First Fall mite treatment

I gave the 3 hives Apiguard this past weekend. 

I thought I was going to have to combine the Russian hybrid with the smaller Italian hive. I thought they were queenless, but I found brood and larva so I just moved them into a smaller space. They are in 4 stacked nuc boxes instead of 2 mediums. They made it through the winter in 3 nuc boxes last year so they should be ok with 4. They still have time to fill it.

I had already combined the other Russian hybrid with the stronger Italian hive because it was queenless. That box which I had put on top of the honey super now has larva in it. I don't know if that's from the Italian queen or I was wrong about it being queenless. Either way it was too weak to get through the winter (only one medium.)

There was some robbing last weekend for the smaller Italian hive, so I added a robbing screen. 

If I can rearrange the hives a bit when I do the next dose of Apiguard I think they'll be mostly set for the winter. Stronger than last fall! If things go well I hope to harvest honey next 4th of July.

Quick status

So on Saturday 4/19 I put syrup buckets on the hives with Fumagilin-B for nosema.

No inspection or anything. Just supply food and go. I'll see if I can inspect them next weekend--weather permitting. It was too windy and cool this weekend.

April 12th

Both hives have survived the winter.

They were bringing in pollen. I don't know where they are getting it, but it is pollen.

I need to get some buckets of syrup on the hives on the next warm day. It got cold again before I did it this past weekend.

Bees are amazing.

November Starts

I went to the annual Maine State Beekeepers Association meeting on October 19. It was interesting. Lots of good stuff on sale and in the raffles. The speakers were pretty good. The food was reasonable. The weather was great so we were all thinking we should be outside checking the bees, not inside. I didn't win anything in the raffles, bummer:) Learned some things. Spent some money on candy boards. Talked about Foyle's War and Doctor Who:)

I pulled the empty syrup bucket off of the Italian hive about 10 days (maybe longer) ago.
I pulled the syrup bucket off of the hybrid Russian hive at the beginning of this week before we got some very frosty weather. It still had some syrup in it.
I wasn't sure about whether to keep the buckets off or not so I emailed the YCBA googlegroup. The advice I got was to pull the buckets since the moisture is not a good thing in cold weather, and the bees can't take cleansing flights to get rid of waste products from the syrup.
Yesterday and today the temperatures are in the 60s so the bees can fly!
Listening to the boxes, they both seem to be OK.
I am going to set up the candy boards and put them on and wrap the hives around Thanksgiving.

Moving day!

I moved 15 frames from the Russian hive into 3 nuc boxes. They hadn't started drawing comb on 5 of their 20 frames so they won't miss them. Now the frames that they ARE working are stacked vertically with the 2 frames of brood in the middle of the middle box. I did the move on Thursday, Oct 10, and gave them a new bucket of syrup, too. I think this is the best I can do for this hive.

I didn't check the Italian hive since they seem to be doing well. I'll check their bucket of syrup this weekend.

More Syrup!

I put another bucket of syrup on the Italian hive yesterday, Oct 8.
I will put another bucket of syrup on the Russian hybrid hive tomorrow, Oct 10.
All done with fall medications.

Last Medications

On Thursday Oct 3 I took a look in the hives.
I checked the Apiguard trays, and they were not empty yet so I put what was left back into the hives. I moved the feeding shim to the top of the hive with the syrup bucket and put the Apiguard tray on top of the inner cover so the bees can walk across it when they go to get syrup. I removed the top boxes from both hives since the bees were not making any significant inroads into filling those boxes. They were just empty space which will not help them stay warm this winter.
The Italian hive has pollen in the bottom box and a little brood. Lots of space left to fill so they did not need the top box. The middle box has brood, honey and pollen and is mostly full. The top box has a little brood, but mostly honey. This hive looks strong, but when I put the syrup bucket on top I think I see robbers hovering around so I blocked all entrances except the bottom one. Today I noticed the bees have worked to open all of the entrances again so maybe I'm just paranoid.
The Russian hybrid has pollen in the bottom box and lots of space so they did not need the top box. The other box has a little brood (really not much, I think the queen is stopping), pollen and honey. This box is almost full. If the hive can survive the winter on two boxes I think this hive is OK. I have been debating whether to put them into the nuc box or not. Is a vertical stack of 15 frames better than 20 frames organized into 2 horizontal sets of 10 frames?