Category: Bee Keeping Journal

Hives were given some wind protection with excess leaves I did not want to bag up.

Mite treatments began in early October. One treatment per week for the next 3 weeks. Make sure to start treatments earlier.

We had a great time working the hives. We focused on verifying if a specific hive was queenright. Thanks for coming out to see the bees.

Hive (000) was inspected. Previous lite inspections showed that many frames in the top box were back filled with nectar and no signs of a queen were seen. This hive certainly swarmed at some point. The lower box was inspected and the queen was seen. Signs of eggs and larva were also seen. The numbers look good, however there are no brood stores.

I was invited to teach the Horizons students on June 22. This involved 4 classes over a roughly 5 hour period. Each class had approximately 10-12 students. The grades ranged from 5-8. I presented topics from exterior hive activity, pollination and inside hive organization. I also brought in the visual teaching hive, a honey frame and the live glass walled visualization hive.

One initiative I would like to pursue, is to install several tree boxes for bees to move into. There are several locations around the campus where wild bees have moved into buildings. We would like to provide alternative tree boxes for bees to move into rather than buildings and structures. This is an example of one of those tree boxes.

The plastic hive has been overflowing with bees for several days. This behavior is due to the high temps but also a bee box that is so overcrowded that the thousands of bees are outside the box 24 hours a day. This hive is past time to split. So I grabbed 5 frames from the top box and inspected the bottom box. The top box had 4 frames of brood and one frame of eggs. I based the split off of these frames. I also noted what appear to be queen emergency cells or supercedure cells already being formed. Not sure why they would be making emergency cells. I will investigate the lower box further for proof of the queen.

The split was transported using the white plastic NUC box and transferred into the 5 frame NUC that was made last week using scrap materials.

A huge swarm was spotted on the campus. I wuickly ran out and performed a sucessful capture. The swarm was about 20 yards to the west of the campus berm hives. Most likely this swarm was cast by my own hives.