More May Beekeeping Odds & Ends transcript

Putting the first round of supers on this brand new yard of bees. These were started with queen cells and they're just now starting to take off. They got four to six frames of brood and we're putting the supers on not because they need them right now today but but because they're going to need them in a couple weeks as they start to expand and we may not get back in time. Got an excluder in a medium there. We started quite a few nukes in this yard at the same time with queen cells and took most of them away after we figured out that they were good and these two were left behind as support nukes for the yard.

What we will use these for is if we run to into any duds this summer, we'll use them to fix the dud spots. And then in the meantime, we'll take brood out of them every time we visit. Today we took two solid sheets of brood out of each nuke, put in two empty drawn comb and we will continue to do that all summer long if we don't need the nukes to fix a problem. Love having brand new queens, brand new colonies. There'll be less swarming with these brand new queens, too.

We can get a swarming period just before sourwood, it's not as severe as the springtime but it definitely exists especially with singles and an excluder. Singles with an excluder ahead of a honey flow is uh highly problematic but having brand new queens just you know, a month old, two months old, it does make a difference. Putting together another bee yard. Got a couple more to go. Found a couple more spots that we can put new bee yards and I just found this one kind of by accident.

Driving down the road, fellow was out working in the yard and I stopped and chatted with him and asked him what he thought about having bees on his place and he said, "Absolutely, I love bees. Help yourself." So, I put them anywhere you want. This hill behind the bee yard is loaded with sourwood. I know that. I've driven by it many times. I've always been wishing I had a bee yard in this area. We're just off of Highway 76 coming west out of Clayton.

So, it's going to be convenient, too, because we have three more yard yards down the road. So, this will be added to our trip out this highway. Makes it efficient. I like to have several yards in any given direction. This will be a 32 colony yard. Um we're shooting for 32 in most areas. We're averaging 32. We got a few yards that are 44, 48, and a few that are 24, 28. So, 32's the average. I think by the time we're done making yards this year, we'll have about 40 yards, give or take one or two.

Got a lot of nukes in the field. We still have to figure out where all these nukes are going. Some will be meant for re-queening colonies, but many are going to be new colonies. We'll be moving these nukes in very early before sunup in the morning, and then tomorrow we'll transfer them into full-size boxes. Might even put a little feed on them, even though there's a little bit of a nectar flow. With this rainy weather coming on, want to make sure they don't run out of feed.

They need to grow over the next 5 weeks. Um it's about 5 weeks, 5 and 1/2 weeks to sourwood. I think we can turn a fat five-frame nuke into a pretty stout single in that time. And uh might need a little feed to do it. We'll see. Okay, turned out good. Pallets at the other end are a little out of level. We'll bring by some 1x4s when come back tomorrow and level them up, shim them up. Once again, we're also putting landscape timbers under the pallets.

If things go right, these pallets shouldn't have to be moved for a long time. I asked John to put the posts in between the pallets in case there was any reason we have to move them real quickly. Posts wouldn't be in the way. Occasionally, we'll just drop the wires on the ground and move things if we need to. It's one of the reasons I don't tie this ground wire to the posts. I want to be able to disassemble it very easily if we're having to move something really quickly.

We'll leave them some drawn comb here. We'll be back tomorrow with the nukes. We're in our new bee yard installing five-frame nukes in deep boxes. Um five-frame nukes are pretty good. They're pretty full. And we're installing them with an added drawn comb, so they'll grow nicely, I'm sure. We're giving them a 2-gallon bucket of thin syrup. Helps stimulate them, help them gain weight. And the plugs in the buckets only have three holes in them, uh 1/16 of an inch.

Some of our plugs have six or eight or 10 holes. Just depends on what we're trying to accomplish. In this case, I want these nukes to to take the feed at a moderate pace. I don't want to just dump it on them. And to steady flow, steady moderate flow of thin syrup will be more stimulating for brood production and it'll accomplish what we want better. We don't want them to plug up real quickly and not have a place to lay. >> These cells were installed in these nukes on 4/24, which was just almost exactly a month ago.

