I first checked the honey super to see if they had done anything...nope, not a thing. No comb drawn out or anything. I then took the super off as well as the top hive body. I knew something was up because the top hive body was not nearly as heavy as I remember it being last time...
Started the real inspection in the bottom box... Found lots of brood at varying stages...tiny grain-sized eggs that must have just been laid recently as well as larger larvae. This is a good sign because it at the very least means there is a queen present...right? I hope so... I never did find the queen but I did find what I feared...several, no MANY swarm cells. Here are just a couple...
This might give you an idea of just how many I found in this one hive...
And here is a closeup of the queen larvae and what I imagine is the special food given to them called Royal Jelly...this special food is what helps make them a queen rather than worker or drone.
Anyhow, my suspicion is that with this many swarm cells present the hive has likely experienced at least one swarm. Why haven't they moved up into the honey super if they were feeling crowded? Damn bees! So it would appear that this hive is half the number it ought to be at this time of year and has a fraction of the honey stores that it ought to have...the effects of swarming.
The news from the second hive was slightly better...maybe. I found only a couple of very small incomplete swarm cells. The top hive body seemed heavier though the amount of honey in it still didn't seem like it was previously or what it ought to be. And they had not moved up into the honey super...
So, now what to do? The danger of them swarming so late in the season is that there numbers and honey stores are so low that they might not recover enought to survive the winter. With that in mind, I removed the queen excluder so hopefully they will feel more welcome in the super box. I will also make up some syrup to feed them to try and get there stores replenished.
I have some thoughts on what I could have done differently...
- Sprayed the foundation of the honey super frames with syrup to encourage the bees to draw comb out on them.
- Provided syrup when I added the honey super to give them easily available material for drawing out all that comb.
- Leave off the queen excluder until the comb was all drawn out and then add the excluder. Eventually with the queen being exculed, the brood that was laid in the honey super cells would hatch and would presumably be replaced with honey.
Who knows if any of the above would have helped...but they are strategies I will definitely keep in mind for next time!
All this likely means that any chance of my harvesting a crop of honey this year is out the window. Oh well...from the beginning I really didn't think that would be possible...starting from scratch means the bees have to expend a lot of energy to draw out the comb...something they won't have to do much of next year.
Oh, one more little tidbit of news...saw my first varroa mite. Lovely. you can see it on the lower bee in this picture.
It was the only one I spotted but where there is one, there are many...and they tend to explode in numbers very quickly. To help mitigate the problem, I removed the drone frames that were mostly drawn out and had drones either in larvae stage or were actively hatching. Mites tend to favor drone brood as they incubate the longest. By removing and freezing the drone comb/brood, you also kill the mites...which helps to keep their numbers in check. This weekend I will also do a powdered sugar treatment...sprinkle enough on to get them all dusted real nice. This causes the bees to groom each other...which knocks the mites to the bottom of the hive and through the screened bottom where they can not get back onto a bee. Let's hope it works.
No comments:
Post a Comment