Category: Bee Keeping Journal

A package of bees was purchased from “To Bee Or Not To Bee”. The package has one italian queen. The package was healthy and a good size.

The over winter hive was also briefly inspected. I did not have any smoke or bee protection. So I simply peaked inside to see what the spring numbers looked like. The numbers were ok. Not great, but ok.

The queen cages were removed from all the new hives. All the queens had escaped and were loose in the hive. The two overwintered hives were inspected. The double deep yellow is packed with capped brood and will need to be split soon. The Triple deep green hive is full of bees but no capped brood.

That time of year again. We installed 4 packages from Dakota Bees at the Corona street property. Excellent day followed by an afternoon and next full day of hard rain. The bees should be spending that time setting up the new hive.

Each hive was setup in a 8 frame deep. Previous years brood frames and one resource frame was put into each hive body. The queens were installed as usual and the hives were dumped as usual. The hive bodies were closed up right before the storms and the entrance reducers put on.

The split hive with queen was quickly inspected. Eggs were found. The queen cage was removed. Queen most likely survived and the colony is on its way to growing. New bees seen at entrance of hive orienting. During the last few weeks of cold snaps, the hive was sealed and moved to the interior of the house.

Original queen-less hive has significant entrance activity. A new queen should be emerging soon and mated. Check for eggs on weekend of May 1st.

The campus hives was opened and inspected. The bees have not expanded much during the last few weeks. Very few die offs were seen at the bottom of the hive from the last cold snap. Only a couple of frames with bees. The queen was seen and eggs. More foragers were seen at the entrance than last visit.

The hives at GG and Corona street mostly perished during the long winter months. Some of the disappearances of the bees was a mystery while others just diminished until the cold snap in Feb finished them off. All hives were treated for mites with the same protocol. Only 2 hives survived.

The unfinished pine hive and the double deep green survived. The unfinished pine hive was damaged from the winter weather and was no longer a good container for the bees. So I transferred the contents of the pine hive to the double deep yellow hive body. This colony was approximately 3 frames of bees. We gave them an additional lower deep with half empty brood frames and half resource frames.

The double deep green hive was absolutely packed full of bees. We did some minor cleaning in the hive and gave them a new lower box full of brood frames.

Campus hives were inspected several times during the Winter months. Across, the months we saw a steady loss of hives after the late fall cold snaps and the February cold spells. As a result we lost all hives but one.

This surviving hive (022) shown below was opened up and a quick inspection performed. The queen was seen. However there were only 2 frames of bees present. The box (023) was added with honey resources and plenty of brood frames.

The refinished bee boxes were also brought back to campus. These boxes were setup on the bench for future use. A commercial bee package was ordered and should arrive towards the end of May. These boxes will be used for these commercial bees.

Several of the house hives also perished over the winter months. Only one hive survived the harsh winter months. This hive is currently exploding with bees and needed a split. I performed a split with the top 2 boxes of bees. These top two boxes were searched for the queen bee extensively. She was not found and these two boxes were used in the new queen-less split. The original hive body was given an empty brood box for the top. We will check this brood box in one week to see if new eggs have been laid box (017). Both split hives had egg frames.

The new split was comprised of the top two boxes below the separator. If the other original hive does not have new eggs then we may investigate further.

Lets face it, 2020 was a tough year for all sorts of creatures. The bees had one hell of a year in 2020. We saw a couple of extreme cold snaps in late spring that destroyed the newly emerged spring forage. As a result the bees simply did not launch themselves into a productive year. We also saw some very serious 70 degree cold snaps in early fall which put pressure on the bee populations and killed off some very strong colonies almost immediately. Personally I lost 8 out of the 10 colonies I had going into Winter. I have similar reports from other beekeepers.

I fully expect my colonies with only 8 frames of bees to struggle and die off during the long winter months. But I and others saw huge 15 frame colonies with tons of resources simply die off.

2020 was also a year that I did not see a single wild swarm nor did I ever see any of my spring colonies show a sign of swarming. The resources simply did not come in and the reproductive signals never triggered.

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.