# Hope after witnessing allogrooming.



## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Getting back into beekeeping after a few years hiatus. I purchased a nuc from a local guy who sidelines with a few hundred hives. When I first started beekeeping a little over a decade ago I was very taken with the notion and goals of going TF. This time around, after watching videos and rediscovering Michael Bush’s website, I was torn between the classic TF philosophy of putting no chemicals in the hive and the newer “organic” beekeeping that seems so popular now days. OAV is a seductive option, but I just can’t shake the common sense logic that if you’re putting something in your hive that requires you to glove up, wear a respirator and repeat ad nauseum that there’s no way to make sure it doesn’t end up in your honey (yes, I know, not while honey supers are on, gotta repeat so you get all the reproductive cycle mites, there’s no proof it accumulates in the hive). 
Anyway, I was torn. I don’t want my bees to die. The person I bought the bees from freely stated he used OAV liberally and religiously. So I’ve been contemplating its use while I search for ways to convince myself it isn’t necessary. 
After getting the nuc into a ten frame Lang deep and sitting to the side of the hive, watching the entrance and enjoying the industrious sound of buzzing bees flying in and out, as beekeepers who enjoy their craft are wont to do, I noticed some house bees dragging out and disposing of unfit larva. It inspired hope, until I remembered I’d seen this a decade ago, and, encouraging though it is, it didn’t save my bees last time I had some (pretty sure their demise was of my doing. Poor fall management and failure to inspect the hives early spring, leading to starvation from low population and no resources during the brood buildup. Though it’s hard to convince oneself amid the din of TF naysayers that the colony’s collapse wasn’t at least helped along by Varroa infestation). So I was still unsure how to proceed regarding management. 
During my weekly inspection last Saturday, a friend, who is letting me keep the bees at her house in exchange for showing her what little I know of beekeeping, pointed to a couple of bees on a frame I was holding and asked, “Are they fighting? What are they doing?” Before laying my eyes on them, my thoughts immediately turned to flashback nightmares of a robbing frenzy I experienced early in my beekeeping and I trembled at the possibility, adrenaline started to pump and prepare me to close that hive back up and lock it down with record breaking speed. Luckily, when I did see the pair of bees she was curious about, it was immediately obvious that they weren’t fighting in any way I’d ever seen. I wasn’t sure what they were doing at first, the “aggressor” was all over one of her sisters, her mandibles gnashing perilously close to vital bee bits. “Is that a mite on the bottom one?”, my friend asked with a bit of trepidation in her voice (I’d warned her about Varroa and the horrifying prospect of a colony being overrun with them). She has better eyes than I so it took me a moment to see if it was indeed a mite. “Huh, looks like”, I replied with a bit of shared trepidation. But, as we watched with curious awe, that “aggressor” bee chomped all around her sister’s abdomen and thorax until… YES! she ripped that mite right off, took a few more chomps on it for good measure and let it fall to the ground! While attempting to suppress a smile of (definitely unearned) pride, I looked at my friend, who was left quite speechless by what we’d just witnessed and said, “Huh, never seen that before”. “Is that a good sign?”, she queried. After a moments thought and the realization that ALL COLONIES HAVE MITES, the only thing I could come up with in that moment was, “It definitely ain’t a bad sign”.
So I’ve dwelt on that incident the last few days, working out it’s possible implications and what bearing it could have on my decision to treat for Varroa or not, and my thoughts have finally settled on not treating. I have no delusions that I am one of the select few to have stumbled upon a super bee who will never succumb to varroa. And one little dead mite in a colony that no doubt has a few hundred more in it doesn’t mean my bees won’t perish, but witnessing allogrooming in person has re-instilled in me a hope that nature almost always finds a balance. 
So I’ll feed my honeybees if I have to. I’ll manage them as best I know how, giving them more or less room as needed. I’ll let the queen lay worker and drone brood as she and the colony desire. I’ll keep them strong and prevent robbing as best I can. And I’ll split them in the spring if it’s prudent to do so, in the hope that the allogrooming behavior I witnessed will be passed down and possibly intensified in any and all daughter queens and their progeny. But I won’t be treating my bees with any chemicals, organic or otherwise, just for the sake of being able to say my bees are alive.


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## crofter (May 5, 2011)

Snip<"hope that nature almost always finds a balance">Snip.

Nature does indeed always find a balance but it does not pick sides or necessarily the one you are cheering for. More species have gone extinct over time than what currently exist.
My experience with allogrooming about ten years ago was very similar; they were also very hygienic bees and due to the high mite loads were uncapping and culling nearly as much brood as the queen was providing. One in particular was declining. Things turned around after knocking down the mite load and the prevalence of allogrooming went a way down.

I had been told first year nucs needed no mite control: maybe occasionally so, but in reality, generally bad advice. The general level of mites in your surrounding area will largely dictate the difficulty or even possibility of being successfully treatment free. Is the local sideliner you mention treatment free?

Keep us updated on your results.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

The local side liner is not treatment free. He said he only uses OAV. Unless you count small cell foundation as a treatment, cause he uses that exclusively. I’m going foundationless and will cull out his 5 original small cell frames when appropriate.
I’ll do my best to keep this posting updated. I’m sticking to TF because, to my mind at least, it is logically consistent with my desire to have unadulterated honey, wax and, hopefully, healthy and strong honey bees. I’m not getting emotionally invested in the philosophy of TF and will have no qualms about posting my complete failure to keep mites at bay if that is what eventually transpires.


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## GregB (Dec 26, 2017)

NUBE said:


> Getting back into beekeeping after a few years hiatus......
> ......But I won’t be treating my bees with any chemicals, organic or otherwise, just for the sake of being able to say my bees are alive.


So I just completed my own 5-year TF run with pathetic results (worse than expected) and concluded at my place pure TF is not sustainable.

You should report back how it works for you - very much a location dependent undertaking.
Be great if the reporting goes for at least for 3-5 years.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

I did notice a lot of hygienic removal of brood early on after getting the colony placed in its current position, but that seems to have tapered off quite a bit. I think there may have been some brood damaged (chilled, banged around, or exposed to a lack of oxygen as they were picked up and moved on an overcast and cooler day in the back of an old, slightly rich running Chevy 1/2 ton pickup with side-pipe exhaust). The brood pattern on the few foundationless frames they’ve drawn the last few weeks is extremely tight and solid. 
I did make the mistake of feeding a bit too much syrup at the start and found they were starting to backfill the original brood combs during the first inspection (first time with an established nuc. All my previous experiences with beekeeping involved packages, swarms or spilts and they were helped along by feeding). Last week’s inspection showed no signs of occupied or newly drawn queen cells (couple of old practice cups I noticed the first inspection and I’m keeping an eye on, though I don’t expect anything to come of those even if I did inadvertently force the colony into an overcrowding swarm). 
The bees are regularly bringing in multiple types of pollen and either nectar or water. The stores looked good last inspection. Plenty of fresh pollen, bee bread and probably too much nectar/syrup, though they did seem to be sorting the backfill issue out and opening up the frame and a half or so of broodcomb that I’d accidentally encouraged them to load up.
Still hopeful.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Curious what has led you to the conclusion that TF success or failure is location dependent GregV.


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## Litsinger (Jun 14, 2018)

NUBE said:


> During my weekly inspection last Saturday, a friend, who is letting me keep the bees at her house in exchange for showing her what little I know of beekeeping, pointed to a couple of bees on a frame I was holding and asked, “Are they fighting? What are they doing?” Before laying my eyes on them, my thoughts immediately turned to flashback nightmares of a robbing frenzy I experienced early in my beekeeping and I trembled at the possibility, adrenaline started to pump and prepare me to close that hive back up and lock it down with record breaking speed. Luckily, when I did see the pair of bees she was curious about, it was immediately obvious that they weren’t fighting in any way I’d ever seen. I wasn’t sure what they were doing at first, the “aggressor” was all over one of her sisters, her mandibles gnashing perilously close to vital bee bits. “Is that a mite on the bottom one?”, my friend asked with a bit of trepidation in her voice (I’d warned her about Varroa and the horrifying prospect of a colony being overrun with them). She has better eyes than I so it took me a moment to see if it was indeed a mite. “Huh, looks like”, I replied with a bit of shared trepidation. But, as we watched with curious awe, that “aggressor” bee chomped all around her sister’s abdomen and thorax until… YES! she ripped that mite right off, took a few more chomps on it for good measure and let it fall to the ground!


NUBE:

Welcome back to the forum. Nice write-up- I enjoyed the read.

Having spend the last few years on my own TF experiment, I would suggest that active 'mite biting' is indeed an encouraging sign and there are some protocols which have been developed by Purdue University that you could consider employing as a means to assess the level of activity in your nuc and subsequent colonies you might bring online in the future. The following is a good article published in 'Bee Culture' that I refer to frequently: Breeding Mite-Biting Bees To Control Varroa | Bee Culture

Another group to engage with on this topic is the Heartland Honey Bee Breeders Cooperative.

Finally, it might be a bit of a haul, but I stay in contact with Mr. Peter Brezny with the WNC Queen Breeding Cooperative and he might be someone who can give you some North Carolina-specific advice.

Best of success in your TF efforts. I'll look forward to reading your updates.

Russ- Western Kentucky


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Interesting reading Litsinger. Thanks for passing that along.


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## GregB (Dec 26, 2017)

NUBE said:


> Curious what has led you to the conclusion that *TF success or failure is location dependent* GregV.


Because I gave it an honest shot and came back to what has been demonstrated many times already:








GregV's Alternative way to keep (have?) bees.


I think you're better with brood less dribble, as the media may be a clean summer, not just a clean start Yes, thinking the same. Long term release may be masking the bee-side mite handling (IF they can do it). Like the idea of giving every one queen a clean and fair start but then letting them...




www.beesource.com





So if you are serious about and make a case-study of your own and report about it, I will most likely follow.
I wish people reported their own numbers over time but we are yet to see such numbers in any consistent way.
All we have is anecdotes and emotions (useless in courts).


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Thanks for that link to your post GregV. I’m sorry your TF experiment ended with those results. 

“Case-study” may be a bit strong of a word for what I’m willing to do. I just want to keep bees without a shed full of chemicals and the tools for dispensing or applying them. I’ll gladly update my progress or lack there of. I’ll do conventional splits to prevent swarming and make increases for insurance against losses, possibly helped along by notching or the Miller method, but I won’t be going full OTS management (I’m interested in bees that can naturally supercede successfully) or grafting. I guess my hope in getting back into beekeeping is to be able to sustain a hobbyist level apiary that requires as little manipulation and management from me as possible. Not because I’m lazy, I simply don’t have the time to devote 10-15 hours or more a week to beekeeping. If I fail at it, I don’t think I’ll pick it back up again. Especially if I feel that constant treatments are the only way to keep honeybees alive in my area. I’ll also do my best to responsibly dispose of any dead out combs and equipment so that my failure doesn’t potentially become someone else’s problem.


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## GregB (Dec 26, 2017)

Good luck.
You should try and see.
I subjectively feel everyone should try and see the TF before making the needed situational adjustments.


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## Gray Goose (Sep 4, 2018)

welcome back and thank you for posting your results and I hope to see updates untill spring.

I do have a comment 
you stated: I’ll manage them as best I know 
as you have domesticated bees, management is the gig you have stepped into.
How is not treating "managed the best I know."

Also IF they are grooming bees then you have a good to excellent bee to propagate from.
there are times when Mites can over run even a grooming hive, keep good notes and in time the "best" you can do will come to you.
trust your gut.

GG


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Thanks GG.

Interesting semantic argument with management and treatment. I suppose that’s the whole reason for having a TF branch of management. One can certainly manage without treating, but there’s no way to treat without managing. As your post seems to imply, I may in fact come to the conclusion that I, personally, cannot manage successfully without treating, but there’s no way to know that for certain without having the baseline of not treating.

There’s definitely a grooming bee in that colony. The nature of honeybee mating and genetics does raise the possibility that there could be very few of them as a percentage of the whole colony. Does make me wonder if future splits, should this colony survive winter and buildup well coming into spring, may best be done small and numerous as opposed to ~50/50 in order to maximize the chances of getting a daughter queen that passes on the grooming behavior.


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## Gray Goose (Sep 4, 2018)

NUBE said:


> Thanks GG.
> 
> Interesting semantic argument with management and treatment. I suppose that’s the whole reason for having a TF branch of management. One can certainly manage without treating, but there’s no way to treat without managing. As your post seems to imply, I may in fact come to the conclusion that I, personally, cannot manage successfully without treating, but there’s no way to know that for certain without having the baseline of not treating.
> 
> There’s definitely a grooming bee in that colony. The nature of honeybee mating and genetics does raise the possibility that there could be very few of them as a percentage of the whole colony. Does make me wonder if future splits, should this colony survive winter and buildup well coming into spring, may best be done small and numerous as opposed to ~50/50 in order to maximize the chances of getting a daughter queen that passes on the grooming behavior.


how far away is the guy you got the NUCs from?
if less than 4 miles his drones will come into play.
if more, maybe he would allow you to take NUCs there to mate, maybe not,, depends on the guy.

No One has asked me, I would for a percentage I think, , like mate 10 and I get 1 or something.

I only offered the idea as you stated he does OA and lots of it. (he perceives a need)
Sideliners with a 100 hives have more skin in the game, if he feels he needs it , I would take that into consideration.

all data helps with decisions.

do some counts in late july early Aug, if mites are present, "manage"........

