Inching the Bees

 

I found some wooden platforms at the green dump this week that are perfect for moving beehives slowly across the garden into the sun.  The hives are heavy so I cannot move them alone unless I dismantle them and move the hive box by box. I don't want to disrupt the bees that much every day. 

The platforms are a perfect solution.  I love to save stuff from the dump, so that was a bonus as well.  I needed help initially in getting the stack onto the platform, but now that they are up there I can just slowly slide them over a foot per day on the platform without having to get someone to help me. Much easier than trying to suit two people up every single day just to go out for 5 minutes to lift them.  It does not jostle or disturb the bees.  They hardly even noticed when I went out there today.  Easier on the back, too. 

The brick colored hive is the superstar hive.  I think it will produce a lot of honey this year.  The green hive is also strong.  The short blue hive box in the foreground is empty right now.  I am either going to buy a nuc from a friend who is raising bees of a few different races or wait for one of ours to swarm.  I might even try to do a split later in the season. 

A split is when you take a healthy hive with a good population and remove a few frames that have eggs 3 days old or less, uncapped and capped larvae along with the nurse bees and put it in its own small nuc box.  The bees realizing they do not have a queen, will start feeding the eggs royal jelly and make themselves a new queen.  You have just made it possible for one hive to become two.  

You can also prevent swarms by doing splits so the bees do not feel crowded.  Since bees naturally swarm in spring to propagate their species, the beekeeper can take advantage of this natural tendency to make more colonies out of a single productive colony.  If you see a queen cell on a frame you can remove that frame as part of the split because you will have  a head start on a new queen.  

The brick red hive started out on the cinder blocks in the lower left corner of the photo.  Over the past week I have moved the hive a foot per day so now it is about 7 feet away from its original shady location.  I noticed some of the bees were confusedly circling around the old locations so I decided to put off the next move for a few more days till everyone in the hive understands where their house is.  If you look closely, you can see bees sitting on the cinder blocks, on the side of the hive and on the stacks of empty boxes behind their hive.  There are quite a few in the air, as well, but I could not get a good photo of them. 

It has been too overcast to do the powdered sugar Varroa mite treatment.  It is supposed to rain all this weekend and next week, but maybe there will be a sunny day were I can slip the sticky board under the screened bottom board and sprinkle the powdered sugar in the hives.  It makes the bees groom each other, the mites fall off and can't get a footing in the slippery powdered sugar and they end up stuck in the margarine on the board below.  What a way to go.