One of the keys to this is to get the nukes into a bigger box by week five because that's the point when they will start to expand in numbers rapidly. All the brood that from the new queen that was laid will start to hatch and right at about five weeks. Actually, a little before five weeks, but there's a little attrition going on there, so five weeks is when you really see them the bees start to swell up in these things.

Of course, we watch for the queens as we work. If we see them, we mark them. If we don't see them, we don't get too worried about it. Cody's filling buckets. Nice spot. Butterweed. I get reports from a few beekeepers they believe they're making honey on this plant. I've never hardly seen any bees on in our area. So, I don't know if it has to do with soil or elevation or what, but some people say they make honey on this.

We're in Turnerville, Georgia. It's one of our yards that is south of the shop, a little lower elevation. And this is the first yard that we're lifting our spring crop up on. Putting excluder boards below the honey, putting a fresh deep super of drawn comb above an excluder. We'll come back next week and pick up the boxes. This yard's done pretty well, better than expected, honestly. A month ago, I didn't think were going to have a great spring, but it's turned out to be okay in the long run.

Colonies are full of bees and full of honey. These boxes are plugged out, so a lot of weight here. This colony did a good job. Those two boxes are plugged out. So, what I'm doing in this case right here is I'm actually taking two frames of sealed brood out of the brood nest and I'm putting it in the new box of drawn comb that I'm putting above the excluder in order to put some drawn comb that the queen can lay in in the bottom.

It's a little bit of a swarming swarm control strategy. At this lower elevation, our sourwood is probably only 3 to 4 weeks away. And usually about two two and a half weeks away from sourwood, good strong colonies like this can tend to want to start preparing to swarm. The swarming season ahead of sourwood is not like it is in spring, but it's definitely notable. It's there. And where it's especially problematic is with single story colonies with an excluder.

Double deeps, which we don't use excluders on, tend to have a lot less of it. And these singles can be a problem. And putting those If we checker board in a couple frames that the queen can lay on, it kind of gives them something to do, a sense of spaciousness for a short while. And then when we come back in a week or two, we'll do it again, and that will be our swarm control measure. In the spring, we controlled swarming here a different way.

These overwintered as five-frame nukes. In fact, I showed them in an early video back in in winter. I showed five-frame nukes that were just two to four frames of bees and made the statement that these would be some of our best colonies in the spring, and they have been. These colonies have had packages and nukes taken out of them. They got cut down and then at that time we had already put the nuke in a single story box and we gave them an empty box of drawn comb deep box to let the queen lay in.

We let her have full reign of the double deep and we came back in a few weeks and put her down below an excluder, put an excluder underneath that second box. And as the brood hatched they back filled it with nectar and then somewhere along the way with most of these we gave them a second box and it worked. We've only had one colony in this entire yard swarm and that's all we did. We didn't come back to do any checkerboarding or any of that business.

And so that that strategy works. Other people do it, too. Ian Steppler's doing the same thing up there in Manitoba. Frank Latta is doing the same thing in Pennsylvania. I've got a video with Frank. I'll put a link to that video at the end of this video so you can see what's going on. And these are Caucasian colonies, by the way. So they're not very vicious on this very humid overcast early morning. Every excuse to give us a stinging.

We're getting a few stings, but it's not really bad. Another good thing about using bee escapes, all this burr comb, this big mess right here, it'll all be cleaned up when we come back in a few days. There'll be no dripping honey all over the place. It's one of the reasons I like using escape boards. Yeah. Okay. All right. We're going to be doing some mite washes in this yard. This is our cell building yard, at least that's what we call it.

We have all our breeder queens and all spring long we've been building cells in here. Um in some cases several hundred a week. All of the larger colonies in this yard have been used for a cell builder at one time or another. And what's unique about this yard is that most of the colonies in this yard haven't been treated since year before last. We brought in many of our treatment-free colonies in here that have been showing very low mite numbers without, you know, any treatment into this yard, and we've been using them as cell builders.

