Raising Queens Status Report, Winterizing Plan

Earlier posts describe some of my efforts in raising queens this summer, inspired by some folks in the Mount Baker Bee group who were doing the same. I am not sure why its taken me so long to give this a try, as it is very interesting, and I have had moderate success so far. I see it as practice for the coming year, and hopefully and integral part in keeping my hives going- it is not difficult, and solves some of the issues I have had with sudden queen losses.

I started a month back, in July.   To date, my tally for queens rearing this year has been as follows:

• I grafted 20 (maybe 24) a month ago from a single, ferral hive ( a "survivor" hive as defined by RO)
• Of these grafts 16 were accepted and made into queens cells. I think the ones that were rejected were those I did not properly set in their cells.
• I put these 16 capped cells into 10 mating nucs (its all I had).
• Of these, 15 hatched, and one did not, which gave me 9 nucs with 9 hatched queens.
• Of these 9 queens, 2 disappeared- either eaten by birds, or lost, or some other reason. In the 2 without queens , within a week I found laying workers and in one, many bogus supercedure cells. I combined these two nucs into other nucs. I was hesitant to combine these earlier as I am unexperienced, and small darting virgin queens are hard to find- or, possibly out carousing. More than a few times I missed here in a few careful inspections, then found here in the third.
• Of the 7 left, 6 now have laying queens. The other, at least 3 or 4 days ago, has a queen, but she is small, and not laying. I will check again this week.

So I guess that's about a 30% success rate.  I also raised 2 with the Cloake board method (I started with 4, but 2 lost their queens- so a 50% rate), so right now, I have 9 nucs out there that I have to either use, or figure out how to get through the winter. I hadn't really thought this out- but have started beefing them up to see if I can give the queens enough room to make enough brood to survive, and feeding them both syrup and pollen. Seems a little late to get their mass up, but I haven't tried before. Its a constant learning process of trying to understand what the best course of action is.

With the nucs, there are now 29 colonies I have to think about. I did not pull off much honey, and I am not collecting, as far as I can tell, any Knotweed honey (though yesterday did cut flowers from a plant to collect its pollen- which is on tiny, tiny flowers). So its a down year- way down, from previous, but I actually welcome that break some- its a lot of work extracting. Most hives are down to three supers (which is how they winter), and I plan a third Varroa treatment in September for all hives, though this is based right now on only one mite count of one hive (which already was over 5%). I will also treat for Nosema- though with Fumagin B, as I understand it,of doubtful effectiveness against N. ceranae.

A few hives will get new queens- my plan was to replace all third year queens- but now I am not so sure- the ones I have seem to be laying well and  don't have the necessary heart (or lack of it) to kill them.

I've installed slatted bottom boards on all the hives, have feeders ready to go, and will check this weekend to ensure that the queens are actively laying. A few hives, I know, are weak, and may get combined. In October I will add vented, insulated tops, and likely wrap my hives as I did too late last year. This seems possibly wrong headed, in attempting to allow sick bees to survive, so I not sure.

That's the plan.