Beginner’s Corner:
February
At each meeting of the Madison County Beekeepers Association, up to 5 minutes is devoted to “Beginners Corner”. This time is used to answer any novice beekeepers questions, let him / her know what is normal and should (or should not be) happening in their colonies as well as advise what actions he / she should be taking at that time in the beekeeping year.
This information is for the North Alabama USA area. If you are a novice beekeeper in other parts of the world, join a local beekeeping association and ask known-experienced beekeepers for similar advice.
All advice is intended for the novice beekeeper. More experienced beekeepers may have to skills to attempt practices not recommended for the novice.
1. At this time, swarming is about over and the bees should have settled down and working hard. You should see lots of “going and coming” activity at the entrance and lots of bees in the hive. They should be hauling pollen. If you do not see this, check to make sure you have a queen.
Particularly keep your eye on any colonies that swarmed since they were queenless just after the swarm and sometimes the young queen does not make it back from her mating flight.
If you have a queenless colony, you have several options for corrective action:
· Order and install a new queen right away.
· Mix a small swarm using newspaper with the queenless colony.
· Mix the queenless colony with a queenright colony.
When mixing colonies, leave each group as intact as possible and let them mix on their own. For example, should you decide to move frames from one colony to the other, move them as a group. Don’t mix frames. If left alone, a colony will protect its own queen. If you expose one queen directly to the other colony, they will often times kill her. If the two groups are allowed to mix “on their own”, this is much less likely to happen.
2. Put on supers and keep an eye on them and add supers as needed. Empty supers in the honey house will make you no honey!
3. Get your labels on order.
2. Get your jars on order.
3. If a small operator, develop a method of extracting your honey. (If you are an MCBA member, schedule the Association owned loaner extractor as soon as possible)
4. Keep weeds cut in front to hives.
5. Put comb honey supers on your strongest colonies.
· Use 10 frames for comb honey (cut comb foundation is recommended).
· (A note for harvest time) Remember that comb honey should be left in a deep freeze for 48 hours before it is sold or consumed to kill the lesser wax moth eggs.
6. Number of frames recommended:
· Brood Chamber - use 10 frames (9 is acceptable)
· Comb Honey 10 frames (as above)
· Extracted honey use 9 frames if foundation.
o If drawn comb is available put a drawn frame in positions 1 and 9 with foundation between. This seems to draw the bees up into the foundation supers quicker.
· Extracted honey use 8 frames if drawn comb.
(Note: fewer frames yield thicker combs. Thick combs are easier to “un-cap” for extraction however too few combs usually result in bridge or other undesirable erratic comb structure.)
7. If you have unused dark comb, store it with PDB.
· CAUTION - Must be aired out well before putting on live beehive.
What you should be seeing now
· Frequent orientation flights. These are young bees graduating from house bees to field bees.
· Lots of activity at the entrance
· Hauling pollen
· The bees should be very gentle
· Caution – this will change come fall.
· If too many drones later in the season check for a bad queen or laying workers.
General comments:
2006 has been an unusually low swarm year in north Alabama. To date the honey crop looks as though it will be generally lower than normal. In most areas, two different hail storms pretty much eliminated the Poplar blooms. Cool weather, frequent rains and hail have reduced the bloom in general.
Queen loss in “non-swarmed” colonies seem to be a little more common this spring. Bees seem a little more aggressive and they are a little more attracted to spilled honey that normal during the main honey flow, which could be signals of a below par honey flow.
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