I am lucky as an analytic intuitive the trail I need to follow comes to me, hence the follow your gut. If your gut fails you then find a different meter/method. 

Keeping bees is closer to art IMO than farming. 

good luck

GG


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

The gentleman I got the nuc from is 30 or more miles away. I hadn’t thought of asking to transport to his breeding yard. Definitely something to consider.

He definitely treats with OAV. He did advise I do the same. I certainly don’t discard his advice out of hand and it was one of several reasons I was struggling with the decision to treat or not. If I had a few hundred colonies and limited time to manage them due to another full time job, I might well find myself OAVing my stock left and right too. But, I’m gonna go with my gut on the treatment issue and not treat with chemicals of any kind.


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## Gray Goose (Sep 4, 2018)

right
The gentleman I got the nuc from is 30 or more miles away. I hadn’t thought of asking to transport to his breeding yard. Definitely something to consider. 

was the angle I was thinking of.


it would be timing critical as there is a time 9 days to 14 days old where sudden motion is not good. IMO
either pre cap or about to hatch would be the less dangerous times to move the mating NUCS.
As well after a few days for the bees to proplize the frames tight so they do not swing, in a cell crushing fashion.

GG


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Inspected yesterday, 7/17, lots of activity at the entrance, but not as much pollen as I’d seen the last few times I’d had a chance to observe the hive externally. I was hoping that was a sign that they were bringing in lots of nectar, but, given the high temps yesterday, I realized it could also be water.

Upon opening the hive and inspecting the frames, water harvesting was confirmed. There is very little nectar and no capped honey. They’ve also drawn comparatively little comb this week compared to the week prior. Placed a half gallon of thin syrup on the hive after inspection and will put on another quart or so mid-week. Hopefully they’ll start drawing the two remaining empty frames this week and another box can be added next weekend. I’d really like to get this colony to two deeps with lots of stores before winter. May require a hefty amount of sugar syrup, unfortunately, as, in my experience, the fall nectar flow here is between lackluster and non-existent.

There was an abundance of pollen in the frames and the brood looks good and healthy (very little drone brood, but that isn’t at all unusual this time of year for my location). The colony looks to be growing well and every frame that is drawn is well covered with bees.

No signs of SHB or brood disease though 2 mites were observed. No evidence of DWV or the mite population getting out of hand. Still hopeful that TF will be possible and successful.


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## GregB (Dec 26, 2017)

NUBE said:


> No evidence of DWV or the mite population getting out of hand. Still hopeful that TF will be possible and successful.


I don't know how you estimate mite evidence; but without proper counting the only evidence you will find of an obvious catastrophic situation where nothing can be done already.

Sometimes in late August you may want to count your mites (sugar-shake is a fine prelim method, as for me).
Pretty much if you have >=3% at that point, you can call them dead with high probability of being correct (granted sugar-shake is likely to under-estimate).

Now IF you got just about 3-5% you may want to try to save them as still worthwhile stock (but this will mean hard, catch-up treating).
IF >=5% probably not worth saving if you are into TF.

Here how the actual TF mite-count numbers may look like (for your reference).
Guess, which of these cases actually survived the 2020/2021 winter (you may cheat and look it up, I have it all reported).
With one exception (if I recall) none of these colonies listed showed any obvious mite-issues even during the mite counts done in September (forget the July).
Right now the only the most terrible, no-good colonies have any mite issues - too early.








GregV's Alternative way to keep (have?) bees.


GregV: I enjoyed reading your recent updates and the conversation that followed. I've said it before, but I do appreciate your pioneering spirit and willingness to try different things. Hopefully the mini nucs provide you with a steady supply of quality queens, and your strategy of 'queen...




www.beesource.com


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

TL;DR. Colony seems healthy. Has anyone ever experimented with feeding different syrup mixtures 1:1, 2:1 at the same time, and, if so, what were the results?

Inspected yesterday, 7/25. Appears to be no nectar flow. We fed 3 quarts of slightly thinner than 1:1 last week, but new comb drawing was negligible. Seems they are using the syrup for brood because over half of the drawn frames have brood on them. The brood pattern is tightening up a bit as they seem to be fixing the backfill issue I inadvertently encouraged when they were newly installed. Also, the queen has gotten noticeably larger, leaving me to wonder if perhaps she wasn’t banked prior to being installed in a hastily put together nuc.

We added another deep hive body and moved two frames up to that with a foundation less frame between them. The lack of a lot of fresh comb being drawn is a little discouraging. I’d really like to get them to two deeps before winter, but I suspect I’ll be compressing them back into one. The bottom box was around 75% drawn out. I was hoping not to add the second deep until that was closer to 80%, but first frost being only a few months away has me wanting to do everything I can to encourage them to draw more comb. Hopefully, an abundance of open space will be that encouragement. We are going to feed liberally and not change much next week even if they haven’t drawn much wax (temperatures are plenty warm and should be for another month if not two). If, the week after that, there is still little wax drawn in the top box, I feel it will be necessary to compress them back into one box.

I have a unique inner cover that my brother and I made many years ago. Instead of having one elongated opening in the center, we put four holes, one near each corner. This allows for multiple feeding points. I’m curious if anyone has ever experimented with feeding multiple blends of sugar syrup at the same time (I.e. putting two on a little thinner than 1:1 to encourage comb drawing and brood and two on at closer to 2:1 to encourage storing)?

The colony looked to be in good health. Still some pollen coming in though noticeably less than the previous few weeks. They have an abundance of stored pollen and bee bread so I’m not overly concerned about a slowdown. Still tons of forager activity at the entrance, but I suspect it is mostly water. Lots of drones being chased out of the hive. It’s that time of year here though so I’m not terribly concerned about that (other than the thought of it possibly being a bad sign for my hope of getting lots of comb drawn). Witnessed allogrooming again, but the mite snuck from the groomee to the groomer, and I rushed my friend to put the frame back in as we still had 3-4 more to inspect as well as the additional box to add. I think she would be quite happy to watch one mite try, and hopefully fail, to evade the allogrooming behavior all day long if the temperament of the colony would allow.


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## Gray Goose (Sep 4, 2018)

the queen will be bigger when laying, that is normal.
you need to be feeding "gallons" if you want comb draw and filled in a few weeks.

GG


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## Norcal Mtns (Mar 28, 2021)

I agree you will want to count the mites. The question is not to treat or go TF. If you do regular mite counts, there is no question at all, just an obvious answer, yes or no right now. Thanks for the interesting post.


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## GregB (Dec 26, 2017)

In fact, a case of observed grooming does not mean much.
This is because it has been established by now that the successful mite-resistance does not depend on one and only factor, but rather a combination of several factors.

What really means if anything, IF 1)your bees survive a winter without treatments and 2)what kinds of mite levels they maintain without treatments.
Then you can start talking the real business - sometimes next spring.
Even that largely depends on your surrounding situation and certain amount of luck (and maybe making some comprimises).

If any metric I'd be interested to observe - mite counts.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Inspected the colony yesterday, 07/31. There is a decent bit of new comb being drawn now (thanks for the advice last week about the necessity to feed gallons GG. It is proving true.), but not much happening in the upper box, as of yet. A thin syrup is being constantly fed to the colony. They are taking a quart or more a day. I am liking the advantage of multiple, separated feeding points as they tend to take the four sources (four wide-mouth pint sized canning jars) at different rates, allowing there to always be feed on the colony and for us to switch out 1,2 or 3 empty jars at a time without interfering with the current source in use.

The queen is laying in new comb as fast as they can draw it. There is some backfilling happening which causes me mild concern. However, the fact that the queen is laying in newly formed comb before it is deep enough to store nectar has me optimistic that continuing with a high rate of feed may help achieve my goal of getting a ton of comb drawn in the next month or so.

There was more pollen coming into the hive than I’d seen the previous two inspections. At the rate the colony is taking sugar syrup, I doubt there is much, if any, nectar flow currently taking place, and I suspect most of the other foragers coming and going are bringing in water (it has been exceptionally hot of late).

My friends and I were excited to observe the “GET IT OFF ME!” dance, and watch as a groomer bee answered the call to chase after a mite. I wonder if there is any pheromone exchange associated with the dance. 

The colony appears healthy and growing. Nice shiny bees all around, grooming behavior is still being seen, brood is being removed if the bees find it defective (though not at an alarmingly high rate). I got to show my friends, on whose property the hive is located, an orientation flight as I happened to swing by their house after a break in a couple hours of afternoon storms the middle of this past week. It’s exciting to see the fascination of such things from those who are new to the craft. Even though there is some backfilling, there were no signs of charged queen cells and the colony hasn’t even really shown any interest in rebuilding the few queen cups I’ve torn down the last few inspections when I was explaining their significance to the friends who are inspecting with me. 


Lastly, I certainly understand the interest many of you have expressed in what the results of a mite check would be, were I to take one. I don’t currently share that interest, at least not to such a degree that I am willing to kill as much as a thousand bees to assuage your curiosity. “Kill a thousand?”, you may ask. Yes! The only mite check I would trust the result of would be the alcohol wash. So the bees, were I inclined to perform a check, would indeed die. What would be the point of posting on here that I performed a sugar roll or an SBB drop board test, only to be met with doubt should the numbers come back low (I wouldn’t blame those who were skeptical of such a result from one of those fairly inaccurate tests as I would share their skepticism)? So an alcohol wash would be the only test I would bother to perform. “Great”, you may respond, “why not perform the alcohol wash? It wouldn’t kill a thousand bees. At most it would be around 300”. Were I to perform a single test, that would certainly be true. But, I, personally, would not trust the result of a single alcohol wash. Even the alcohol wash (which is by far the most accurate field test to the best of my knowledge) is still plagued by random highs and lows. It is ON AVERAGE the most accurate test. My point being, that, were I inclined to perform an alcohol wash test at this point in the development of my bee colony, and to possibly be swayed from my decided path of going TF for what remains of this year by the results of such a test were they to come up high, I could only be swayed by performing a minimum of 3 of such tests back to back to back. You may find my logic in this regard erroneous. Such is your right. Tbh, I don’t understand why beekeepers who have made the decision to treat, especially with organic acids like oxalic and formic that, to the best of my understanding, mites are incapable of developing a resistance to, would even bother performing mite checks, save for satisfying curiosity. If I were to treat, it would be with either one or both of those organic acids and I would do so on a predetermined schedule (based on flow and brood production observations on a given year, not by a calendar). So, why would I perform a mite count check? So I can gloat if I perform a single alcohol wash and my numbers come back low? I wouldn’t trust those single test results anyway, so why would I gloat? So that I can be berated and have others on this forum attempt to shame me into treating if the number from a single wash comes back high? Once again, I wouldn’t trust the result from that single test, so why would I change my management method based on its results simply because some of you think I should. If my bees make it through the winter and are growing well come spring in an established colony, I almost certainly will perform a series of alcohol washes to satisfy my own curiosity. Right now, having had this nuc in place for little over a month and feeling a bit of pressure from the time of year and the rapidly approaching winter, I want every available bee drawing comb, raising brood, and/or gathering the necessary resources to do so.

I stated previously in this thread that if this Colony doesn’t make it through the year and, after a thorough and objective examination, I determine their demise was due to being overwhelmed by mites and the fault is mine due to my lack of treating them, that I would likely not try to keep bees again in the future. It was a foolish statement. After a number of years away from the activity I am remembering why I so enjoy keeping bees and watching the new beeks who are helping me and learning about the science and art of beekeeping has re-instilled in me that sense of awe at the incredible feats these tiny insects are capable of accomplishing. So, IF this colony dies from mites over the winter, I will post observations of the dead out here and take advantage of the vast amount of knowledge held by the collective members of this forum and work on a plan to keep the next colony I get alive, even if that means treating for pests and diseases


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## Norcal Mtns (Mar 28, 2021)

That is a lot of philosophy there. 

Practically speaking, each of us has different goals and follows the appropriate path. Most do not push their philosophy onto others, they just offer advice and you can take it or leave it. The only beeks who really care what you do are your neighbors, who are impacted by bee drift and the associated mite drift. Without mite counts it is difficult to be a good neighbor unless your hives are isolated. If they are not isolated, a me philosophy is less appropriate than an us approach. And some people want to actually know if they have a “mite resistant” hive and take advantage of that. Others are not concerned. Both are fine. There are many different goals.


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## Gray Goose (Sep 4, 2018)

NUBE said:


> Inspected the colony yesterday, 07/31. There is a decent bit of new comb being drawn now (thanks for the advice last week about the necessity to feed gallons GG. It is proving true.), but not much happening in the upper box, as of yet. A thin syrup is being constantly fed to the colony. They are taking a quart or more a day. I am liking the advantage of multiple, separated feeding points as they tend to take the four sources (four wide-mouth pint sized canning jars) at different rates, allowing there to always be feed on the colony and for us to switch out 1,2 or 3 empty jars at a time without interfering with the current source in use.
> 
> The queen is laying in new comb as fast as they can draw it. There is some backfilling happening which causes me mild concern. However, the fact that the queen is laying in newly formed comb before it is deep enough to store nectar has me optimistic that continuing with a high rate of feed may help achieve my goal of getting a ton of comb drawn in the next month or so.
> 
> ...


glad the bees are drawing comb, if the back fill seems to much then maybe back off the feeding a bit or shift from 1:1 to 2:1.
they do need appx 7LB of honey/syrup to make 1 LB of wax. and as more bees hatch there will be more to keep fed.

good luck.

you need to do the mite thing your own way, of course you then reap what you sow but at least you have the choice.

