Tuesday, 25 May 2010

First, an apology to the JBeek, who was at school when we worked on bees today.

Family visit this long weekend; last night, Patrick noticed a small beard of bees--sign of discontent--hanging from lip of the east hive,. So, he offered, when he and and Margaret stayed over for car service, to don the bee suits, light up the smoker, and "do" bees. After she went down for her nap, we accomplished the following:

West (new) hive:

1. We removed the drone comb frame from the top brood box of the (new) west hive, and discovered on it a good quantity of capped drone brood. We wrapped it in plastic and put it in the freezer to kill the contents; we will bring it out in thirty days, and the bees can clean out the dead-by-freezing varroa mite and honey bee larvae and start fresh.

2. We replaced this frame with fresh wax drone foundation, to be removed in 30 days and replaced with the frame placed in the freezer today.

3. We estimated the weight of the honey super, and judged that this new hive doesn't need a second honey super yet, but soon will. Patrick had brought down the four empty honey supers from the guest room closet one with foundation placed, and the other three I must clear out the wax from the crevices of the frames, by heating in a slow oven; place new foundation; must do that this week.

East hive:

1. We did NOT flip the incorrectly placed (upside down) screen bottom board; this hive is packed with bees and very heavy, and we judged it not worthwhile under the circumstances.

2. We removed the honey super, and it was heavy with honey, Patrick judged 40 lbs. i.e. full.

3. To give this hive a frame of drone-comb for varroa control, we did the following:

The top brood box was jammed with brood, so we took it off, and removed a frame from the outside of the bottom brood box, which was part-full of honey, no brood, and we placed this on the chair in front of the hives for the bees to clean. We moved the frames over until we could see the edge of the brood "basket ball" and we placed a frame from the outside of the top brood box on the edge of the bottom box's brood ball. We replaced the top brood box, and moved the frames so as to place the new green plastic drone foundation, which I had that morning covered with melted bees wax, in that important-to-bees space.

NB RE covering with bees' wax, as advised, I tried pouring melted wax onto the plastic foundation, and this warped the surface a bit, discovered after a bit of experimentation what's successful is to heat a dish of wax in the microwave so it's the consistency of a soft wax crayon, and then manually rub the disk on the surface, leaving a good covering of wax. I hope when they discover this, they will raise drone-comb, and not be inspired to place regular comb on top of the wax. We will know in a month. Maybe with that hive, shouldn't have bothered--should not have given them the opportunity for "error"; they seem gangbusters.

4. We then replaced the queen excluder, and placed a new honey-super on top of that, followed by the full honey super we'd taken off, followed by the inner cover, followed by the outer cover, followed by the brick.

We dumped the smoker into the metal garbage can on the far side of the compost bins. And, we removed our HOT suits!

Patrick and I haven't done this as a team for 22 or so years, and we were wonderfully smooth--thank you, Patrick!

We must now return in 30 days to exchange the drone-comb frames in the brood boxes.