June 2021 - Swarm Season

What a beautiful season we have underway! 

Here are some tips on what we are doing right now with our colonies.

We have moved all hives to their permanent locations.

Hive checks are being completed every 10-12 days during the warmest time of the day.

June is traditionally the SWARMING SEASON!

We have found a couple colonies queenless in the past couple of weeks. This is determined when no eggs are found in open honeycomb cells. Queenless colonies should have multiple queen cells at various stages.

We choose a single queen cell that is the largest/longest and leave that one while removing all other queen cells and cups.

Our hope is a new queen will emerge and spend the first 3-5 days mating with drones from a neighboring colony. Hopefully, during our next hive check, we will find new eggs and some larva.

If we do not find any evidence of a new queen, our chances of having a healthy colony are greatly diminished. We can do one of the following:

1) Call Dale Lupton for a new queen 907-378-1455 and if he is out of queens, we have a queen shipped here via Fed Ex. Here's where we like to order queens: https://www.koehnen.com/

2) Another Good Option: We can take a frame from another colony that has a queen cell (either capped in the pupa stage or at least that contains a bed of royal jelly) and tap all the bees off the frame. Then we place this frame with various stages of brood (eggs, larva, and pupa, with one queen cell) into the queenless hive. 

 3) Last Resort Option: We can combine colonies to make sure the queenless colony does not completely fail. This is done by draping a couple sheets of newsprint over the top of the healthy colony and cutting 1-2 inch slits in the paper. Then we place the queenless colony hive bodies on top of the newsprint. This allows the bees to develop a mixed family gradually as the bees eat through the paper.

This gives both colonies an increased population of foragers for the remainder of the season.

Entrances are completely removed now!

During Hive Checks:

We continue to move slowly through each of the frames, starting on one side (away from the brood nest) checking each frame for evidence of a queen. 

If we see eggs, larva and pupa, we know we are 99% sure we still have a healthy queen.

If we don't find the queen, we are not concerned as queens usually do a pretty good job hiding from us.

We keep the area in front of our hives free of weeds and grass so the entrance is wide open. Bees will be rushing in and out of both entrances with the majority utilizing the bottom entrance.

When temperatures reach 80* or higher we lift the outer lid (only in the front of the hive) and place a stick or 10-penny nail diagonally across the front corners of the top hive box to help the bees with air circulation.

We continue to ensure our colonies have a good water source nearby. If you are providing a container, be sure to have twigs or rocks in the water so the bees don't drown. 

ANT PROBLEMS:

Ants like sweet things and bee hives can attract ants. We have used the following methods to remove ants:

1) We sprinkle cinnamon around the ground base of the hive.

2) We use a kiddie pool to set the hive in and fill it a quarter of the way with water, again, making sure to put twigs, wood, rocks, moss in the water so the bees don't drown.

ADDING HONEY SUPERS:

We will start adding additional boxes (medium honey supers) in the next couple of weeks. For our colonies, the dates for adding these boxes will range from June 23rd to June 30th.

We expect to have full frames of honey by the end of June or the first week of August.