GG


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## GFWestTexas (Jul 10, 2021)

NUBE said:


> I am remembering why I so enjoy keeping bees and watching the new beeks who are helping me and learning about the science and art of beekeeping has re-instilled in me that sense of awe at the incredible feats these tiny insects are capable of accomplishing.


Good to hear, and hoping for the best with the colonies.
Cody


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Performed a quick inspection August 6th in the late afternoon, trying to get into the hive to get ahead of a storm front that was supposed to last a few days. Everything was looking pretty good and the hive was shut back up to avoid the approaching storms.

Inspected more thoroughly yesterday, the 14th. Keeping 1:1 on constantly has kept them drawing comb and we finally observed a few decent bands of capped syrup/honey on the top of several brood frames for the first time since hiving the nuc. They’re getting close to having the bottom box fully drawn (two fully drawn frames were placed in the otherwise empty top box several weeks ago when it was added). They still aren’t drawing much, if any, comb in that top box. They’re taking in 2 gallons, or more, of syrup every week. The queen is still laying in new wax as fast as they can draw it. Plenty of eggs and brood in all stages. We observed zero phoretic mites this inspection (my friends look very closely for them and have usually seen at least a couple every time we open the hive). SHB have been becoming more plentiful. Not to an especially worrisome amount, but we’ve gone from seeing 0 to 4-5 under the feeding jar caps when we switch them out. We crush most of them ASAP. I’m not overly concerned about their numbers yet, but it does have me keeping a little closer eye on one of the two frames we placed in the top box that doesn’t have quite as much bee presence as all of the other frames.

Some interesting observations from the past week…

There is definitely a pretty severe nectar dearth currently. Foragers have been spotted on overly ripe figs on a nearby tree consistently for the last week or so. There is, however, still an abundance of pollen coming into the hive.

While switching out syrup jars a few hive beetles and a few bees came through the inner cover to the top of it. I crushed a handful of them, but one was being chased by bees and I couldn’t get a good opening to crush it without possibly damaging a bee as well. I gave up on it and started placing syrup jars back on the hive. When I finished, they were still chasing that beetle around and I waited for a moment, hive tool in hand set to crush mode, one of the bees faced off with the beetle, grabbed ahold of it and flew it right off the hive lid, similar to how they would carry out deficient larva or an ailing bee who wasn’t taking the “sacrifice yourself” route as quickly as the colony would like. I’d never observed such and was pretty tickled and fascinated by the behavior. (A side note on the beetle presence: we’ve not really observed them in the hive proper. The bees seem to be doing an excellent job of corralling them into the tiny space between the feeding jars and the top side of the inner cover). 

Robbing during this dearth could become a concern, I fear. After work one afternoon last week I stopped by to check on the colony and give them some more syrup, if needed. I almost always sit to the side of the hive entrance and observe the activity there whenever time allows. I did notice one bee, a slightly darker color and a bit larger than most of mine, exhibiting classic robbing behavior (“hawking” back and forth in front of the hive entrance, going around to the sides of the box and searching for entrance at a small crack created by a couple of 1/16th inch shims between the top deep and the inner cover). It approached the entrance multiple times and was rebuffed, but did finally make it inside. I watched the entrance intensely for several minutes afterward and never saw it exit. I assume it was “handled” by the ladies inside the hive. There was no sign of robbing, at least by other honeybees (more about that presently), during or after the inspection yesterday.

YELLOWJACKETS! :| Had all four of the bee veils in use yesterday as a friend returned from an extended summer holiday overseas and wanted to see what we’d been up to with the colony. A couple of us were waiting for everyone to get ready and my friend, whose property the bees are on, pointed out a small ball of bees on one of the cinder blocks upon which the hive sits. We watched for a few minutes as the 5 or 6 bee cluster vibrated and clung to whatever it was that they were balling. It was a good occasion for the new beeks who inspect with me to observe the defensive behavior and a great opportunity to explain how they rapidly vibrate their wing muscles to overheat whatever is at the center of the ball. As we watched, a yellow jacket gave up on scavenging removed brood and old, dying bees below and in front of the hive entrance and tried to get into the hive. It was quickly met with fierce resistance and retreated as fast as it could. Shortly thereafter, the ball broke up and the last couple of bees seemed to play tug of war with the carcass of what turned out to be another yellowjacket they’d just killed. One bee finally prevailed and flew off with the deceased wasp.

The colony seems very strong and quite capable of rebuffing all these attempts at robbing, especially with a good number of idle foragers constantly bearding the entrance during this dearth. Still, I’ve advised my friends to keep an eye on the entrance and reduce it immediately if robbing seems to be occurring in earnest.

Lastly, I got stung  Right on the thumb. Breaking loose the second to last frame on the bottom box so a friend could pull one for the first time, I pulled my hand away and absent-mindedly rubbed a little “tickle” on my thumb with another finger. Yup, the “tickle” was a honeybee and it immediately hit me when I pinched it between thumb and finger. Comedy ensued when, after quickly removing the stinger with a hive tool, I asked another friend, who was unaware I’d just been hit, to start puffing smoke. She calmly asked, “What do you want me to smoke?” and the only response I could muster as I checked the severity of the sting was, “EVERYTHING”. Lmao.

It was the first time I’ve ever been stung by a bee I’ve kept. I’m kinda glad it happened tbh. In my very early youth my mother always said I was a bit allergic to honeybee stings as I’d swell up considerably around the sting sight and feel poorly for a few days after. So far, there is just the slightest bit of swelling and I feel great. Happy to have it out of the way and to have the event over with to remind me to be more mindful of my movements when the hive is open.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Inspected hive last Saturday, the 21st. Everything looks pretty good. Lots of brood in all stages, pollen and sugar syrup everywhere. They’re taking a couple gallons a week at this point. Still drawing some comb, though not as much as I’d like. We placed an empty foundationless from the #10 location into the center of the brood nest. If they’ve drawn it out a good bit this week then we’ll probably pop the frame in the #1 spot of the lower deep into the brood nest next inspection.

Still not any comb being drawn in the second deep, though they are populating the two fully drawn frames we placed in there more heavily every inspection. They’re also packing them with syrup, may not have to feed as much 2:1 as I was anticipating come late September, early October.

I would love some feedback regarding how many of you would prefer to overwinter 15 frames in a 3x5 arrangement vs leaving a double deep setup with 4or 5 frames undrawn. I already have the equipment for it, so I wouldn’t have to scurry to order anything.

The friend who is letting me keep the bees on her property and doing the inspections with me found a bee supply store close by. It’s a locally owned garden supply and plant nursery. They have a pretty good selection of items and I picked up an extra veil and a queen clip. Need to go back by there this weekend perhaps and price out frames. I’ve made my own in the past but it’s time consuming and kind of a PITA. Starting to get a bit low on those and I know that, at the very least, we’ll need some next spring. We picked up an aster while we were there. I know one won’t do much for the bees, but you gotta start somewhere. She planted it Sunday and says she’s already seen bees on it. That supply center keeps a half dozen or so colonies on site and it’s very advantageous to be able to walk around the plants and see which ones can fill the needs of bees during this time of year. The butterfly bushes and the asters seemed to be getting the most attention.

Robbing is still a bit of a concern. Yellow jackets are getting a bit bolder, but the ladies aren’t giving them an inch. We placed a slightly longer entrance reducer on the hive. Cut it down from about a 6” opening to around 4”.


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## Litsinger (Jun 14, 2018)

NUBE said:


> I would love some feedback regarding how many of you would prefer to overwinter 15 frames in a 3x5 arrangement vs leaving a double deep setup with 4or 5 frames undrawn.


While I imagine that the 'right' answer may be somewhat climate-dependent, I expect that your wintering conditions are similar to mine (Climate Zone 7a). What is universally true is that it is easier for a cluster to move vertically into contiguous stores that are overhead versus having to move laterally into adjacent frames. Thankfully for us in the Midsouth, we get lots of milder days in the winter that allow colonies move laterally as might be required.

Often what I see in my apiary is that the cluster initially sets up near the center of their stores left-to-right and then tend to move upward and outward (generally asymmetrically toward the warm side of the box) as the winter goes on. At least in my specific situation, they also tend to move up fairly quickly in the winter to near to the top of the stack.

All that said, I would tend toward more stores overhead than laterally if my choices were mutually-exclusive.

Finally I'd offer that what might be most important is to make sure the colony has a sufficient quantity of high-quality stores for overwintering and that they are given plenty of time to arrange these stores in a manner that suits their preferences. It is certainly not too early to begin thinking about having the frames/comb set in their close to final arrangement for wintering so the colony can organize their nest and stores now that they are predominantly focused on getting set-up to winter successfully.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Thanks for the your input on that Litsinger. I am definitely a little concerned about manipulating the hive too much right before it starts getting cold out. They are starting to look pretty good on stores. All the brood frames have a band of capped or being capped syrup/honey on them and they are starting to pack it into the sides. I’m going to be sure to take all of my nuc bodies, bottom board and covers with me for the inspection this weekend, and may go ahead and transfer them over.

Inspection last Saturday, 8/28, went well. I pulled the lower deep off the bottom board. Mostly because I wanted to get it set a little better, but also to see what I could see down there. There were a little less than a dozen SHB scurrying around and we crushed most of them. There were also a half dozen or so under the feed jars on top of the inner cover. Crushed them too. We aren’t seeing any sign of larva getting into the brood area, or any of the other comb, for that matter. The bottom frames are well populated and the few in the upper deep that are drawn out are pretty much all syrup.

The frame that was moved to the edge of the brood nest during the previous inspection is 1/4 drawn and we went ahead and moved another into the brood nest as well. Fingers crossed that those aren’t interrupting the colony too much.

They continue to take a pretty good amount of syrup and have tons of pollen stored up. Still seeing plenty of eggs and larva in all stages, though the amount of brood frames has contracted down a bit as they are packing syrup into the outer frames of the lower deep.

I’m kind of toying with the idea of building a couple of spacer frames and inserting them in the 1 and 10 slot of each box, cutting the tens down to eight framers. If I do build them, I’m thinking of putting insulation in the middle of them. Any thoughts on whether such a setup would be less disruptive than moving them into a triple 5 frame nuc setup?


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## Litsinger (Jun 14, 2018)

NUBE said:


> I’m kind of toying with the idea of building a couple of spacer frames and inserting them in the 1 and 10 slot of each box, cutting the tens down to eight framers. If I do build them, I’m thinking of putting insulation in the middle of them. Any thoughts on whether such a setup would be less disruptive than moving them into a triple 5 frame nuc setup?


Nube:

Just my humble opinion, so take it for what it is worth.

Depending on the initial winter cluster size, you might run the risk of forcing the cluster to initially span two boxes in a 5-frame set-up.

If it were me, I might be tempted to set them up in a fairly tight 8 over 8 set-up with division boards, making sure they had at least one full frame of stores on both sides of the cluster, plenty of overhead stores and a little overhead insulation for good measure. And I suppose you could always insulate the division board assemblies, I would only want to take care to fully embed the insulation inside the double-sided boards to mitigate pest pressure.

Best of luck to you in your winter preps. I'll be curious to see what you come up with, especially with your insulated division boards. Might want to try it out myself someday!

p.s. I have successfully overwintered 5X5 Nucs around here- and if the USDA map is accurate, it looks like your location is a bit warmer than mine.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Thanks Litsinger.

I think the colony is certainly to large for a 5x5, and I’m a little concerned by the turnover potential of stacking 3 deep 5s on top of one another. Thus the thoughts about cutting down the 10 framers with division boards. I’m liking the idea more and more the longer I mull it over. I may start building those division boards this weekend. I’ll let you know how the turn out and how they work over winter. Do you think it would be wise to make the top bars on the two upper division boards stand a little proud of the hive body so that they make contact with the inner cover?


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## GregB (Dec 26, 2017)

NUBE said:


> I’m a little concerned by the turnover potential of stacking 3 deep 5s on top of one another


Absolutely nothing wrong with 7x7 or 8x8 or even 8x7, etc....
You can do whatever fits your bees and your equipment allows.

x5 is not a set in stone prescription (but a limitation for those who are stuck with their 5-frame boxes - hence the 5x5x5).


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## Litsinger (Jun 14, 2018)

NUBE said:


> Do you think it would be wise to make the top bars on the two upper division boards stand a little proud of the hive body so that they make contact with the inner cover?


I suppose that technically a true division board runs the full depth of the hive body. 

Dave Cushman's website has a good description of them, and also talks about a double-skinned polystyrene division board that sounds akin to what you are thinking about building:



Division Board for British Bee Hives


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Inspected on both the 3rd and the 10th of September.

On the 3rd it became quite obvious that the colony is no longer interested in drawing large amounts of comb. An empty frame we’d placed in the brood area the week before was very minimally drawn (a couple of 2-3” wide bits of comb about 3-4” long). The bottom deep had a healthy population and good bee coverage on the drawn frames (9 of 10). The upper deep had two drawn frames from the original nuc and just a couple of very partially drawn frames. The bee coverage in the top box was not good. I made the decision on the spot to remove the nearly empty frame from the bottom box, replace it with the newest looking drawn frame from the top box, and cut the colony down to a single deep. There was too much room that the bees weren’t policing and SHB numbers were on the increase, though there are no signs of larva sliming anywhere in the hive. Afterward, we closed the hive back up and placed about 3/4 of a gallon of approximately 1.5-1 syrup on the inner cover.

