Sunday, March 26, 2017

Early Spring Management

I dropped in on the bees today to catch up on where I left things a couple of weeks ago.  The good news is that since I removed the removable bottom boards the moisture in the hives has disappeared. It's either that or down to the fact the bees are growing in number and are therefore keeping moisture levels down through their fanning.  Ventilation is much better now and the weather warmer.

Hive 1: This now has brood throughout the 2 supers as well as the deep on the top of the stack!  I'm going to have to get things back on track and I think the best way is to trap the queen in one of the 3 boxes using 2 queen excluders and then re-organise things.  I'll add QEs next weekend, then look for larvae the following week.  Bingo where there's larvae that's where she'll be!  Apart from that the hive looks good - quite a bit of stores and brood present and some, but not a large quantity, of drone brood.

Hive 2: This is doing well.  There's even a couple of completely capped frames of honey in one of the supers! The brood is in good shape too.  There were 6 or 7 frames with brood on them in the deep so I added a second deep to the hive and 'seeded' the this with a couple of frames of brood. I may take the supers off in order to make space for fresh foundation - but that's something for next week or at least once spring really gets moving. If this hive builds up well I will attempt to make a split from this hive.

Hive 3: I took the empty deep from this hive and added it to Hive 2.  The bees are mostly in the deep below the QE but there are several frames of bees and I'm happy with the way this is coming on!

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