Mid April, Latish Hive Inspections, Mite Game Plan
Mid April.
It's been a lot of years since I've waited this long to go through hives and get try to get a sense of what I had, and where problems were. I only have 12 hives left- and went through 7- these all seems OK. From pretty good (in days gone by, "average"), to weak, but with a laying queen. No dead outs, no laying workers or unmated queens, though very little stores despite the month early blooming of maple around here.
As I write I'm looking out at a long stacked row of 150 empty supers in my back yard, and know I have another 30 or 40 out in apiaries I need to bring in. But there's no way I'm going to need 200 supers again. Losses are just to great, and wearying.
Which I haven't entirely accepted. And if I give it all up, there's all that equipment, and tools, and a pretty dang big collection of bee books, that I guess won't mean much. I've self-identified as a beekeeper for a lot of years, its sort of tough to think about not doing it.
Below is Easter afternoon yesterday at my favorite apiary down on Cemetery road. There are actually only 5 hives alive in this picture (though another two are off screen). That's down from 15-20 in past years, plus plenty of queen raising, swarm boxes, and mating boxes. In front, I've unpinned the winter cloth from the boxes, and there's still a bear fence ready to go. To the right is another apiary section of the same size with no hives left.
But there is a fundamental deep down pleasure in seeing the bees do OK, to get a good Spring start. Here's a decent comb with nice packed brood in one of the better hives. I think they are just getting rolling- but I make a mental note (and a paper one) that hives like this- "boomers" (though this is hardly one), are the first to crash if not tended to- first to explode with bees- and quick to swarm, and fly off to some other home. For me I Demaree- I find it by far the best method- so much easier and solid then techniques like Snelgroving (though that is apparently popular with new beekeepers).
One hive I wintered over turned out to be still Demareed- a queen excluder still on box #1, with 2 boxes above it, with no brood (at first I thought this was a queenless hive-though full of bees- and then came upon the excluder). At first I cursed myself for leaving it in- keeping the queen down in a cold box all winter, and of course, a metal excluder sucks in the cold- its not insulated on the edges, and when it's freezing outside, its going to be freezing inside. Bad beekeeping!
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