On the 10th we opened the hive up and the first few frames had decent bee coverage, but no brood and little to no resources. The other 7-8 frames are quite well populated with brood, pollen and/or syrup/honey in various stages of capped/uncapped. I realized that I’d made a mistake the previous week by placing two resource frames near the entrance, which is on the left side of the hive when viewed from the front. This was corrected by moving those two frames to the opposite side of the hive. I realize that during the earlier part of the year I could have left these frames as is and allowed the colony to naturally start moving the brood nest closer to the entrance and the resources farther away, but the queen has slowed down her egg laying a pretty good bit over the last few weeks and I felt the frame manipulation warranted.

There are still a few more SHB in the colony than I’d like to see, though still no signs of larva and I have seen colonies in the past with a considerably larger population of the beetles survive just fine. Still, the friends I inspect the bees with, while taking great pleasure in crushing the few beetles they can get to, expressed concern over their presence and wanted to know what could be done to cut their numbers down. Through my explanation of beetle traps and Swiffer pads and a few google searches, they decided we should give the Swiffer pads a try and we placed one on top of the frames above the brood area. Next inspection, we’ll see if it’s accomplished anything. 

The bees took little to no sugar syrup over the past week. It’s been cooler this last week and, when taking a moment to observe the entrance before opening the hive yesterday, I already suspected there was some natural flow going on as the forager traffic was quite heavy and the need for large amounts of water to cool the hive has decreased significantly. The inspection showed that they weren’t really stocking up on honey as much as I would like, but that they certainly haven’t lost any vs the previous few weeks inspections. A trip to the local hardware chain store later in the day proved that the asters are providing a decent flow at the moment. Even so, we kept a half gallon of syrup on the hive.

We’ve manipulated the hive a bit much the last few weeks, but I am contemplating one more large disturbance before leaving them alone for the year. I’ll make a decision this week on whether to leave them in the single 10 frame deep or to go with a 5x5. A couple of you have already commented on this, which I greatly appreciate and value, with regard to a previous post of mine about the possibility of running 8x8. An idea which I abandoned when I decided on the 3rd that it was necessary to cut the colony down to 10 frames. I’d greatly appreciate any input on whether that final manipulation, to 5x5, would be wise at this point in the season, and given the, in hindsight, potential over-manipulation of the colony the last month or so.


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## Litsinger (Jun 14, 2018)

NUBE said:


> I’d greatly appreciate any input on whether that final manipulation, to 5x5, would be wise at this point in the season, and given the, in hindsight, potential over-manipulation of the colony the last month or so.


Nube:

Just my humble opinion, but if I were in your shoes I might be tempted to roll the dice and leave them in a single deep at this point and give them the next month or so to get the volume set-up the way they want to.

Lots of guys around here overwinter in a single 10-frame deep with a sugar brick on top.

Good luck with your preparations.

Russ


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Apologies for being absent for so long. I started a new business last Fall and had a death in the family a short time later. Needless to say, I have not had a lot of free time over the last few months. 
The colony didn’t survive the winter. There was still activity on the sporadic warm day at least until January, but the population had dwindled to the point where there weren’t enough to survive the late winter cold snaps. Upon inspection sometime in late February, early March, there was a small cluster of a few dozen dead bees and the queen. I assume they froze to death or starved after dwindling down all of late summer and early-mid Fall. I looked for sign of disease, but didn’t really see any of the telltale indicators of mite crash. There were maybe a half dozen mite carcasses on the bottom board. There was 0 brood, so I’m not sure about EFB, AFB, and the other brood diseases. That queen never did have a good pattern. I’m sure a lot of folks would just assume mites were the issue, but I almost wonder if that queen wasn’t laying diploid drones. The pattern was so much spottier than I’ve ever seen. Such is life.
My two friends who I introduced to beekeeping last year were pretty disappointed, so I searched around and we ordered a few packages. They were installed on the 20th of March, both with direct release of the queens. We did reuse some of the better looking comb from the deadout (fingers crossed there wasn’t any AFB or EFB). They were both laying immediately it seems as a very quick inspection of each hive a week later showed they had lots and lots of eggs. Inspection last weekend went well and my friends got to see what a proper laying pattern looks like as both hives had a couple of frames covered in capped brood. They also got to see how fast the bees can build out a frame in the proper time of year for them to do so. Each hive already has nearly a full frame drawn and working several others.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the year goes.

Matt


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## Tumbleweed (Mar 17, 2021)

So this year will you treat or go TF?


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

I’ll continue treatment free. If I’d gone into winter with a queen laying a proper brood pattern and all the other things that I know will get a colony through the winter (good population, abundant resources, etc.) and they still didn’t make it, I’d probably be inclined to look into treatment options. But last Fall I was not expecting them to make it as long as they did, tbh. I was truly surprised to see them flying in January. I know a lot of very knowledgeable people on this forum have tried to go TF and abandoned the idea of it to some degree. I may be one of them come next spring, and I don’t discount their advice or doubt their experiences. Some things you just have to try for yourself and learn the hard way. I’ve never had a problem getting a first year colony through winter, save for last year of course and the reasons for that are fairly well documented in this thread I think. The second year is where I’ve usually run into issues, but, with the benefit of hindsight and more experience, I think a lot of that was from me trying to make the bees do what I wanted them to do instead of being a beekeeper. So, yeah, treatment free this year. Next year… we’ll see.


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## GregB (Dec 26, 2017)

NUBE said:


> .........we ordered a few packages.......
> 
> I’ll continue treatment free. ........
> So, yeah, treatment free this year. Next year… we’ll see.


So at least do the mite counts at the summer end.

That will tell you why the bees are dying - which they likely will (based on your previous winter).


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

3rd inspection of the two new packages yesterday, 4/10. They are looking amazing. Multiple solid frames of brood in each box. Yesterday was exactly 21 days from the install and there are already new bees emerging in each colony (the advantages of installing them on at least a few drawn frames). Each colony has already drawn out at least 2 full frames and working diligently on others. I’m anticipating each needing another box either this coming weekend or the next.


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## fieldsofnaturalhoney (Feb 29, 2012)

NUBE said:


> I’ll continue treatment free. So, yeah, treatment free this year. Next year… we’ll see.


It will be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to have a package of bees survive without treatments, it's all they know🤓


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Added another box to each hive this weekend. They are both busting at the seams with brood. On the 10 frame hive there were two frames on one outer edge that were 1/2 drawn and 1/4 drawn. Every other frame is, for all intents and purposes, fully drawn (I’ve found they’ll often leave a 3/8”-1/2” gap on most of the bottom of the comb on foundationless, as well as several holes and gaps along the edges. They’ll often fill these in some as it heats up during the summer and structural integrity becomes a possible issue). The 8 frame hive had one outside frame 1/4 drawn and the opposite side last frame was 3/4 drawn or more. 

We moved the outer most frames from each hive up above the brood nest with a foundationless frame between them and the rest of each top box populated with foundationless frames. We’ll rotate in more open frames every week as they draw out the ones between the previously drawn frames. Open frames were placed on the outer edge of each lower box. I’m always a bit nervous when placing so many foundationless frames into a box, but I’ve either been very lucky over the years or had unusually well-behaved bees, because I’ve never run into a serious problem with it. 

The queens are both still laying like crazy. Great brood patterns in each hive and both are doing well at coming back to lay in the freshly cleaned cells of emerging brood. 

I think we got the new boxes on just in time. Another day or two delay may have been one too many as each hive was just beginning to backfill a little of the recently vacated brood comb on the outer edges of the brood nest with pollen mostly, but also a bit of nectar. I was looking quite carefully for queen cells as we went through the frames, but I haven’t even seen any practice cups in either hive as of yet, so I think they are content to keep building up, for the moment at least. 

Neither hive took much sugar syrup last week. Seems to be a pretty decent flow starting up, likely tulip poplar and some clover. We went ahead and put a couple quart jars on each hive anyway since we just added so many frames to draw and the weather will be sub-optimal for a lot of this week. We wanted to run a very non-scientific experiment and ran one thin bottle of syrup and one heavy one on each hive just to see if they have a preference this time of year, if they are inclined to take any sugar at all this week. 

We also caught the bees doing an orientation flight later in the day and sat near the hives as workers came pouring out and filled the air with some pleasant buzzing. Pretty good bee week overall.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

One pic that’s fairly representative of the laying pattern of these queens. And one pic of, by far, the most backfilled brood frame.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Inspected both hives today 4/24/22. The ten frame hive had a half dozen or so swarm cells forming in the bottom box. About half of those had an egg in them. We seriously considered splitting them immediately, but decided to wait and see how things look next weekend. None were larval, and none had even a spot of royal jelly. With the weather having been quite cool and miserable the first half of last week I am fairly confident that those eggs were laid yesterday or today (we didn’t inspect until mid-afternoon). The eight frame hive had drawn a few queen cups, but no eggs were spotted in any.

Both hives have drawn a considerable amount of comb since placing the second deeps on them last week, though both have concentrated most of their attention on the outer two frames of the bottom box. Even so, there were 3 or 4 frames in the top box of each hive with bees festooning on them and comb beginning to be drawn on all of those.

We ceased feeding sugar syrup this week as the two colonies had barely taken a quart each, if that, the past week (the larger colony took less than the eight framer, and the eight framer had a frame full of nectar and syrup in the top box). Seems to be a pretty good flow on

We did go back into the top box of the ten frame hive 30min - an hour after the initial inspection. The two mostly drawn frames inserted up there last week were moved to the outer most edge of the box, farthest from the entrance. Hopefully the lack of nectar/honey/ sugar syrup directly above the brood nest will discourage any ideas they had about swarming.

The bee coverage on the frames in that ten frame hive are quite impressive. Every frame covered with bees on both sides. They may need to be split next week whether they have continued with swarm prep or not. Think I should have placed a top box on that hive week 3 instead of week 4. The weather was a bit cool early to mid April this year though and I didn’t want to give them more room than they could manage. I had anticipated a bit of a dip in hive population between weeks 3 & 4, but with the queen’s laying on drawn comb immediately after release (we watched brood emerge on the 3rd week) there never was much of a decline, if any. 

Hopefully they won’t swarm before our inspection next week. If they have drawn out swarm cells any on the next inspection, we will split immediately. Otherwise, I may try to convince my friends who inspect the hives with me to hold off a bit. I was hoping to be able to collect a handful of honey frames this year so they could experience the honey extraction process for the first time. But, perhaps they’ll just have to settle for their fist splitting experience. I think they may be more excited about doing a split anyway.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

We split the 10 frame double deep Wednesday evening 4/27. Pulled 5 good frames and placed them into a nuc. We placed several frames with queen cells on them as well as 3 frames of capped brood and one of eggs and larva. We tore open the first queen cell we came across when pulling frames from the double deep and it was charged with royal jelly, and I assume a very small larva. We didn’t look into the rest and just assumed they were also charged, but we put the frame of eggs and young larva in as backup in case there was nothing in the queen cells. All the brood frames had decent nectar bands and lots of pollen, but another frame about 3/4 drawn and full of nectar was also added. A shake of bees from another frame of open brood were added as well. 

At this point I believe I made a mistake. We left the queen in the original location, which I’ve never had an issue with, but I decided we should pull the top box as we now only had about 7 frames fully drawn and one with just a couple lobes of comb pulled, back to why that was a mistake in a minute. So we went through the frames to be left in the original location with the queen and, looking over them thoroughly, destroyed all the remaining queen cells. We buttoned everything thing up and placed a couple quarts of syrup on the nuc.

Immediately prior to inspection mid-afternoon yesterday, Sunday 5/1, my friend looked out the window into her back yard and said, “man that’s a lot of bees!”. We immediately went outside and saw bees pouring out of that single deep 10 frame hive. I knew pretty much immediately what it was and said, “dang, they’re swarming” though part of me held on to a sliver of hope when my friend said that maybe it was just a ridiculously big orientation flight. That hope vanished when the area in front of the hive cleared but we could still hear the cacophony of thousands of buzzing bees high overhead. They settled at the top of a 35-40’ oak tree. We made an attempt to get up to them, but they were too high and that tree can only be safely climbed to about 2/3 to 3/4 of its height, leaving us still quite a bit too far away to affectively hive them. After 30 minutes or so of tree climbing and rope throwing, I convinced my two friends that our time would be better spent going through the 3 colonies that weren’t in a tree. We went through the eight frame double deep first (I tend to always go through my strongest colony first to keep them busy cleaning up after our intrusion and away from the scent of the weaker colonies as we open them). One comb in the top box was a little wonkily built, but after a small piece came off and it was pulled out, it was corrected. I was a little nonplussed when we realized the Queen was on that comb, but she was unharmed and placed back in quick enough. There were some Queen cells in this hive now too, though none even had an egg in it. Their existence did end up dragging our beekeeping adventures for the day out a bit though. The rest of the hive was as I’d hope any newer colony would look this time of year. Lots of nectar and pollen coming in, loads of brood in varying stages and a bunch of healthy looking bees. We closed that one back up and went into the 10 frame. I’d prepared myself for the worst case scenario of very few bees being left in that colony, but they really were not that light. They had good coverage over all of the brood frames and plenty of activity on the few resource frames, they’d even drawn a decent bit of comb since the split and before the swarm. We kept an eye out for the queen, still hoping, but she wasn’t seen. We looked over every frame quite intensely, and though there were certainly plenty of queen cups that had been rebuilt, we didn’t find any that were capped or even looked like they were close to being so. The only reason that I can figure for them to have gone ahead with the swarm was my decision to remove to top box, thereby convincing them they were still a bit tight on space. We made sure they had plenty of resources and some eggs in case none of the queen cells were charged and closed them back up.

