This was a great year! We had a mild winter with very few winter losses, with strong health bees. Bee inspector was as impressed as I was going through so many great looking colonies. They required very little feeding, weather cooperated all year with enough rain to keep everything rolling without too much bad weather. Queen rearing was great with plenty of brood, nurse bees, and drones. Got bunches of honey, usually don’t mess with honey but had so much it was a great bonus. Bees had plenty of fall pollen and nectar to pretty much set themselves up for the long winter. Wishing everyone else had the same experience. Looking forward to next season.
We have got the bees fed, treated for mites, and ready for winter. After all the rain we had last year, we made sure to feed well this year. Never fed pollen substitutes much before in the fall. But after last year we did lots of pollen feeding this year, which has made a big difference in buildup and numbers going into winter. After an effective mite treatment in August (Apivar) we followed up in late October and in early November with a couple of OA sublimation treatments, when mostly brood less, to clean up before winter season. Bees are looking better than ever this year, we have more colonies than ever, and am looking to continue expanding next year. After another great season we want to thank our great customers and looking to meeting new customers next year. Our nucs and queens are available to reserve on our website for spring of 2023. As of now we are not raising our prices this year.
We are getting the bees ready for winter. It’s been a long busy season and it’s time for a little rest soon. The bees are getting fed 2-1 syrup and pollen patties to keep them stimulated to raise brood and store enough nectar to get them through winter. I like to do as much as possible to keep their numbers up and keep strong numbers going into winter. Most of my colonies were started in August and September from July nucs and merging queen castles. We are also treating mites with oxalic acid sublimation. We will follow up with another round of sublimation in about a month. In August we treated with Apivar. All year we have been using Super DFM from Strong Microbials and think this is a great product, especially for getting the bees stomach ready for winter.
Our website is open for taking deposits on 5 Frame Nucs and Package Bees for Spring of 2021.
Enjoy the pictures of what we have been doing and current bee yard work.
We have had another great year thanks to our great customers. After a slow, rainy, and cold start things got right for a great bee build up toward the end of May. We grafted 1000 queens this year, with around 750 good mated queens. We adjusted the way we sustain our cell builders along with new introduction techniques that has immensely improved our queen rearing operation. Finally have had a little break to catch up on some other work, beekeeping keeps us busy most of the summer working everyday possible, feeding, splitting, and queen rearing. Our queens did great this year!
We got some new breeder queens from New River Honey Bees from the imported Slovenian Carniolan stock. Having around 100+ daughters from them in the bee yards will be a good wintering test. We will be getting more VSH breeder queens for spring 2020 to keep that dominant trait in our stock. I have added another bee yard that was cut into the hill, with the soil banked around it, for wind protection from our wild winter weather. It’s time to do mite counts and treatments. We are combining our mating nucs into full colonies to fill our new yard and make increases. Again I want to thank all our great customers. Next year we are not going to raise any prices. Our nucs will be going on sale in October.
Yesterday was almost 50°F the bees got out for cleansing flights. Today was 55°F and they were out again, after the vortex cold spell (-25°F) for 4 days it was nice to get out to the bee yard to look around. I shoveled the snow off a couple of days ago anticipating the warm up so the lids would be clear. I had a chance to open some of them up to check stores and see how they are doing. So far they are looking great, lost a few with the extreme cold spell but most are looking good and we are excited to get ready for the bee year. I like to get started feeding in March so its not too far off. We have been getting our equipment built and have a lot of boxes and frames ready for the season. Need to start getting sugar ordered, looking for the best prices. We have a lot of pollen substitutes to mix for pollen patties to get early brood rearing stimulated. Looking forward to spring after a beautiful day like today! Hope everybody’s bees are doing great also.
It has been a very busy year, have not had much time to post this year. With the late spring and switching quickly over to hotter temperatures it was quick spring. Started about a month behind this year but have come through ok. Has been a year to feed most of the time to keep the bees going and they are looking great getting ready for winter. They say bees will only take syrup if there is nothing else they want, well they wanted it all year here. Only went a couple of weeks without feeding, mainly because I was too busy to feed. We have been treating for Varroa Mites and making up colonies from the mating nucs. We stopped selling queens early to use them for expanding our numbers. Have used my Instrumental Insemination equipment every chance I had and have got some good queens to evaluate, get through winter, and use for next year. Hope everybody has had a good year and get them mite counts down and get the bees ready for winter. Finally a little break coming…YES!
We all want to know what is going on inside our hives in the winter, and its usually too cold to open them. I have tried it all, from putting your ear to the hive and knocking on it to get the bees to make more noise. A stethoscope works ok but its still tough to hear unless you get it just right. I have a thermal image camera which works well but is tricky to get a good reading depending on where your bees are located, if the cluster is not close to the outside of the box or if your hives are close together you cant get a good image with the camera which can be very deceiving to tell exactly what is going on. They are good to tell the position and if they are still alive, but are quite costly. But I found a app called Fennex (I used a IPhone but there is many other apps also), which is a hearing app, that connects to wireless earphones and uses the microphone on your phone. So once you get it set up and connected you can push your phones microphone to the hive opening and hear very clearly what is going on inside the hives without disturbing the bees. It doesn’t give you a lot of information but you can hear bees buzzing so it gives you what you really want to know. Just wanted to share this as I’m always monitoring my bees to see if there is anything I need to do or improve to give the bees their best chance of getting through our tough winters. Hope you enjoy.
The bees are looking good going into winter, been feeding right along as I’m raising bees and growing my apiary. So I still have a lot of brood and the drones are just getting pushed out. So I still have a late oxalic acid vaporizing treatment for mite control to get done on a good day. I have my mice guards on(I like 4″openings), inner covers flipped(hole taped), rigid insulation over the inner covers(outer cover on top), and providing wind breaks at my windy yards. I don’t do any wrapping but I might try bubble insulation on some of my single deeps and nucs to see if it makes a difference.
Its a lot of work to get the bees ready for winter, but with our hard winters its important to keep good ventilation to keep moisture from forming. With our weather it seems it gets cold, we get 3′ of snow, and then it warms and melts. There is a steady changing of temperatures causing moisture. I have ideas of wintering inside a building using single deep boxes that are packed full of bees and honey, where you can control the temperature fluctuations and humidity. I need more research but I assume that keeping them in total darkness keeps them in there colonies if we get a winter warmup. Hope everyone is getting ready for winter looks like our nice weather is gone for now. Happy Beekeeping!
Cant wait to get some grafts from these new queens this week and see how they can improve my genetics in the bee yard. Have done some mite counts from the Minnesota Hygienic queens and getting zero mite counts with a alcohol wash the first week of August. I need to test some of my other colonies to get some comparison on the mite counts.
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