From: allen <[log in to unmask]>

>How's it goin'?

Ok, in rough terms...we started the season with 5 survivor hives.  We brought in 30 packages, with 10 in our urban backyard for queen rearing (for ourselves, and for students).  The packages were a bit late, and the queen rearing classes (4 weeks in a row, with students grafting in class and the cells started and finished in our yard) started just about 4 weeks after the packages arrived.  Ideally we would have let the packages build for another couple of weeks before using them for cell builders, nucs, reaqueening, etc...but the schedule didn't allow for it, and it all worked out well for us and our students.

Packages were started on drawn comb (some honeysupercell, some sc foundation, some mann lake pf100's) with an average of 2.5 frames of capped honey (from winter deadouts).

Using our 5 survivor queens (all but one nice and strong) along with 2 other queens from local beekeepers, we requeened all the packages with virgins, and whenever possible having the virgins mate in a yard other than that of her mother (the 5 survivors were spread over 3 locations), with some mating in our home yard (with drones from all of our bees).

We probably have 40-45 colonies (including our smallest/weakest nucs) in 5 locations, and I expect to combine down to 30-35 for the winter.

Aside from the honey given to the packages to start, and the honey smeared on top bars of the cell builders, the bees have not been fed and the bees have not been treated.  Our home yard is overcrowded, and we should move some of the bees.

We don't do mite counts, but I have a sharp eye for mites...i sometimes uncap a few drone brood (probably 30% of the time I open a hive I do this to at least 1 or 2 cells).  I've seen one mite in our colonies all season.  We haven't been bringing the observation hives to the markets this year very much, but I have brought them a couple of times in the last month....you can usually spot mites on the undersides of the bees as they walk on the glass...I couldn't find a single one in 4 days with the hive (stocked from 2 separate colonies for 2 consecutive days one week apart).

5 of the nucs are weak, with not enough bees to really do anything....some of these have a spotty brood pattern, and definitely should be requeened/combined unless they show marked improvement by our next visit.

We had one single box colony in our home yard collapse with some efb like symptoms.  I pinched the queen and added a queenright nuc to the box and they seem to be doing fine.

We had some trouble with chalk in some of our maine hives (as reported earlier).  I'm hearing a lot about chalk this year.  Changing queens seems to have at least cleaned things up, I hope to see more solid capped brood patterns next time I visit.....Ramona reported barely any visible in the combs, but still some cells that look like they have been chewed out.

That's really all I have to report at the moment.  Most hives aren't heavy, and I'm hoping for a strong flow...many colonies are well brooded up and full of bees.  If we have to feed, we have honey to feed.

Of course, we don't know what the future will bring.....

deknow

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