After that ten frame swarming, I was worried that maybe a lot of the bees we’d transferred into the nuc had flown back home the next morning and that had contributed to them swarming. When we opened the box up it was obvious that wasn’t the case. It is quite loaded with bees. They’d taken a little over a quart of syrup since the split and were actually getting rather close to finishing out that 3/4 drawn resource frame. We had some extra eight frame equipment around and moved them into that. The handful of swarm cells we’d placed into the split were all being drawn out and the couple I could get a good look at had larva and plenty of royal jelly in them. There was not a single emergency cell drawn that we could find, so I think they are content with those few swarm cells.

After the 3 hive inspections, I grabbed the now empty nuc body and a few old drawn frames and put it together out in the yard with a couple drops of spearmint oil, we didn’t have any lemongrass on hand, and hoped that that swarm up there in the tree might find it a suitable place to move into.

Once that was done, my friend who owns the property the bees were on started to express concern that the double deep eight frame colony was looking really strong just like that ten framer was a week and a half or so ago. She wanted to split them. I was reluctant to do so, we didn’t have the equipment for it and I’d hoped to keep them as strong as possible and get a honey crop off of them, but she finally helped me convince myself that the only thing worse than two queenless colonies and a swarm in the trees would be three queenless colonies and two swarms in the trees. So we went up to a local garden supply that has a decent selection of beekeeping equipment and picked up what we’d need for another eight frame colony. By the time we got back to her place with hive equipment and pizza we had to act fairly quickly to beat a storm that was moving in. After going through the top box and halfway through the bottom box, we finally spotted the queen. She was left in the original location and we took four frames of brood, one loaded with eggs and emerging brood, as well as a good resource frame and a shake of nurse bees into the new eight frame hive. This time we left the second deep on the original colony and the area above the brood nest was stocked with undrawn frames.

I’m told the swarm moved out this morning after surviving the rainstorm last night, but that they could not be followed to their new home. Wish them the best. She was a very prolific queen. 


So, now we have 3 queenless, but strong, colonies and one Queen right colony. I’m hoping at least two out of the three queenless ones get well mated queens.

Crazy bee week, fun though.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Inspected all four hives on 5/7. We started with the 8 frame hive that was originally set up as a package on 3/20. Even after pulling a very sizable split last week, this hive is booming. Serious flow going on right now as some frames were dripping nectar as they were pulled and that hive hasn’t been fed for a few weeks now. The queen was spotted as were plenty of eggs and healthy larva in all stages. As mentioned, there is no lack of nectar/honey and loads of pollen, both in cells and coming in continuously. They are drawing comb like crazy, and, even after pulling five fully to nearly fully drawn frames last week for a split, they had only one frame with nothing drawn on it. The comb that was drawn a little wacky and corrected last week is now being drawn properly, and all the combs are being drawn centered with the occasional less than 1/8” deviation from center. We added another 8 frame deep to this hive. 2 queen cups were seen in a spot where they are intent to keep building back after I rip them open each inspection to make it easier to see if eggs or larva are present, but they weren’t charged and they were the only cups seen. Seems this colony has made it through the swarming urge immediately prior to the flow and is content to just collect all the nectar they can for the time being.

Next, we inspected the most recent queenless split, pulled from that 8 frame hive last week. More erratic(?) behavior than I’d like to see at the entrance (robbing is obviously always a concern for a queenless split), but the split we pulled a few days prior to this one had the same activity level at around the same time and is much calmer now, so I assume it’s something to do with worker bee age imbalance and the very tiny opening we have for the entrance. I have a mental picture of something like a very young kid on a diving board for the first time not quite sure they are ready to jump off, and I imagine these are fairly young nurse bees who know there’s nothing for them to do in the hive, but can’t quite convince themselves it’s time to go foraging. There’s a little pollen coming into this hive and a healthy guard response at the entrance so, with the flow being what it is, I’m fairly confident there’s not a serious amount of robbing going on. This split is packed with bees. They were fed a quart and a half of syrup last week and are drawing some comb on the few empty frames (they were originally 5 drawn frames placed in an 8 frame deep). They have built out plenty of queen cells, curiously all near the bottom or open edges of the frames like swarm cells, though none are capped yet (all very close). I culled a few cells and left maybe 5 all together on 2 frames next to one another. I wanted to scratch out a couple more, but I’m a big softy and my friend whose property the bees are on found the culling process quite distasteful and gave enough of a gentle protest at the sight of every squished mess of larva and royal jelly that I made myself stop with still a few more cells intact than I’d like (they have good numbers of bees in there and I’m confident we can get that hive strong enough for winter even if they swarm… once). If they swarm away to nothing, she’ll know better next time 🤷🏼‍♂️.

The 3rd hive we inspected was the original ten frame hive that we split on 4/27 and then swarmed on 5/1. My two friends who always help me inspect the hives and, living on the property, have more opportunity to observe the entrance during the week commented that the activity level at the entrance of this hive had always been much calmer and more natural looking than the two splits and they’d come to what I believe is the proper conclusion that, though the hive had been split and swarmed, the ages of the workers vary across a wider range than those of the two pulled splits. This hive is doing very well. Plenty of resources, no eggs and very few uncapped larva (as expected), a healthy population, and a good number of capped queen cells. I once again culled away all but a handful of cells, with those handful left on frames directly adjacent to one another. A couple of occurrences of note on this hive. I got to show the two second year beeks why a really large and long queen cell is definitely one that should be cut out (larva had slid down the cell and away from the royal jelly), and my friend got stung on the pinky while holding the frame with the nicest and oldest looking queen cells on it. She’s a trooper though and managed to keep a good grip on the frame until I could take it from her and she and her daughter could walk away for a minute and deal with the stinger and make a quick inspection of the sting site. I closed that hive back up and puffed some smoke in the entrance of the last hive to be inspected as I waited for them to return.

The last inspection of the day was on the split pulled on 4/27. Lots and lots of bees in here. The activity at the entrance is a little low, but very consistent. Pollen coming in quite regularly. They were originally placed in a 5 frame nuc, but that was switched out for an 8 frame hive body on 5/1 as the population was booming with brood emerging continuously. Lots of capped queen cells in this hive on 3 frames. I culled them down to two adjacent frames leaving 5-6 cells (still more than I’d like, but the gentle protests were even a bit louder with capped cells, so we’ll see what happens. I’m fairly confident the population of bees can handle one virgin swarm from each of the queenless hives if that’s what they decide to do). They were fed a couple of quarts of syrup last week and are drawing out a few frames. Plenty of resources in this hive, yet lots of open cells from emerged brood that will be perfect if we manage to get a mated queen back.

Rough math on the timing has me assuming a queen or queens will emerge from the 4/27 split between Tuesday and Thursday of this week. The original 10 frame I’m expecting to have a virgin queen either late this coming week or very early the week following. We will not inspect either of those colonies next week, though we may add some syrup up top if inspection of the other two colonies seem to warrant it. I’d love some advice and opinions on whether to inspect these two again 2 weeks from now or to wait 3 weeks. The 8 frame 3 deep queenright colony we will inspected fairly thoroughly once more for queen cells next week (and hopefully gauge the likelihood of stealing some honey this season). The split pulled on 5/1 I plan on doing one more inspection to verify capped queen cells next weekend (slightly concerned about the timing here as I’m calculating a very small chance that they could have a queen emerging on Sunday, though unlikely to happen Saturday as no cells were seen capped in that hive yesterday).

Overall a good week for beekeeping here in central NC and some exciting new experiences for the two second year beeks inspecting with me.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

A few pics of the first (4/27) split that were sent to me on Wednesday. I assume they were of a virgin queen orientation flight. Could have been a mating flight, I suppose, meaning my math was 2-3 days off. The pics were sent by the second year beeks I inspect with, and they confirmed the bees went back into the box, so at least it wasn’t a swarm. Very exciting, I was a bit jealous tbh. I’ve had several splits with the hives requeening themselves over the years, but work has always had me away from the hives during the time of day such activity is likely, so I’ve never been able to witness it. It was fun to get the pics and an excited phone call asking, “What’s happening? What should we do?” 😂

It’s going to be hard to force myself to stay out of that hive this weekend, but I’ll manage it for the health of that queen.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

More activity from that first split this afternoon. Think I may have missed a cell when the charged queen cells were first spotted a few weeks back. From everything I’ve ever read or seen, that is classic mating flight behavior, and it’s 2 or 3 days earlier than I’d calculated/anticipated. If you zoom in on the pics, you can see the nasanov gland at the last segment of the fanning bees’ abdomens.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

We inspected the most recent split and the 3 deep queenright hive on 5/14.

Weather was a bit touch and go on Saturday, but the radar was showing a decent break in some passing thunderstorms. I usually like to inspect the strongest hive first, but I really wanted to make sure we got into that split on Saturday to verify capped queen cells, because my bee math was saying a Queen could very likely hatch on Sunday. It was probably a good call, as when we got to the 3rd frame in (the first with Queen cells on it) they’d already chewed away the capping a bit on the two cells on that frame in anticipation of the queens emerging soon. We’d already seen plenty of nectar/syrup/honey and pollen on the first two frames, so I recommended we get them all back together and closed up ASAP. We did, and I’d guess there was at least one Queen hatching either late Saturday or sometime Sunday. This little split isn’t so little. They’re occupying a solid 6-7 frames and have a tremendous amount of traffic at the entrance. So much so that I decided to go ahead and increase their entrance size from 2 bee widths to 8 or so. I did the same on the first split from 4/27 as well.

The big hive is still booming. We placed another 8 frame deep on there last weekend with all empty frames and they only have about 4 frames completely empty at the moment. We went through every box checking for Queen cells. There were a handful of cups, but they were all empty. The queen was spotted in the middle box and there are plenty of eggs, young larva and capped brood. There’s loads of nectar/honey in that hive, though the Queen is laying up in the top two boxes right now. Hopefully she’ll work her way down into that bottom box again, as there is a decent bit of room for her to lay down there. If she hasn’t gotten down there by next weekend, I may consider reversing the bottom two boxes. There’s an acceptable amount of pollen in the hive. I’d prefer there be more in the brood areas, but she is laying all over the place right now as the workers draw comb. Hopefully they’ll get a little more organized once all the frames are drawn. I did discuss my belief that it will be wise to perform an alcohol wash on this hive come early July with the two 2nd year beeks who inspect with me. They weren’t thrilled with the idea, I’m not really either, but, if this colony continues being as strong as it has been all season long, 300 bees lost in a mite wash won’t even put a dent in their numbers, and I’d really like to see where they are at with varroa population once the dearth hits and the summer solstice is a week or two behind us.

We kept an eye out for queen/mating activity coming from the first split and the remnants of the swarming event from that original 10 frame hive. The forager traffic from the 10 frame is actually a bit lower than from the two intentional splits. I know they have a decent population and plenty of resources, so I’m not quite as concerned about it as the two friends who inspect with me. As mentioned earlier in this post, Saturday was a bit nasty for weather. We had that break in the late morning and were able to inspect those two hives, but shortly thereafter the rains came again and it was raining and overcast until just before dusk. So no Queen activity on Saturday. However, I was able to be over there most of Sunday and, as I was grabbing some coffee, I looked out a window into the backyard and there was a ton of activity coming from that 10 frame hive. The property owner and I ran out and caught a queen orientation flight 😀. We watched intently for a few moments as bees poured out and flew around the front of the hive. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a big blur of orange zooming around and said, “The queen’s out”. I started recording and lost her, but, with all of the activity in the air and it being her first time flying, she fell down onto the cinder blocks supporting the hive and we spotted her again. She’s a decent size and really bright orange/golden. She took off and fell down onto the cinder block a few more times before we lost her. I kept recording for a bit and they gradually calmed down and started heading out to forage or back into the hive. Reviewing the video later, we spotted her heading back into the hive. I was extremely excited to get to witness it, as was my friend. The activity was much closer to what I expected from a Queen orientation flight, as opposed to the gigantic mass of bees covering the front of the hive on the first split when I believe that queen did an orientation flight. We kept an eye on the first split the rest of the day, when we could, to see if there was another mating flight, but we didn’t see one. I assume that Queen is mated and, hopefully, beginning to lay. Of course, it’s also possible that she was lost on a mating flight, but we’ll find out next weekend.

The weather should be fairly nice this week, and I am hoping that we’ll have two mated queens, one each in the original split and the ten framer, come this weekend. The second split may even have a Queen mated by then, if she hatched on Sunday, but I intend to leave them alone next weekend. We might ought to leave the other two alone next weekend as well, but I’m too curious. Gotta be nosy. Hopefully it won’t mess things up too bad for us to take a quick peek through the frames. I’ll just have to pound the fact that we are only doing quick scans of the frames, not looking to observe behavior, into the minds of the two 2nd year beeks… and my own.

A grainy still of the queen climbing up the cinder block during her orientation flight below.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Inspected 3 of the 4 hives 5/21/22.

