Do you have a queenless colony?

Nearly every year I have had at least one queenless colony in mid to late season. Here are a few things that I have tried and succeeded at:

1) Borrowing a queen cell from another colony:

• Pull a frame with a well developed queen cell out of a different hive. 
• Tap off all the honeybees into their original hive.
• Place the frame with no bees into the queenless colony hive (center).
• Check back in 5-10 days to see if you find a new queen or evidence of a queen (eggs & larva).

2) Combine the queenless hive with a strong, healthy hive:

• Take both inner and outer lids off the hive with a queen.
• Place two to three sheets of newspaper over the top of the top box of the hive with a queen.
• Place several slices in the paper with a box knife.
• Place all boxes of the queenless hive on top of the hive with the queen.
• Replace both lids.
• Keep completing hive checks every 10 days.

This will allow the workers to become one family. The paper slows the process so there is less fighting while the strong colony accepts the queenless colony as siblings with the same skills and benefits. The more workers, the more resources are foraged and the more honey is produced. 

3) Order a replacement queen:

Kohnen & Sons if they still have them available and ship them one day air. This is expensive and may not work this late in the season.

https://www.koehnen.com/

LAST CALL FOR HONEY SUPERS!

By now, every hive should have at least two honey super boxes on top of your brood boxes! If you haven't noticed, the honey flow started a couple weeks ago and will continue through the first few weeks of August, beginning a decline at the beginning of August. If you don't have your supers on yet, don't delay! Bees only store honey when they have empty cells to store it in.

Preparing for the Honeyflow, Organic Mite Control & Swarm Prevention

Preparing for the Honey Flow:
I will be adding honey super boxes over the next couple weeks. I do not use a queen excluder because I believe it is not efficient for the workers to have to squeeze through the excluder wire when they are full of resources (nectar, water, and pollen). The queen usually lays eggs in the middle super frames however, by harvest time, those bees hatch out and the cells are used for storing honey rather than for brood.

Organic Mite Control:
Some ways of controlling mites include:

Using a green plastic drone frame. This works well because all the mites somehow know that if they crawl into a cell with drone larva, when the larva is capped for the pupa stage, the mites can eat on the unborn honeybee four days longer. Once all the cells become pupa, pull the green frame out of the hive and place it in the freezer. This should kill most or all of the mites in a colony.

Bring a kitchen sifter with powdered sugar and dust the bees on both sides of each frame. The mites can't stay adhered to the honeybees. I order mite boards from Mann Lake to place at the bottom of the hive. When the mites fall off the bees, they stick to the paper and the bees can't stick because of the rubber mesh that protects them from touching the sticky board.

http://scientificbeekeeping.com/powdered-sugar-dusting-sweet-and-safe-but-does-it-really-work-part-1/


Swarm Prevention:
June is the month for the highest possibility of swarming. To prevent swarming:

Make sure you have a queen by seeing her and/or evidence of her (eggs & larva).
Kill and remove all queen cups and swarm cells.
Perform complete and thorough hive checks every 10 days.

Building Colony Population for the Honey Flow

Now that dandelions are out in full force the bees also have trees, domesticated and native varieties of fruits and vegetables to gather nectar and pollen from, they no longer need sugar water feeders. Jen and I have removed all feeders from Langstroth hives.

Entrance reducers and inside as well as outside insulation have all been removed.

We do leave our top bar feeder in a few weeks longer, since the bees have to build raw comb with no
foundations to start with.

The more foragers a colony has increases the amount of resources brought into the hive.

Here are some tips for increasing honeybee population.

1) Keep a water source near the hive.

2) Keep pests and chemicals away from and out of the hive. Local businesses who spray chemicals to kill mosquitoes are honeybee killers as well. Chemicals may not be safe for humans either.

There are safer ways of killing mosquitoes, such as using mosquito vac machines.

3) Complete hive checks when the sun is highest in the sky (12-3 PM) every 10-12 days consistently. If you see the queen and evidence she is still laying eggs, remove all queen cups and cells.

3) Pull some of the frames with pupa and other stages of brood into the middle of the 2nd box to encourage the bees to build out the brood nest.

4) Spray sugar water on both sides of bare foundation.

5) If rain and weather cooler than 50* is in the forecast for longer than a couple days, slip a pollen patty into the hive (lay it on top of the frames in the top box) and don't forget to cut an x into the wax paper so the bees can access the food source with their proboscis.

6) We will add honey supers in a couple weeks. We don't use queen excluders to allow bees to store honey easier and this is a personal preference. I suspect having to squeeze through a queen excluder when full of nectar slows down efficiency during the honey flow.

Ants?

1. Sprinkle cinnamon around the perimeter of the base of the hive. Since cinnamon is water soluble, re-apply after rain OR . . . Place each of the legs of a hive table in a bucket of water.