All berm hives except for the hive with circular opening were treated for mites with Oxalic acid for 10 minutes.
Mite Treatment
No one likes to treat for mites. The process itself is nasty and irritating. You also get a feeling that the bees would be better off without caustic fumes flooding the hive interior. However the truth is that your colonies will most likely not survive without some sort of mite mitigation. Mites are ubiquitous. Telling yourself your bees are somehow special and do not need treatment is setting yourself and your bee colonies in your care up for disaster. Expect 60% or more losses without some mite treatment or mitigation.
Mites are nasty things which are an invasive species originating from somewhere in Asia. These things attach themselves to bees and slowly drain the bee of hemolymph. Perhaps the more devastating problem is not the leach like behavior but the viruses that the mite brings into the colony. Viruses like deformed wing virus can be a death sentence for a colony.
Mites are just one of the environmental stressors that honey bees face. Luckily we can perform a simple, quick and inexpensive treatment with Oxalic acid. I use a heated aluminum block to vaporize the Oxalic acid. The treatment takes about 10 minutes and in most cases not a single bee will perish. In some cases the bees do not even take notice of the treatment procedure. The only affect I have seen is the introduction of the hot vaporizer block causes a bit of commotion.
This mite treatment will be performed once a month starting in July and ending in October.
Honey Harvest
I pulled one Warre box off of the WildCA18A mother colony. This box was completely full of solid capped honey frames. No brood at all. I processed the frames using the hew honey spinner. The intact frames were returned to the box. However the box of frames was added to a different colony. The box was added to the now severely overcrowded neighboring hive.
Hive Split
One of the WildCA18 swarm colonies was showing some significant overcrowding problems. I opened the hive and was greeted with a box packed full of bees and most of the foragers were out already. So this box is full and we need to do something now. I removed 3 frames and added those to a new 5 Nuc box. I took this queen less colony back to my house and introduced a queen. The queen was caged and will be released in 24 hours.
Hive Inspection
Officer Ed’s hive was opened and inspected. Eggs and larva were seen. The colony has expanded to approximately 5 frames. I would expect a huge growth in the next round of brood. Next inspection should be in 3 weeks. The bottom box should be full of bees. Otherwise we may have a problem with this new colony overwintering.
Hive Inspections
All campus hives show normal activity. Not all hives were opened. The Carniolan hive shows normal queen activity. The Wild17 re-queen is going just fine. The WildCA18B colony has eggs.
Hive Building
I spent some time using some old OSB sheathing to build 3 frame queen rearing boxes. These are Langstroth deep frame boxes which should be good for rearing queens next year. However, OSB board is extremely difficult to use and not worth the time. These boxes are so fragile and vulnerable to water that they are almost useless. I will need to spend a huge amount of time and material coating the OSB with paint to protect the material.
Foster Bee Homes
Both wild nuc colonies were opened today at their respective foster bee homes. The smaller nuc colony which was just started the week prior was very calm and normal during the opening. Probably because they did not have many numbers inside the hive body and thus had lesser internal temperature to cope with.
The other colony which was opened in the evening was extremely mobile and wanted out of the hive body immediately. This would also explain the tremendous amount of fanning which could be heard from this colony. Next time we shut them up for 3 days, we should provide more ventilation. The wire screen across the opening was not enough air flow.
Hive Inspection
All campus hives were inspected. All campus hives were queenright with good resources and entrance activity.
Carniolan19 has decent numbers but is behind the normal expected population curve for an Italian queened hive. Not concerned yet.
Both of the ApisCA19A and ApisCA19B are doing just fine. Three frames in the honey supers are being filled out.
One frame of brood and nurse bees was taken from the Wild17 swarm colony and moved to the recent Bee Bearding split which was taken on Thursday. Inspection of the Woody’s pond hive showed excellent numbers and the bees are moving into the super with huge numbers. However the wax foundation frame repairs which were performed did not work. The bees are still rejecting two of the frames.
All feeders were removed from the hive brood chambers and backfilled with undrawn wax frames.
Officer Ed’s colony while still small seems to be increasing in numbers. The hive was only partially opened due to time constraints. A quick peek inside showed more bees than we started with. The colony is still operating out of only one small frame brood chamber.
Foster Bee Homes
Two colonies will be moved out to new locations. The first colony will be relocated in the neighborhood and the second will be located to the Barrett house. The colonies which will be moved are the WildCA19B colony and the beard starter colony with a WildCA18A queen. The colonies are established in Nuc hives and have their own stands.
The colonies were shut this morning and will be stored in a cool ventilated location until 3 days from now on Wednesday.