Went through the 3 deep 8 frame hive first. The queen was spotted, still in the upper boxes. We didn’t reverse the two lower hive bodies. They’re still drawing comb fairly well. It’s foundationless, so there are maybe 2 out of the 20+ drawn frames that I’m not super pleased with, they’re a little wonky. They aren’t imposing on the next frame over, but they are a bit shallow on one side and really deep on the other in a few spots. Those will be moved into the top box as the season progresses, and, hopefully, culled out if they’ll pack them full of honey. Speaking of honey, they’re starting to pack away a good bit of that. The very top box is slowly beginning to look more like a honey super than a third brood box. We went through most of the top and middle boxes and found very little pollen though. I was starting to get a bit concerned. The nectar flow here in central NC usually starts up in mid to late March and builds until the end of May, then starts to trail off throughout June until we hit a pretty severe dearth in July. But, I’ve never had a colony that’s had a problem keeping plenty of pollen in a hive throughout the spring, summer and fall. Luckily, on the bottom box, a couple of the last frames to be inspected were almost completely loaded with pollen and bee bread.

The second hive to be inspected was the first split, made on 4/27. We skipped this one last week as the bee math and behavior witnessed at the hive entrance indicated that, if they had a Queen, she would be very newly mated. We went in with the intention of closing them up immediately if either properly laid eggs or a queen were seen. 4th frame into the 8 frame box, we hadn’t seen any eggs, but we did spot the queen. She was a little more skittish than the queen in the 3 deep hive, but not overly concerned with hiding and her walk on the comb was fairly relaxed. We closed them back up without seeing any eggs, but they will be gone through completely next week and eggs, open brood, and, possibly, even a little capped brood will be expected. If those aren’t seen, she’ll need to get the hive tool test, I think.

Lastly, we went through the 10 frame that the 4/27 split was pulled from and from which a swarm got away on 5/1. We saw neither any eggs, nor a queen in this hive. She’s a little newer than the queen in the 4/27 split, if she’s in there (she went on an orientation flight a full 4-5 days after the queen seen in the split). So it’s entirely possible that she is still very newly mated and was hanging around on a sidewall or the bottom board. Could have even been on a mating flight, I suppose. Even so, we quickly pulled a frame from the 3 deep 8 framer that is newly drawn comb with eggs and young larva in it and swapped that out with a frame from the ten frame hive. That frame with eggs and larva was marked and we’ll go straight to it next week to see if emergency cells are drawn. I hope they aren’t, as the eggs placed in there are from a different genetic line. We closed that hive back up, a little disappointed we hadn’t seen a queen, or proof thereof.

Next week, we will inspect all four hives. Hopefully we’ll find a Queen or eggs in the most recent split that was skipped this week. I think we’ll inspect the 3 deep 8 framer first, the most recent split (pulled from that 8 framer on 5/1), the 4/27 split, and, lastly, the ten framer. If a decent number of eggs and larva are found in the 4/27 split and an emergency Queen cell is found in the ten frame hive, I intend to scratch out that Queen cell or cells and swap in a frame of eggs from the 4/27 split. We may try a bit of queen rearing next year and I’d like to have two lines to assess the rest of this year and have 2 colonies from each line in order to increase our chances of each line making it through the winter.

Pretty decent beekeeping week. We were all quite excited to spot that new Queen in the 4/27 split, and a little disappointed we didn’t see one in the ten frame hive… yet.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Inspected all 4 colonies on 5/28.

First up was the original package in 3 8 frame deeps. It rained a lot last week and pretty heavily before dawn on Saturday morning. I think this is the cause of the incredibly pissy attitude we ran into from this hive when we popped the top. Traffic at the entrance was steady, but much lower than normal from this hive on a nice sunny morning. Only a trickle of pollen was coming in, and the few foragers that did have some only had partially filled baskets. So I think there were a lot of field bees still in the hive and that they were not happy at all, having been cooped up in the boxes for three of four days straight. Even so, we had a plan we needed to carry out. Luckily it didn’t necessitate going through every frame in all three boxes. We went through the first handful of frames in the top box and marked the top of any frame that had eggs and/or young larvae in it for use later in the other hives if necessary. A few frames in, one of the 2 friends who go through the hives with me got hit in the wrist. She held onto the frame in her hand until I could grab it and walked away to tend to the sting and get the scent of alarm pheromone off of her. As she and her daughter walked into the house for a minute to attend to the sting site, I checked the last frame or two in the top box, the queen is STILL up there, and put it back together. As I began cracking the top box loose to start looking through the 2nd deep, her daughter came back out and aided me with some well timed smoke. I got a frame or two into that second box and, I too, got hit on the wrist. I placed the frame in my hand back into the box, scraped the stinger off with my hive tool, and smoked my wrist pretty heavily to mask the alarm pheromone. By this time, my friend who got hit came back out and her daughter started throwing smoke into the air indiscriminately as the bees in this hive were quite pissed. Having already marked 3 or 4 frames in the top box, we decided that our core mission for opening that hive up had been accomplished (marking frames of eggs for possible use in the other 3 hives if necessary) and that any further inspection to satisfy our curiosity was not needed and would just aggravate the bees even more. We closed it up and prepared to move on to the other colonies. We did come back into this box later, find the queen (still in the top box), move her down into the second box, and, a first for me, placed a queen excluder between the 2nd and 3rd boxes. On 5/21 there was plenty of room in the bottom box for her to lay. I am annoyed at finding her in the top box the last few inspections and decided it was best if we made sure that wasn’t going to be an option for her. There were plenty of eggs in that top box, but, whether due to her trying to lay wherever she can up there as the frames are drawn or some other, as of yet undiscovered reason, her pattern isn’t as tight and full as it was the first 5 or 6 times we inspected that colony after the package install. I have a slight concern, between that and the miserable attitude of the workers in that hive this week, that she may be beginning to fail. We will need to look through that colony very closely this coming weekend.

The second box we inspected was the 8 frame split pulled on 4/27. We’d seen a, presumably newly mated, queen the week prior, but we’d stopped looking deeper into that hive after spotting her and hadn’t seen any eggs. We went through every frame this time and spotted, not only frames with eggs and young larvae which we marked, but also, in one of the frames we didn’t get to last week, a decent little pattern of capped brood. What we didn’t see was a ton of was pollen. As mentioned previously, the weather last week was very wet, and I think pollen was just nowhere to be found. This precipitated another first for me, we would go back into the two splits and the swarm remnant later and add a small chunk of pollen patty to each. Pollen isn’t usually an issue in my locale and, even after the nectar flow wanes, there is always a decent amount of pollen coming in. I also prefer the bees to have a natural ebb and flow to the amount of brood in the hive based on the amount of pollen they forage. However, with so many new queens, I felt it best to give them every opportunity to expand their broodnests as quickly as possible. So, a small chunk in each of the hives with new queens was necessary imo. Pollen was seen coming into the hives in abundance the next day. Otherwise, with this colony, we put them back together after marking a few frames with eggs and prepared to move on with the inspections.

Next up was the 8 frame split pulled from the large, 3 deep 8 framer on 5/1. We’d skipped this one last week as we’d seen several queen cells with the caps chewed down the week prior. The queen was spotted toward the last few frames, as were eggs and young larvae. This split is crazy packed. I didn’t think that we’d given them anything much different than we had the 4/27 split when we pulled frames from the 2 different package hives to form the splits, but, apparently, I was mistaken. They had 7 frames out of 8 pretty much completely drawn. We went ahead and added another box. Even though emerging brood should still be a few weeks off, I’d prefer they go ahead and get a couple of more frames drawn prior to that. If this queen packs frames full of eggs like her mother did when we first got her, they are going to need a lot more space by the time brood starts emerging. So, after adding the extra box and closing them back up we were 2 for 3 with hatched, mated and laying queens.

Lastly, we checked the 10 frame hive that we pulled a split from on 4/27 and then swarmed anyway on 5/1. They’re doing quite well as far as bee numbers go. 8 of the 10 frames are well covered with bees. During inspection on 5/21, we’d seen no Queen, no eggs and no larvae. We’d placed a frame of eggs from the 3 deep 8 frame hive in there as insurance in case the queen hadn’t made it and they needed the resources to try again. This frame was marked and, after pulling an edge frame to make some room, we went straight after that fresh egg frame to look for emergency cells. Plenty of capped brood and still a few larvae near to capping, but no queen cells. We proceeded to check the rest of the frames and found the Queen and some eggs a few frames in. The frame was one of those that’s had a couple of rounds of brood in it before so it isn’t very light and isn’t quite yet completely dark. I couldn’t see the eggs, but I trust the young set of eyes who said she was 100% confident she spotted a good number of them. So we closed them back up and called it a day for inspections.

A very good day, in spite of the stings received. 3 for 3 with emerged, mated and laying queens. After my friend and I both got stung and then went 2 for 2 on finding laying queens in the next two hives, we joked with my friend’s daughter, who seriously hates getting stung, that we needed her to pop the top on the 3 deep 8 framer and wave her hand around a bit until she got hit so that we could appease the gods/goddesses of queen mating with a sacrifice before we opened the last hive up. Surprisingly, after an eye roll and expressing her 100% certainty that getting stung wouldn’t increase our chances one bit, she said she’d do it in a heartbeat if she thought it would work 😂. It’s good to see them both embracing the craft as completely as I’d hoped. I’d encourage anyone with a few years experience, and the time to do so, to help bring others into beekeeping if you ever get a chance. It’s definitely helped me to cement what knowledge I have of beekeeping and bring to light the aspects of the craft I need to devote more study to.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Inspected all 4 colonies 6/4:

Inspected the big hive, 3 8 frame deeps first. We went straight to the bottom box, as we only went through the top box and a few frames into the second last week due to the bees being a touch aggressive. They were a little better this week. I got hit on the back of the hand when I had my phone a little too close to a frame while trying to take a picture. My friends got a kick out of the fact that the first few pics of my photo album for the day consisted of a pic of the bottom box top bars, a couple frames full of pollen and then several accidental snaps of my hand and, somehow, a screenshot of one of those pics as I flung the bee off and grabbed my hive tool to scrape out the stinger. This colony is still very flighty and runny, at least in the bottom two boxes. When we finally got to the 3rd box it was surprisingly docile. I think most of the open larvae is up here right now, so it’s mostly nurse bees, and having left the box on the hive lid while the other two boxes were inspected, most of the foragers had flown back to the regular hive position. The Queen excluder we placed on last week is doing its job. No more eggs in the upper box, the Queen was starting to lay up that second box pretty heavily though. Her pattern looks much better down in this box than it was in the top box, at least her laying pattern is. We’ll check for how well they’re developing through the brood cycle next week when we will expect to see nice, large capped brood patterns. Otherwise this colony is doing pretty well. Still bringing in tons of pollen and a decent bit of nectar. We rearranged a little bit and swapped a few nectar loaded frames from the second box with some brood frames from the top box. I’m still hoping to be able to pull a few frames of honey from this hive.

The May 1st split from that large hive was the second colony to be inspected. We put a second 8 frame deep on this colony last week. They had just started to draw some frames in the top box. In the bottom box, they’ve made good progress on drawing out the empty end frames we’d swapped out with a couple of drawn frames for the top box. Just a 1/2 frame or so of capped brood in this hive, but loads of open brood and eggs. The new queen seems to be hitting her stride. They should have a pretty healthy nurse bee population in the next few weeks that can help with drawing that top box out. This hive is also a little flighty and not terribly calm on the comb like it’s mother colony. All the bees in there are, of course, from that bigger colony so it’s too early to tell how this queen’s progeny will behave. Hopefully, they’ll be a little calmer, but, judging by the runny behavior of the queen, I’m skeptical that they will be completely docile. Plenty of pollen in this hive now. They did completely remove the small bit of pollen patty from last week, so hopefully it was helpful for them to have it for a few days as they built their pollen stores back up. When I first got to the bee yard yesterday, I did a quick survey of each hive’s returning foragers. Those workers carrying in pollen ranged from 6 in 10 to 9 in 10. So, with the weather having been quite warm and dry last week, I think that brief nectar dearth is behind us.

The 3rd hive we inspected was the 10 frame deep lang that are the remnants of a May 1st swarm that we couldn’t capture. They needed a second box ASAP, and got it. They had every frame at least half drawn in that bottom box. We inserted a few empty frames in the outer positions of the bottom box and moved a couple of mostly drawn resource frames to the top. The queen in this box is just getting good and started. She has a baseball size grouping of capped brood on each side of one frame, but it’s completely surrounded by open brood and eggs. Should be a nice looking frame slam full of capped brood next week. There are several other frames that she is laying up as well. This hive is much calmer than the other two we inspected before it. The queen is a little fidgety on the frame, but nothing like the queen in the 5/1 split. Looking forward to seeing if her reasonably calm demeanor transfers to her offspring. Plenty of resources in this hive. The forager traffic is a touch lower than all the other hives, but they definitely aren’t hurting for anything.

Lastly, we inspected the oldest split from 4/27. This queen is friggin’ awesome. Two frames completely packed with capped brood on both sides, and she’s laying in any worker sized cell that doesn’t have pollen or honey/nectar in it. She is extremely calm on the comb. We actually kept the frame she was on in hand for quite a few minutes because I mentioned to my friend inspecting with me that she may very well lay while we’re watching her. She has a rather interesting coloring. The best way I know to describe it is to say that each shell of her abdomen looks like a part of a sunburst pattern. The color transitions from a dusky yellow to an almost grayish orange. Really quite beautiful. Unfortunately, they still only have about 6 1/4 frames of an 8 frame deep drawn. We left them in a single box for now, but they really need to get to work drawing comb. Once all that capped brood starts hatching in a week and a half or so, that hive is gonna be slam packed with bees. I may put another box on there next week whether they really seem ready for it, or not.

