Medicated for varroa mite

Thank you to the YBKeep, his younger brother (EYBKeep--Even Younger Bee Keeper?), and his mum and dad for coming along this morning to remove the three remaining honey supers, and medicate the four (two each hive) brood supers with medicated strips to get rid of the varroa mites.

These strips must stay in the hives for 42 days; on Saturday, 31 October (easy to remember!), we remove them. We will then also remove the screen bottom board from each hive. (These screen bottom boards are new to beekeeping since my last incarnation: their function is to prevent fallen varroa mites from crawling back into the brood boxes.)

We left empty honey supers above the pair of brood boxes on each hive, and I will immediately make fall-formula sugar syrup and begin to feed, and continue until the bees are wrapped for winter.

After the bottom boards are removed (and in the course of removing these, we can feel the weight of the bottom brood boxes--we want HEAVY going into winter!), we will wrap the hives for winter, with ventilation top and bottom so vapour can escape, and the bees can exit on warm winter days to poop.

At my leisure this week, I will assess the 27 frames from the three taken-off honey supers. The completely uncapped frames can be put in front of the hives for the bees to clean, before being stored in their supers upstairs in the house.

The mostly uncapped frames can be completely uncapped, and given back to the bees for cleaning and after they're cleaned, stored.

The dilemma is in relation to mostly-capped frames--the capped frames one side and uncapped the other, etc. Some frames, we will cut out the capped honey, and crush and drain, some we can make into chunk honey, and if the wired comb is beyond repair by the bees, we will melt this down for candles, and let them clean the frames, etc.

Notes:

1. RE Re-queening: We discovered that the red hive (the swarmed hive, which made a new queen and is now strong) has a more aggressive temperament than the easy-going yellow hive, so we made a mental note that when we re-queen the yellow hive which contains an August 2007 queen, we will also re-queen the red hive with a queen from the same stock, aiming that both hives have calm temperaments.

2. RE bee-suits: I made a note to buy two additional bee suits. This morning I retired twice (three times?) to get rid of bees up my pants, under my shirt, and inside my bee-veil (even though bee-stings are recommended for arthritis). The yellow hive didn't mind much when we took off honey supers, but invasion of the brood boxes is another matter! The red hive minded everything!

3. RE Rubbermaid Roughneck boxes: It would be handy to have several additional shallow Rubbermaid Roughneck boxes into which to put the honey-filled frames. Off to Canadian Tire!

4. RE moving brood boxes: The yellow hive had created a large slab of burr-comb between two of their frames in the bottom brood box, and this made the top brood box very problematical to remove. This huge chunk containing open comb and a small amount of brood lifted out attached to the bottom of a frame in the top box. (We put this in front of the hive, and eventually placed this for cleaning on top of the inner cover. When I go to feed the bees, I will remove this.)

A couple of lessons here:

first, the nine frames must be spaced evenly in the supers;

second, we must saw the two brood boxes apart: lifting that heavy top brood box is very problematical, and not only because it's so heavy; they glue the two boxes together along the edges of the boxes, and also the frames are joined between the two boxes. Next time we do this, we can take a carpenter's wood saw and pass this between the two boxes before attempting to lift the top box. This will (let's hope!) prevent the bottom box from lifting from the screen base and base, which happened this time in both hives, and had to be realigned. The main problem with this disturbance: it must inevitably endanger the queen. We must hope that we didn't damage our queens today!

Observation: We kept bees from the time Patrick was ten (same age as the JBKeep) approximately until he went away to university, and this was pre-varroa, so beekeeping was simpler, and we had veils, but no bee suits--we just put on sweat shirts and boots and gloves and taped ourselves shut with duct tape. My goodness, we must have been hardy! But, we never had to go into the brood boxes, the most we ever did was attempt to lift, to make sure these were heavy; I do remember re-queening, but not that this was an issue. Well, I certainly am a sissy now: it's a bee suit for me going forward!

The EYBKeep took 118 photos! Because this note is so long, I will put the photos in another blog-entry.