The Buzz Newsletter

June 2004

 

 

Page 4

The Bee Yard Report

The longer I keep bees, the more I realize that you make up the plan as you go. I always try to spot equipment in the good looking yards in preparation for splitting. I almost always guess wrong. How they look early on has little bearing on what they are going to do later. The yards where I had all the equipment piled up were only average at the end of April. Others, that were rather ho hum early on, were boiling with bees.

We seemed to have a much higher rate of queen failure from the over wintered queens that we usually do. We would open the lid and think, "Here is a good one". Then there would be nothing but drone brood. Usually, there were enough bees to divide these three ways. The other scenario would be to simply set one of the boxes on a different bottom. This year we had some small nucs with laying queens that we used to requeen the drone laying colonies.

We usually split our bees way down. Some years we keep going until the third week in May. Most of those years have had cold wet springs and beans were still being planted in late May or even early June. This spring was a whole different ball game. The weather was great. We haven't been stuck one time (no 4-wheel drive). Everything was early. Dandelions were blooming by mid-April. We pulled the bees out of the orchard the last week of April. The biggest factor for us is that the beans are already in the ground. That's going to shorten our season considerably.

We started pulling brood from the good colonies before the winter wraps were off. We pulled the three frames out of the middle of the top box, shook the bees off and then but the brood into another box on top of a queen excluder. The bees will come up and cover the brood. We come back later and pull the box and put a new queen in it. Sometimes we leave it in the same yard and sometimes not. Queen acceptance in these splits is about 98%. When we spread the bees out into nuc boxes, queen acceptance isn't quite as good. My theory is that we upset their organization but I don't really know.

I don't like to draw comb in the brood nest. We just haven't had very good luck with that. We had to do it this year since it was obvious we were going to run out of brood boxes. Some of our good colonies got a
box of foundation instead of getting split. We pulled three frames of brood and put them in the middle of the foundation box and then put the other three frames of foundation between the brood frames in the second box. Others got two or three frames of foundation inserted into the second box when we split them

Some of our colonies still looked huge after we took the split off. We gave these a third brood box, thinking,” We’ll do them again later". Some of these boxes got filled with honey before we got back to them. Now we are on the verge of woodland bloom. Our colony count isn't quite where we want it but we have decided to stop splitting. If we get some weather there will be honey. If we don't, there will be a lot of swarms hanging in the trees.

A major departure from normal for us is supering without queen excluders. We still have to do it on the single story colonies but they won't be ready for another two weeks(late May) We felt like the doubles were just too big to be restricted. We used a few excluders on the ones that still had undrawn foundation in the brood nest because we hoped to force them to draw it.

It's been nice having son Eric out of the Marines and home helping with the bees. Adam came down from Ames in late April and grafted some larva. His queens are just starting to lay in the nucs. He is home now to help us get organized for the summer. Alex has been around when we needed him in addition to taking care of "The Buzz". It's been a busy spring.

Submitted by Phil Ebert