We are really looking forward to assessing these colonies through the rest of the year, and will do our best to get them all through winter. 4 healthy and quickly growing colonies is certainly more than I could have hoped for a month ago when we had one Queen and several pounds of bees lost to the trees, another starting to build a lot of cell cups, and 3 hives with just a few capped queen cells and no layer.










A pic of that uniquely, to me at least, colored queen. A little hard to find her due to her coloring.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

All 4 colonies inspected on 6/11:

Normally we go into the biggest hive first, but that thing has been aggravating lately. Random bees being a nuisance after we close it up and try to work the other hives. So we started with the 4/27 split. They’re super chill and quite a pleasure to work. My friend and I let her teenage daughter take the lead and go through the single 8 frame deep on her own. She loves checking the bees with us every weekend, but is always a bit nervous when working the hives. I thought it might be good for her to go through one solo to get a bit more confidence pulling the hive apart and going through frames. She did a great job and the bees in this colony were very well behaved, as usual. The new Queen is pumping out brood and she’s already had quite a fair number of bees emerge this past week. Looks like she is going back through to lay in the newly vacated cells very well. Otherwise, a bit of a good news/bad news situation. The hive has plenty of pollen now, something they were running dangerously low on a few weeks ago, but they have almost zero nectar/honey reserves. The flow is over. Some of the other hives aren’t quite as dry as this one, but we put about a gallon of light syrup on every hive. I decided we should go ahead and add another deep 8 framer on this hive as 7 frames are drawn below and every one has brood in it. Hopefully the sugar syrup will kickstart them into drawing out that top box.

Next colony up was the 10 frame that swarmed on 5/1. The new queen is doing quite well in this hive. They had a little bit more honey than the first hive checked, but not by much. The lower box is pretty well drawn out, save for one frame and the queen is laying in 7 of them. They’ve just started pulling some comb on the upper box and hopefully the sugar syrup will aid them in getting it all drawn in the next few weeks. Interesting thing we noticed in all three of the hives with new queens that was done to a larger degree in this hive. The bees are thickening the walls of a lot of drone cells that were drawn early in the season to turn them into worker sized cells. I don’t recall ever seeing it before, but all 3 are doing it so I guess it’s a thing 🤷🏼‍♂️. This colony is also very relaxed and easy to work. Always nice when that’s the case.

Third hive we inspected was the 5/1 split. They were pulled from the hive that is now 3 8 frame deeps. They aren’t quite as horrible as their mother hive, but it is definitely a completely different experience compared to the first two colonies we inspected. The bees are flighty and will definitely come off the frames at you if you move too quickly. Haven’t been stung by this colony yet, but I won’t be surprised when it happens. The new Queen is definitely laying away. She has several frames full of capped brood and eggs and open brood in several others. This colony actually has a bit more honey stored away than any of the others, but it’s still no where near enough to make it through the dearth that’s expected to last until August. They’ve begun drawing out a few of the frames in the upper box that was added a few weeks ago. I’m hopeful that this colony will calm down some as the workers of this new Queen start to take over, but I’m not holding my breath.

I’m going to kill the queen in the last hive we inspected. Didn’t happen today, may not even happen this season, but I will end her one of these days. This one got me again, popped me right in the chest on one of the last frames of the last box. That’s 1 sting each of the last 3 inspections of this hive. At least I’m the only one who got hit. My friends don’t handle it quite as well as I, and I usually find myself alone in the bee yard with alarm pheromone in the air and a spicy hive open and torn apart when they get stung. We used an inspection process that a member on this forum has mentioned several times this season. Their name eludes me at the moment, but I’ll put it in another post when I recollect who it is. Basically their recommendation for best practice when inspecting a really strong hive with multiple boxes is to pull and set to the side all but the lowest box. The lowest should be inspected first, then the next box should be inspected prior to placing it back on the lower box and so on. It really works rather well. Most of the more aggressive bees are the older foragers and they tend to fly out of the offloaded boxes and back to the original hive location, but as this is occurring, you’re already completely or most of the way through inspecting the frames in the bottom box before the bees really know what’s going on. By the time the bottom box is gone through and the bees are just starting to organize a defense of their home, you’re moving on to the offloaded boxes that are now mostly filled with younger, typically more gentle bees that don’t readily fly. I even modified this slightly and placed my inner cover over the box(es) in the original hive location as we finished inspecting them. Made the inspection process much less stressful than it was the last few times we’ve been into this hive. Even so… that queen will die… just a matter of time. This colony is looking much better than the last few inspections. The middle box has lots of brood and the Queen has a much healthier looking appearance than she has the previous couple of weeks. Her pattern is back to being much tighter than it was when she was laying in the 3rd box. There are ridiculous amounts of pollen in this hive. The bottom box has 5 or 6 frames loaded with it. Since the main nectar flow is apparently over, I’m seriously considering knocking this hive back to two deeps next week. I think we’ll pull some of the frames from the top box where brood has emerged and not been filled with nectar and swap them out for 3 frames of pollen in the bottom box. Then we’ll give each of the new colonies one of these frames of pollen and divvy the rest of the drawn frames removed from the third deep into the second boxes of those new colonies. I’m also giving serious thought to pulling a nuc split from this hive next weekend and placing a frame with eggs on it from one of the gentle hives to get them to raise a new, hopefully nicer, queen so I can dump the one in the spicy hive in some alcohol (man I hate that queen).

I may even see if I can talk my friends into trying some grafting with that nuc split. It would be fun to play around with… and nice to weaken that big hive a bit. Pretty good inspection overall. It’s really nice to see the 3 new queens doing so well.


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## Gray Goose (Sep 4, 2018)

NUBE said:


> I’m also giving serious thought to pulling a nuc split from this hive next weekend and placing a frame with eggs on it from one of the gentle hives to get them to raise a new, hopefully nicer, queen


so a good way to insure this is:
take a frame of eggs from the "good" hive, place in a box with a frame of sealed brood, on each side from the bad queen.
fill the res of the hive with what ever you want, but NON young brood or eggs, empty, pollen, honey frames etc.

Place this box on the mean queen stand, with a super of foundation.
move the mean queen to a new stand. basically a fly back split to chosen eggs.
in 8 days go into this new hive and "Insure" only have queen cells on the center frame of eggs you provided, and remove any from the mean queens brood frames.

old hive,, 2 days after the split, the feild bees should be gone to the old stand, the bees way less, and the older bees are the "guard" bees.
take the pollen frame a honey frame and a brood frame, 3-4 frames. newspaper combine these in a second box over the queens you like the nice queens. basically split the mean queens resources up and give to the nice queens.
during this process, look for the mean queen, if found dispatch. if not found an option is shake the frames you wish to take, place in thier own box, place excluder on hive place these "verified queen free" frames in and close for a couple days. bees will move up and then they can be taken and newspaper combined to the good queens.

extra credit, put 2 frames of eggs in the old stand split.
when the mean queen is dispatched, wait 8 days cull all queen cells, give one frame of queen cells from the good queen to the remaining part of the old hive to get 2 new good queens.

do the queen math first and have a plan to allow all the steps to be done in a fashion where you can accomplish the main goals.

have fun
many ways to do this but that is the way I would go, divide and conquer, build up the queens you like, replace the ones you diss like.

GG


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Thanks for the insight, it definitely sounds like a viable option. I think we are going to graft into a nuc though. Next weekend, we intend to bust the strong hive down to two brood boxes (currently 3, though the 3rd box has had a Queen excluder under it for the last two weeks and all the brood remaining is capped and should emerge this week). We will place 2 frames of brood in varying stages, one frame of pollen, and one of sugar syrup in the nuc. We will also shake an additional 2-3 frames of open brood into the nuc to increase the nurse bee population. We will then attempt a half dozen or so grafts off a frame from one of the two nicer queens. The grafting frame will be placed between the brood and the frame of pollen. They will receive a half gallon or so of light syrup and the entrance will be severely reduced (just a couple bee widths). The week after this, we will open up the nuc, assess how many grafts took and are capped, and, hopefully, leave two in the nuc and place two in the big, aggressive hive after dumping that Queen into some alcohol. We will also go through the rest of the nuc and destroy any Queen cells that aren’t from our grafting frame.

If anyone thinks that won’t work, I’m certainly interested in why and how to make it successful.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

This will likely be one of my last posts on this thread for reasons made clear at the end of this post.

Inspected all hives on 6/18.

We started with the 3 deep 8 frame hive that started as a package installed on 3/20 and had a split pulled from it on 5/1. We were compressing this hive down to 2 deep boxes, as the flow has ended here and the top box, above the excluder, is mostly empty comb with only a few frames having any syrup/honey in them. They took all of the 3/4gallon of 1:1 we gave them last week. We were looking to remove 3-4 frames from the bottom box that have been loaded with pollen the last few inspections and to replace them with some empty comb from that top box in order to encourage the Queen to start laying in that box (she’s been in the top boxes the last month and a half or more). We were also looking to pull two frames of emerging brood and a half drawn comb with some syrup/nectar in it. Those 3 combs and one of the pollen loaded frames were pulled and used to form up a nuc that we intended to add a grafting frame to. This big hive had stung me once each of the last 3 weeks and we are hoping to requeen this hive if our first attempt at grafting pans out. So we pulled the top box, the excluder and the middle box. We were pretty sure the queen would be in the middle box so we placed it on the cover, the Queen excluder over that and then the top box on both. My friend went through the mostly calm top box looking for good frames of drawn but empty comb to add to the bottom box, as I went through the bottom box and assessed how many pollen loaded frames we could pull. We ended up grabbing 4 of them out, leaving behind 2 others, and put several empty combs from the top box in that bottom box to replace them. We placed one of the pollen frames and one frame with a decent bit of sugar syrup in it into the nuc we were forming. Next we set the top box aside, pulled the excluder and went through the middle box. We located the queen, set her in the box with the frames we were pulling from that hive and went about removing 2 brood frames for the nuc as well as shaking in 2 other frames of nurse bees. We shook another frame into a container to perform a mite wash and dumped the leftovers from that into the nuc as well. The queen was added back to the box and it was filled out with undrawn frames. The hive was set back up as two 8 frame deeps with 3 or 4 undrawn frames and the bees on the frames we pulled from the bottom and top boxes were shaken back into the hive. About a gallon of syrup was set on top of this hive and they were closed back up. The nuc box was closed up and fed as well, though, in hindsight, I left a little too large of an opening for the entrance. We were wanting to use the frames pulled from the 3 deep hive, which has had a solid 4 months of time to draw comb, to help equalize the comb in the other 3 hives and help them catch up with the amount of drawn comb in their boxes. Surprisingly, I didn’t get stung by this hive, even with the major disruption and the shaking of multiple frames.

I did, however, get hit by the next colony we inspected. We moved over to the split that was pulled from the 3 deep hive on 5/1. This hive is strong. It may even be as strong as it’s mother hive at this point. They took all of their 1 gallon of 1:1 that we added last week. The queen in here is laying up a storm. 6 or 7 frames in the bottom box are filled with brood. The top box has 4 frames that are mostly drawn and pretty well packed with syrup. They are even starting to backfill the brood nest ever so slightly. They were not fed again this week, which I worry may have been a mistake since syrup wasn’t added to every other hive. I fear we may be inviting this colony to start robbing the others. After they stung me, I decided they were strong enough and we didn’t add any frames from the big colony to this hive.

Next up was the ten frame hive that are the remnants of a split on 4/27 and a swarm on 5/1. They have a decent bit of brood and resources in this hive, but they took in less than half of the gallon of syrup we had on them last week. From all appearances, this hive is in decent health, but the brood pattern is looking just a little spotty. I’m a touch concerned about the possibility of mites being an issue in this hive. They are by far the most docile of our four hives, but they don’t seem to be quite as strong as the other colonies. They are also the only ones in a ten frame box. We added a frame of pollen to them and closed them back up. Before inspection, we’d considered marking frames as potential grafting donors, but decided against it after going through them. They were only given a half gallon of 1:1 this week. I think we may move them into double deep 8 frames within the next month or so.

The last colony we inspected was the split pulled from the 10 frame hive on 4/27. They’re doing quite well, loads of brood in all stages. Their activity at the hive entrance isn’t quite as heavy as the other two 8 frame hives, but they took the whole gallon of 1:1 we gave them last week. Unfortunately, they aren’t drawing much comb with it. They have a couple of lobes pulled on two upper frames that are a little larger than a softball. We gave this colony the two remaining pollen combs hoping to help them catch up a bit. They are such a pleasure to work compared to the two other 8 frame hives. Very calm on the comb and not looking to pounce, stinger first, at any digits or appendages that move over their frames a little too quickly. We marked a couple of frames as candidates for grafting the next day. We’d originally planned to graft the same day the nuc was made up, but I had some car trouble on the way over to my friends’ house where the bees are located and had to turn my attention to fixing that. So grafting would have to wait another day. This hive was closed up and also given another gallon of 1:1.

Later in the day, after fixing my car with the help of one of my friends, I noticed way too much flying at the queenless nuc we’d made up earlier and got a larger block of wood to place on the landing board. I asked my friend to remind me we needed to look in there prior to grafting the next day.

6/19: We went into the nuc first. I feared they were being robbed, and they may have been, but, if so, the robbers weren’t tearing up the comb to get at capped syrup, they were after the half gallon or so of 1:1 we’d placed on top of the nuc. We pulled the cover off, removed the 2nd nuc box that we place over the inner cover and were rather pleased with the number of bees that poured out as we removed upturned mason jars from the four holes I always drill in my inner covers to allow for my method of feeding syrup. However, once the inner cover was pulled, it was obvious there were nowhere near enough bees on the frames for what we had planned. There were still a decent number, but we needed TONS of nurse bees for the grafting we were preparing to do.

