June Frame

June Frame

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

A sad day for the Nuc. Other interesting info ..

Down to 4 hives now - 2 are double-deeps, and 2 are single-deeps.

I'd checked the Nuc along with all the other days about a weeks ago and things have bee progressing well and there was a increased activity of bees feeding from the top feeder, as well as good "flight" activity.  Whenever I went to check on them yesterday, I didn't notice too much activity on the hive and whenver I opened it up - most of the bees were dead.  There was some slight orange staining from the entrance hole and I think these bees might have suffered from Nozema and the SHB were attaching the rest of what was left.  If you remember, this was the Nuc that I'd created from one of my packages, and actually moved the queen over by accident.  I didn't see her in all the mess along the bottom of the screened board - so I hope she and a few other bees made it out.  I'd double-tapped the 4-frame nuc boxes together so that the SHB wouldn't get in - but it might have been too "tight" and there wasn't enough ventiliation for the rest of the hive - despite the bottom board being fully screened.   

On another note, I've been feeding sugar water with HBH in the 5-gallon feeder and refilled it the other day.  I've added a top (box style) to one of the hives and refilled the 1-gallon top-feeder on the other hive.

Here's the latest feeding activity ..


 


 It took the bees just over a week to empty this one, and I think it was due mostly to the poor weather, due to the rain.  We've had over 6.5 inches of rain in the last 4 days and things are really water logged.  7.21 " of rain to date for this month, and a "normal" rain fall for this month (with 10 days left in the month still) is 3.35".  The weather channel is calling for rain for the next 5 days - then about a week of no-rain ... so let's all keep out fingers crossed.

I went to a local 'health' food store yesterday and bought some Wintergreen, Lemongrass, and Spearmint Oils for some mixtures that I'm going to start using.  The Wintergreen will be using in the grease patties, and some new SHB preventative treatments.  I'll try to also reference that info on another page for anyone who's interested in following along or looking for additional link info.

I'd ordered some Beetle Barns before I heard about this trick (keeping the SHB out in the first place, mentioned above in the SHB link) but will be using the barns in the bottom of the hives also.  I'll probably, since I'm down to 2 hives now - try these 2 treatments --- and see how well it works. 

Hives 1 and 3 - paper towles/coasters (look down for the Feb 9, 2010 post)
Hives 2 and 4 - beetle barns. 

Will update everyone as things change ... hopefully for the better quickly ..

ps - got to make time to visit Mr. Crocker in Spartanburg and "brain-dump" from him.  He's been keeping bees for about 60 years now, and still has 25+ hives doing really well ..

No comments:

Post a Comment