Hello Folks,
I hope you are seeing lots of honeybee babies "brood" and pollen stores inside your honeycomb! Our bees are now foraging my favorite, the Alaska Rose in addition to all the other variety of weeds, domesticated and native flowers. In the last several weeks, I have requeened one colony myself and helped a couple of people re-queen their colonies. It is now getting a bit late in the season to re-queen colonies.
When a queen goes missing mid-summer(and I don't see any eggs and/or larva, I often combine the queenless colony with a strong colony to increase the number of foragers before the honey flow.
To combine two separate colonies, I take the lid off a strong colony, and cover the entire top of the box with two or three pages of newsprint, leaving it hanging over all edges of the box. Then I use my hive tool to slice 4-5 two-inch holes in the paper to help the bees begin to tear apart the paper. The queenless colony is reduced to one box if the population isn't too large. This is done by tapping the bees off of frames that have no brood and little to no stores inside the cells. These frames should be stored in a cool, dry place that the bees cannot reach.
Combining colonies allows a slow pairing of the two colonies as opposed to a fast combination which always causes the workers to fight. I have been very successful with combining colonies over the past 18 years. It nearly always works great.
The queenless colony can then keep working and won't die off due to a decreasing population which also exposes them to disease and robbers.
I just swapped my top boxes with the bottom boxes a couple days ago and will be adding honey super boxes in the next week to prepare for the honey flow.
I keep removing grass and plants in front of the hives and completing full hive checks every 10-12 days. Ten days is best practice in case you miss a queen cell/cup.
I make sure my bees have plenty of water nearby. This helps them with making lots of honey.
Now it's just waiting for the web of life to work the way it was intelligently designed!
Two of my colonies are at Georgeson Botanical Gardens and they are really bringing the nectar and pollen in!
Lisa and James Harlow have been wintering successfully for the past two years. In their first year, they successfully wintered 5/5 colonies.
Here is the link to Lisa's blog where you can find a variety of information about homeschooling and homesteading. It has been a pleasure collaborating with Lisa and her family over the past five years!