So I decided we’d be best served by pulling bees from the hive that was started as a split on 5/1. We got into them, found a frame packed with emerging brood, swapped it out for one of the frames of brood we’d pulled from the large hive the day before and then proceeded to shake frames of open brood from this hive into the nuc. I, of course, got stung again, but we managed to get it done and we shook one last frame onto a piece of Coroplast that I laid in front of the entrance to the nuc. I was happy to see lots of fanning and the bees marching in. We left the opening extremely small on this nuc, closed it back up minus an empty frame we’d left in the previous day as a space holder for the grafting frame, and moved over to the gentle 4/27 split to pull one of the frames we’d marked the day before as a potential grafting donor. We found the ideal frame that was of course loaded with bees and I started brushing them off. I can’t even imagine trying this on either of the other two 8 frame hives. They would have stung the crap out of me. These bees though, while obviously not thrilled at being brushed off the frame, let me push them into the hive without so much as a headbutt. So we closed the hive back up and went over to the porch where we had a makeshift grafting station set up and 3 of us proceeded to take turns saying, “oops, destroyed that larva” and “rolled that one” though we finally got 10 cups filled with, hopefully, the right age larva. Both my good friend and I each did four, three of which we were fairly happy with, and her daughter got two in that she was quite confident will do well. My friend grabbed the donor frame, I grabbed the grafting frame and we placed each in their appropriate hives.

The grafting nuc was looking really good. Loads of bees in there. They were festooning across the gap we’d left between the 2 brood frames on one side and the pollen and honey/syrup frames on the other. Very little activity at the entrance with none of that being flying bees. Later in the day I saw them defend against both a Yellowjacket and a bumble bee, so hopefully they’ll be good. I’m hoping to have at least 4 capped cells next week. We plan to put the bees in the nuc into an 8 frame deep and leave them with 2 queen cells in cell protectors. Then we’ll pull the Queen from what was the 3 deep 8 frame hive and is now only two deep, and mover her, along with a frame of brood and a resource frame into the nuc box. We’ll then place two Queen cells inside cell protectors into the now queenless hive and hope at least one of the two hives ends up with a mated, gentle queen. If not, we will reintroduce the original queen, distribute ny remaining bees from the new 8 frame hive, and plan to requeen next spring.

If you’ve made it through all the above, you’re probably curious about the results of the mite wash performed on that strong 3 deep hive. There were 3 mites. 2 showed after a minute and I swirled for another minute or two and there were 3. I swirled a bit longer, but no more fell out. I had hoped for zero, and if zero was what I’d seen, I had no plans to treat. But seeing three, and understanding that will likely be six within a months time, I’ve decided to treat. After the requeening process is complete, I’ll do at least two treatments of Apiguard on every hive. I’ll likely be doing the 25g dosage as it gets well into the 90s here during July and August. I’ll do a mite wash on at least a couple of the strongest hives after the 2 treatments and if either of them wash more than 2 mites, I’ll do a third treatment on all the hives. If I don’t see mites in either, I’ll perform washes on all hives and only do a 3rd treatment on any that have more than two mites in a wash. The Apiguard is already on order and should be here this week. I also ordered an oxalic acid vaporizer and plan to hit all the hives with 1 or 2 rounds this November or December. I may post on this thread a few more times until I actually perform the treatments, but I will definitely be treating this year, and likely continue to do so moving forward.


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## Litsinger (Jun 14, 2018)

NUBE said:


> I may post on this thread a few more times until I actually perform the treatments, but I will definitely be treating this year, and likely continue to do so moving forward.


Nube:

I appreciate your objective reporting- no shame in electing to treat, and you can always take a 'Soft Bond' approach to assessing developing resistance mechanisms.

Best of success to you as the remainder of the year unfolds.

Russ


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Thanks Russ,

I’m not thrilled with feeling like I have to treat, but I’m also not thrilled at the prospect of having to buy bees next spring when I’ll likely have 4-6 hives going into winter. Einstein said crazy was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I’ve never treated a hive since I captured my first swarm from a double deep my father had in his back yard the year he passed away and we didn’t even think about until I happened to be at my mother’s house the Easter morning after the winter he passed and a neighbor came over and said dad’s bees were going crazy. I’ve also never had a hive make it all the way through 3 years. So it’s time to try something new. Treatment free sounds great, and I salute those who say they can make it work, but it would be nice if some of them would get on the video sites and show us all what they’re doing. If you search “treatment free beekeeping” on YouTube, you get a bunch of hour long lectures and 5-10 minute videos from people who catch a bunch of swarms every year and rarely show you the inside of their hives. It would be nice if some of the folks claiming success at treatment free would do some Bob Binnie/Kamon Reynolds type videos. Think what you will about those two, but they’re showing what’s happening with their outfits year after year, not just posting a few random beekeeping club lectures with great claims and a few slides.


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## Litsinger (Jun 14, 2018)

NUBE said:


> ... it would be nice if some of them would get on the video sites and show us all what they’re doing.


@NUBE:

If you haven't already, I strongly recommend watching the video interviews that Mr. Cory Stevens is posting on YouTube. His latest video is part two of an interview with Mr. Troy Hall- and delves into an honest discussion regarding struggles in a commercial TF apiary and the adjustments that Troy is making as a result of a devastating collapse last year:






I really enjoy these long format videos because it allows space to unpack the relatively complicated and often nuanced situational opportunities and challenges that emerge in resistance breeding and propagation. 

His video with Sue Cobey is a must-watch in my very humble opinion.

Hopefully you are able to find a means to simultaneously support your apiary goals while still moving the resistance needle.

Russ


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## GregB (Dec 26, 2017)

NUBE said:


> Einstein said crazy was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results


It is an overused myth, as usually (that Einstein said this). People don't take the time to google a little bit and keep copying the same old clichés.

But also - this definition of craziness only makes sense if everything around you stays the same. *Static*.

Well, nothing around you is static.
Only the change what is permanent.

With this, doing the same thing over and over very well may get you different results, *in time (!!!).*

Question is - do you have the time?
How much time do you have?


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## GregB (Dec 26, 2017)

Litsinger said:


> @NUBE:
> 
> If you haven't already, I strongly recommend watching the video interviews that Mr. Cory Stevens is posting on YouTube. His latest video is part two of an interview with Mr. Troy Hall- and delves into an honest discussion regarding struggles in a commercial TF apiary and the adjustments that Troy is making as a result of a devastating collapse last year:
> ..............
> Russ


Like Troy said - If I have no bees, I can not do this. 
Pretty much what I found out for myself.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

That was an interesting video Russ, thanks. If I can get most of my hives through the winter, I do have a tentative plan to start moving colonies that exhibit some mite resistance (verified by having a consistently lower mite wash count) to another yard next year. I don’t think I would have success trying to isolate mite resistant genetics in the same yard that I will be performing treatments.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

Be careful what you believe from a quick google search.


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## A Novice (Sep 15, 2019)

NUBE said:


> Getting back into beekeeping after a few years hiatus. I purchased a nuc from a local guy who sidelines with a few hundred hives. When I first started beekeeping a little over a decade ago I was very taken with the notion and goals of going TF. This time around, after watching videos and rediscovering Michael Bush’s website, I was torn between the classic TF philosophy of putting no chemicals in the hive and the newer “organic” beekeeping that seems so popular now days. OAV is a seductive option, but I just can’t shake the common sense logic that if you’re putting something in your hive that requires you to glove up, wear a respirator and repeat ad nauseum that there’s no way to make sure it doesn’t end up in your honey (yes, I know, not while honey supers are on, gotta repeat so you get all the reproductive cycle mites, there’s no proof it accumulates in the hive).
> Anyway, I was torn. I don’t want my bees to die. The person I bought the bees from freely stated he used OAV liberally and religiously. So I’ve been contemplating its use while I search for ways to convince myself it isn’t necessary.
> After getting the nuc into a ten frame Lang deep and sitting to the side of the hive, watching the entrance and enjoying the industrious sound of buzzing bees flying in and out, as beekeepers who enjoy their craft are wont to do, I noticed some house bees dragging out and disposing of unfit larva. It inspired hope, until I remembered I’d seen this a decade ago, and, encouraging though it is, it didn’t save my bees last time I had some (pretty sure their demise was of my doing. Poor fall management and failure to inspect the hives early spring, leading to starvation from low population and no resources during the brood buildup. Though it’s hard to convince oneself amid the din of TF naysayers that the colony’s collapse wasn’t at least helped along by Varroa infestation). So I was still unsure how to proceed regarding management.
> During my weekly inspection last Saturday, a friend, who is letting me keep the bees at her house in exchange for showing her what little I know of beekeeping, pointed to a couple of bees on a frame I was holding and asked, “Are they fighting? What are they doing?” Before laying my eyes on them, my thoughts immediately turned to flashback nightmares of a robbing frenzy I experienced early in my beekeeping and I trembled at the possibility, adrenaline started to pump and prepare me to close that hive back up and lock it down with record breaking speed. Luckily, when I did see the pair of bees she was curious about, it was immediately obvious that they weren’t fighting in any way I’d ever seen. I wasn’t sure what they were doing at first, the “aggressor” was all over one of her sisters, her mandibles gnashing perilously close to vital bee bits. “Is that a mite on the bottom one?”, my friend asked with a bit of trepidation in her voice (I’d warned her about Varroa and the horrifying prospect of a colony being overrun with them). She has better eyes than I so it took me a moment to see if it was indeed a mite. “Huh, looks like”, I replied with a bit of shared trepidation. But, as we watched with curious awe, that “aggressor” bee chomped all around her sister’s abdomen and thorax until… YES! she ripped that mite right off, took a few more chomps on it for good measure and let it fall to the ground! While attempting to suppress a smile of (definitely unearned) pride, I looked at my friend, who was left quite speechless by what we’d just witnessed and said, “Huh, never seen that before”. “Is that a good sign?”, she queried. After a moments thought and the realization that ALL COLONIES HAVE MITES, the only thing I could come up with in that moment was, “It definitely ain’t a bad sign”.
> ...


While Oxalic acid is not licensed for use with the supers on, honey contains between 5 and 300 mg/Kg of oxalic acid naturally. Many plants contain oxalic acid, most notably spinach which has (if I remember correctly) over a gram of oxalic acid per kilogram. It is what makes it taste like spinach. The threshold for being able to taste oxalic acid in honey is reported to be 400 mg/Kg.

While I do not suggest applying oxalic acid while supers are on, I think the evidence is that one need not be overly concerned about its effects on honey.

Keeping bees is an unnatural activity. They are not a native species. 

Treating is unpleasant and time consuming and should be avoided if practical, but there is no virtue in being treatment free. It isn't "better" to not treat. Treatment free beekeepers are not morally superior to those who treat for varroa. It may be less work and produce better results, but for most people who want honey production treatment is necessary or at least beneficial. In fact one might argue that those who treat are ethically superior to those who don't, as they keep their animals alive and do what is necessary to care for them. I'm not arguing that, but I would, as I think in a debate I could wipe the floor with any representative of the TF position.

Oxalic acid must be handled with some care, as it has a high dissociation constant, and will damage your lungs if you breath the vapor. A respirator is needed. I would recommend a n-100 or a p-100. It is a nuisance, and repetitive. I would avoid it if I could.

However, they are your bees, so do as you wish. If you can achieve your beekeeping goals while not treating, and it is less work, good for you. Some people seem to be able to do that, others not so much. Where you are located seems to make a huge difference.


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## NUBE (May 24, 2009)

I’d argue it is definitely better to not HAVE to treat, but there’s a big difference (living or dead colony) between not having to treat and just flat out refusing to treat, I’m finally starting to see that. I’ve always been hardheaded about some things and have to find out for myself, now I know. Or at least I’m on the road to possibly knowing. If I lose all my hives over winter after treating or can only get a couple that just squeak through and build up poorly I guess I’ll have to seriously re-examine my beekeeping basics. I’d definitely prefer to not have to treat, and, as stated in my last post, if I’m able to get a decent percentage of hives through winter this year with treatment, I have every intention of beginning to hunt out the colonies that seem to better suppress mite levels and separate them from my main yard to start giving them a closer look. I’d like to see if they’re just slowing the seasonal mite population growth curve, or actually keeping them at manageable levels throughout the year somehow. Either way, I’ll probably graft queens from them. If slowing the curve means only needing one mite treatment a year vs the 2 I plan to perform this year, then that’s great. If they’re actually keeping the mite population managed all year, that’s even better, but, if treatment helps me get a decent percentage of colonies through the year and allows me to expand my hive count early next spring, I have every intention of sticking with what works while keeping an eye out for colonies that consistently have lower mite wash counts.


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## GregB (Dec 26, 2017)

A Novice said:


> Oxalic acid must be handled with some care, as it has a high dissociation constant, and will damage your lungs if you breath the vapor. A respirator is needed. I would recommend a n-100 or a p-100. It is a nuisance, and repetitive. I would avoid it if I could.


I keep repeating that Oxalic dribble is highly effective, sufficiently efficient to apply, requires no expensive applicator, requires no expensive PPE.
Don't like Oxalic - use Lactic - even safer.
Not repetitive - IF done correctly (on brood-less colonies) - that's the efficiency, right there.

Yes - this does require mind-set change as far as apiary management goes.


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