And we did some testing in February and found everything to be in pretty good shape, and now we're back here in late May to do it again. So, we're what we're doing something else unique in here, too. I have always presumed that taking a frame of open brood from the brood nest would be where you'd get the most accurate mite count. Randy Oliver has suggested that the frame immediately next to that brood would be the best, perhaps the frame of pollen next open brood.

What I want to know is what's the difference between a frame out of the brood nest and a frame that comes from above the excluder in a honey super. We have a lot of colonies that we want to wash, and it'd be really sweet if we could just go into the box above the brood nest and get bees out of there and not have to check for the queen or any of that business. So, in every colony here that we're going to wash, we're going to keep two numbers, one for the brood nest and one for above the brood nest, and by the time we're done here, hopefully I'll have an answer to that question.

It's a lot of work going into the brood nest to get frames, plus you got to watch for the queen, too. And also, it's an overcast day. It's threatening rain any minute. We're expecting the to get a beating in here, sting-wise. All the field force is home. So, this will be a test just how gentle these colonies are. And uh again, most of the colonies in here have not been treated for mites in uh since year before last. They're all marked with a TF, which stands for treatment-free.

Treatment-free, treatment-free. There's a treatment-free. Yeah, most of the colonies in here have have uh not been treated for a good while. And most of them are still in really good shape. And I'm just a little worried about mites at this time of year. I want to make sure I'm not doing something stupid by just leaving them all alone. And if anything has a high mite number, we're probably going to split it, requeen it, and just do away with that that queen.

But even though the queens in these colonies are 2 years old, if they're still showing low mite numbers, I'm going to let them overwinter and have them here next spring for drone stock. And they're most of them are in good shape. I'm thinking that most of them will make it through the winter okay. Anybody that watches my videos very much knows I like to requeen every colony every year, and we've been doing that for the most part.

Our colonies are going to be requeened this season, this summer. We're actually are about halfway done doing that already. So, I'm anxious to see what we got. You ready, John? >> I think I think we are. >> This is what we're looking for right here. These are two of our breeder queens. This is an Italianish uh it's an open-mated golden west queen that we purchased from uh California, Oliveros Honey Bees. It's Randy Oliver's stock.

We bought in several hundred of these over the last few years, and we're we're searching out the very best of the best and using them as breeder queens for us. And this is the history of this thing. This this queen is 2 years old. So, the dates don't go way back to the beginning, but we just did it today, did a wash on it, and it showed one might today 5 22 26. Back in March it showed zero. Last Sept Tennessee that'd be August or September 8 25 it showed one. 720 that would have been the end of July that was zero last year.

So that's what's going on with that one. This is a Caucasian mated with Caucasian. In other words this queen came from an artificially inseminated Caucasian breeder queen we purchased from Burrage open mated with our Caucasian stock at our Walmart yard and our tiger yard. And look at this thing 7 20 0 8 25 0 3 26 0 5 26 5 22 26 0. And that's a good colony too. It's gentle. It's productive. We keep having to take brood out of it to keep it under control.

So this is good stuff. This is what we're searching for here. And then we ended up killing several of the treatment free queens in here. I think three or four had to go. Their mites had climbed a little too high for my taste. One had 14 and I think another had 17. Which isn't horrible after you know a couple years of not being treated but that's not what I'm looking for. But the rest had relatively low numbers. I'll take a picture of that paper that Cody's been working on and show what our results were here.

And the ones that we where we killed the queens we just split them up and made a bunch of nukes out of them. Put a queen cell in them and move them on. All in all I'm happy with what's going on here. And then of course this later this summer we'll be doing a whole bunch of mite washing looking for more colonies that seem to show mite resistance. I know we're not doing it the most uh exact way by using washes instead of the Harbo assay uh way or some of these other ways but uh it's a it's what we do.

It's easy. A lot easier, I should say. So, anyway, the results here were not bad considering that they haven't been treated in so long.