End of Spring Report

Its been a pretty intensive Spring for my beekeeping- lots of projects and learning, decent warm weather, and up to this point,  mite free and relatively healthy bees. There have been lots of challenges- like not being ahead of the game with swarm prevention on hives that got huge quickly, a few cases of CBPV, which seemed more vicious than ever (and I removed and isolated the hive, but unfortunately not before I made splits from it, which I now fear are also suffering), and trying to get lots of equipment built, repaired, and ready for use. I did a lot this work in the winter, but still- there's always something more to do and I am trying new things all the time (this morning I built 5 honey escape boards using old inner covers (I don't use inner covers much anymore), so now have 11 of these boards).

Here are the supers I made up during the winter, ready to go a month  or two ago. They are all now all used, and I had  to put together another 30 for the upcoming Blackberry. I think at this point I have about 23 active hives- and would guess that all but a few will make honey this year, if things go well. Knock on wood- but it seems like at least a few things are working- like the hive poupations are up- though a few have lost queens (swarmed and lost their virgin queens I think) and a few did not take off and i am requeening.

Below are the first round of mating boxes I made a month ago- number 1 through 8- and which I and my friend Jim installed the first round of cells from grafts we made. Which went okay- but not as well as I had hoped (I think I was deficient in setting up the cell builder hives, and used Susan Colby's method like last year but did not get enough nurse bees so the cells were undersized).

I use Westerns for everything (and more and more am convinced that this is the way to go), so these are all made to fit 3 frames. I picked bee vision colors for the numbers- so both the queens and I could remember which box was which.

Subsequently, I built 10 more boxes and grafted another round of queens (22 out of 24 were accepted and made queens- much better size, but I still would like them bigger). So now there are 18 mating boxes, in various states of queen making. Only 4 from the first round mated.

I set the boxes on a small platform made from 2x6 which has a hole in it, and which fits over a #4 rebar which I drive into the ground. In that way, I don't need to level any ground or clear any areas- I can pretty much set them anywhere- here are  a few:

Last year I worked in my old truck and got it real hot, this year I discovered that my friends Denny and Meg's well house was perfect- a heater so I could get it to 80 or 90- damp (and I used a spray bottle, a door, and a light so I could make it perfectly dark. I brought a chair and a work table I could angle, and set my foundation on that (grafting bars in this pic though):

I also made 5 new swarm boxes, which use Western frames stacked 5 above the other (I made drawings for this which I will share), and they are cheap to build, and three already have swarms- in just a few weeks- and I don't even think they are from my own hives. Here's a swarm coming in which landed as I was working below (I saw bee shadows on the ground and looked up)- fascinating to watch (they seem to go in sort of a circle around the opening, those on the right going up, on the left going down- not a huge swarm though):

Here's a close up a few minutes after the main body of bees landed:

And on a less happy note- here's what really intense CBPV looks like when it gets maxed out on a bee. Usually they just look sick, hairless, and sort of black- orange- swollen even. This hive started getting some that were totally black- which I have never seen before and was dramatic. These are yellow Italians- so you can see how radical the color change was. I'd say 1 in a 100 were like this. Its a very serious disease in my opinion- not something to be taken lightly, as most books say. I am assuming that I have diagnosed this correctly, and its not one of the other strains, but in any case, no fun to watch a hive crash from it: