aggressive this year? As soon as I remove the top to my hive, bees immediately come out and start aggressively attacking me. Once I finished my hive check last night, the bees continued to follow me down the block and an hour later were still quite agitated and flying around the backyard and deck area.

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  2. They may have mites. I will talk about various ways of treating hives for mites at the next co-op meeting this fall. Haven't set a date yet. At this point I would start using a smoker. I always set my lid on the ground and set the hot smoker on the lid to ensure I don't start a fire while I'm working the hive.

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