April Tasks

Mid-April tasks.

I've done this same thing, in varying degrees, with varying numbers of colonies, for 25 years. Almost spot on. From 1 to 40 hives. Right now, reduced, by a series of bad choices, to 25.

Still quite a bit to manage.

Due mostly to an unrelenting amount of "real" work- I'm an architect- I find I haven't met many of my goals in my beekeeping this year, and am constantly behind. I can't tell if it's being busy with work, or just getting old and tired, or just not really prioritizing getting out to the shop in the middle of winter to fix and scrape frames. All of that. I am guessing it's part of the cycle. I've never started the year without a fresh coat of white paint on all my stored hives... and this year I am. It's a personal pride thing- and aesthetic- clean white hives like you see in all the old pictures of the great beekeepers. And suddenly- I'm just overwhelmed with stuff to do.

Below is going through stored supers- one by one, scraping the shoulders, separating drawn brood comb from drawn super comb, from undrawn, from foundationless- and pulling out beat up drone comb, or comb to old. Or broken boxes. And then scraping the, fixing them, putting in new foundation, etc. Sheesh. Makes me tired just writing about it.

Every beekeeper I know in this valley lost their bees this year, except one. And he says his are barely hanging in there.  I don't know everyone by any means- but that's maybe 10 who lost their hives.

I too lost a lot. But I can say- with pretty good surety- and believe it or not- that each one was my fault, and could have been avoided easily. I know what  I did, or did not do, and it killed my bees. If you're not a beekeeper, you'd wonder, why did you do it then?

Because- one always experiments, always has to try new thing to combat things we have never known before (like mites), and because we're human, we forget, and do dumb things. I did a few.

I'd say that if it hadn't been for me- or more correctly- had I done what I usually do- I'd have a 100% survival over the winter, and be facing a booming population about to outstrip itself in honey production. But- I screwed up- and I'm down to 24 hives or so, with maybe 5 at a top level.

Below is a new idea- I am making screen ladders for a slatted rack. The slatted rack is an odd invention- dating I think from C.C. Miller', who invented the basic concept, but really perfected by a Hawaiian beekeeper named Bovard, and more respectively called a Bovard Rack (despite Rusty's insistance- she's wrong- this is what the god of PNW Beekeeping Roy Thurber called it). 

It's odd, as I don't really know how it works, and which dimensions are important. It's odd as it entirely screws up how a bee gets into the hive- it makes them go to the side, as with the rack, they can't reach up except at the sided. Bovard added the 4" windbreak- somehow that changed the game- but I don't know. I would say - that I am fairly certain that hives with these have brood to the bottom super, those with out , don't. True? I don't know. Seems like it

So I made ladders- bees can go straight up. Why didn't Bovard?


And that's it- April is an intense beekeeping month, and I am exhausted. I Demrareed two hives in the rain pause this afternoon- and so glad I did- but more rain is coming. I hope for a swarmless May. but don't know that I am going to keep up!

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