Author: The Moderator

Every year we seem to have one long February storm. This year is no different. The temperatures were in the single digits overnight for a good 12 days. Couple that with a serious amount of snow and you have an extremely challenging end to the winter months. I find that half the colonies are lost in early winter freezes and the other half during February.

This time of year, we need to perform a quick check on the bees and give them extra food if needed. So, I typically look for a nice couple days of winter weather where the temps are above 50F. If the bees have made it this far, the last thing I want is for them to die off for lack of food when they are so close to making it through to April.

There are 2 hives at the campus which are still surviving. Both of these hives were opened quickly and newspaper and loose sugar were poured onto the top frames. This is a very quick and non invasive way to give them a little extra food for the last length of winter.

Treatment of Campus hives, Corona Street hives and GG Hives.

A replacement queen was sourced from Dakota Bees on 07/25/2020. The original queen has failed as she had not laid any signs of brood. That would indicate that the queen had not laid any eggs in over 3 weeks. We removed the original queen which looked healthy but for the lack of any egg laying and we introduced the new queen in the cage.

GG Blue hive is showing signs of a failed queen. A 8 frames are back filled with pollen and nectar. No signs of any brood at any stage of development can be seen. A replacement queen will be found.

Also we decided to harvest 2 medium 8 frame supers from each of the Corona street hives. This leaves one partially filled medium deep for each hive which will remain.

Additionally, we removed 1 medium deep worth of bees from each of the Corona Street hives and merged them with 2 very weak hives at GG. This partially worked. For some reason all of the bees from one of the attempted merge, left the medium super and gathered onto the other attempted merge. So, very strange behavior and not sure why the bees would not stay put and leave and merge with the other attempted hive merge.

Treatment of Campus hives, Corona Street hives and GG Hives.

Performed a quick hive inspection at GG before the upcoming weekend honey harvest. Honestly, the rooftop hives do not look that great. The numbers of bees are not overwhelmingly positive. But rather marginal.

All hives were inspected in some fashion. The Green hive is the strongest and given more space to grow. The blue hive has a failed queen and is suspect. We need to replace this queen. Going down the line, the pine hive is looking healthy with a decent brood pattern. However, the orange and the yellow hives are not looking great. We should reinforce their numbers with bees from the Corona street hives.

All campus hives were inspected. All hives appear to be queenright and functional. This includes the Woody’s pond hive which does appear to be on the rebound with a new laying queen.

Hives were given more space and the smallest hive was given some new bees from the strongest colony.

A quick trip to the campus to inspect two hives. The far hive (022) was clearly overcrowded and we would like to prevent swarming. So I added another shallow honey super to the colony. Also all hive top covers were propped open at an angle for extra ventilation.

Hive (021) combine went very well. This hive does not need a honey super. So I shook all the bees from the honey super into the bottom brood box. I then placed the empty honey super onto Hive, (022). Hive (021) now only has one brood chamber. We need to order 2 more honey supers.

Hive (027) at Corona street has a laying queen and is off and running. The Orange hive at GG has once again rejected a queen, has no brood and has enough bees that should be saved. So we moved the (027) colony into the orange hive. We separated the two sides of the box with the plastic divider and screened the new colony into their box. This prevents the new colony from leaving and the original colony from entering the wrong entrance. 2 days later the screens were removed. And 6 days later the plastic divider was removed.

Hive (003) was queen less for some reason. The emerging virgin queen was seen but never mated. So a new frame of eggs was added.