Package Hive

 

It's about time! The flowers are blooming and it's starting to look nice and green in the backyard. The bees finally have something to eat.

 

Now that's a frame of brood! 

 

The Italian queen from my package is laying like crazy. We'll have lots of babies hatching out every day now.

Mad Scientist

Oh no, mites already? My two surviving hives have mites!?  One is pretty small and the strong one has signs of deformed wing. Sigh. And this is after treating with Formic last spring and Apivar in the fall. I don't know whether my mites are resistant to the treatments or if the bees are just susceptible due to bad genetics.  Or maybe they're getting reinfected from other hives in the neighborhood?

 

Anyway, time to try something new and bring in reinforcements.

 

Enter the mad scientist! This is my friend Jim from IEBA. He brought over his equipment for oxalic acid vapor treatment.

 

The oxalic acid powder is heated in a crucible by a heat gun and it shoots a vapor that we directed into the hives. It only kills mites on bees, not brood so I will need to treat weekly x 3. If we're successful, the mite counts will drop and the hives will grow and out-breed the mites.  I will also re-queen later in the spring. We'll

see how it goes.

Package Day!

 

Time to start the new hive! I picked up a package of Italians at Tate's yesterday.

 

Toby came along for the ride. He didn't mind the bees flying all over the place: he was too busy enjoying a honey stick.

 

I dumped them into the new hive with some help from

Toby's friend Marko.  Now is the hard part: waiting for them to release the queen and get started. 

Bees On Campus

My mom and I went to Gonzaga with the garden club for a tour of their hydroponic greenhouse.

 

 

The greenhouse tour was great but what caught my eye were the rooftop beehives.

 

 

 

This one had a window in the bottom deep! A cool idea but I don't think there's much to see from this angle.

It's pretty cool that they're trying to promote honeybee awareness. They are working to make the campus pollinator friendly too. Our bees can always use more friends.

2017!

A new beekeeping year is starting!

 

 

The poor bees were in a deep freeze all winter. Tons of snow and cold but it's finally melting. 

 

Say hi to Lucky! Our new all natural mouse control system. I had mice living in the shed and getting into the stored frames. Yuck.

 

 

Not much blooming yet but a few spring bulbs are up. Two of my three hives are flying and even bringing in some pollen but the third is a dead out. I'm not that surprised since it went queenless in the fall and had to be combined with the nuc. It was definitely the weakest of the three.

 So what's on tap for 2107??

I'm going to be working on my journeyman certification this year so I'm going to try some new things and learn as much as I can. I'm going to raise Italian bees for the first time when I get a package in April. I'll be learning about queen rearing this spring and summer which will be really cool. And as always I'm hoping for a good honey crop! I'm hoping all of the snow and rain leads to a good nectar flow this spring when the plants start blooming.

Let's go!!