End of Season cleanup, part 1.

Hello readers,

First off: excuses... 

I've been putting the effort in to get my video content out, even if it's a bit out of chronological order.  As a result the apiary does no longer look like it's building up in a logical order.  I hope you forgive me since it has been busy and filming wasn't on the top of my to do list.

To point this out a link to a video from july 2nd:

Second on my list: intro

I've, again, attended a meeting from the Mandelbie.  This time we had one speaker who walked us through his year of beekeeping.  Nothing new, but bits and bobs he uses from other beekeeper methods.  The main chunk of it was a bio-technical method of outsmarting the Varroa mite, called the combination methode.

I'm not going to repeat the entire process here, but will provide a link (to a flemish website) where the method is talked about: Click Here

The jest of it is you limit the space the queen gets to lay in.  Then you remove all brood from that limmited area bar one frame of open brood (to lure all varroa in) and place the removed frames in another apiary where you allow a 'high' mite count. (to avoid recontammination)  Only 1/3 of the bees on the brood frames is transported with them.  (Since a lot of it should be closed brood about to hatch, the low amount of bees suffices)
The idea is you draw most of the mites into that one frame of brood and remove it after 7 days.  The queen is limmited further to 3 or 4 frames during that time.  Removing the frame (with closed brood) after a week is repeated the week after that. Upon removing the second time the queen is allowed to expand her brood nest again.

All removed frames can be added to the box in the apiary you moved the original brood frames to, or be destroyed - depending on whether you want to 'treat' for mites in that hive (either with or without the use of chemicals)  You could freeze the frames to do a mite count and see how many you actually had to begin with...

It was a very interesting method and preffered to any other that uses substances if you ask me, but I'm a new beekeeper that has set his mind to the 'bond' methode. (aka live and let die).

I also got to interact with some beekeepers there and was mostly charmed by Dael Joost, who is keeping 24 hives (a lot of them are nucs) with all local stock.  He does admit they are very assertive and not gentle to work with, so I won't be begging him for queens or bees, but I am interested in his methods and might poke my fingers further up his nose to see what I can dig up there that I might want to use.  I briefly mentioned I wanted to get into queen rearing myself using the Hopkins methode and he was interested in that aswell.

Weather Report:

It should have started getting colder since my last post, but it actually is still warm.  The bees are still very active and dragging in pollen!  We've had very nice days flirting with the 20°C
As for rain we maybe had a 6-ish amount of days where some water fell out of the sky, but nothing out of the ordenary.  I can say there are still wasps around too and even Asian hornets in my area!

Hive Report - a state of things :

Apiary 1:

Simplex Nuc: I must say, this hive is not really a nuc so I should change the name of this hive to a better suited one... provided this one makes it through winter!  But it's the first nuc I got, so we'll stick with it for now.
A state of this hive: It's on 3 Zander Deeps, one of which is not used by the bees (bottom one with buzzbox attached).  Through the window I can see the bees are concentrated in the top box, but the middle box has some drawn out comb. And during the day I can spot some bees on that comb.  I did spot a wax moth on there once but the bees took care of it (must be, since I don't see any evidence of the moth anymore and it has been a couple of days now).
I gave this hive a sugar cake (I got from the beekeeper that has stopped his beekeeping activities due to allergies) twice since my last report (last one was on monday 15th october) The first one was eaten over the course of 3 days.
I also insulated the hive cover a bit more and am ready to let this hive go through winter.  I might spy through the windows now and again and come back with an update, but not sure if or when that'll be.
Looking at the hive entrance shows good activity and I can say they bring in a good amount of pollen (yellow mostly)


SS 1 2018: This hive is on 2 Zander Deeps, but really, the bees are only in the top box.  The bottom box also has a buzzbox mounted to it, so I'll leave it on 2 deeps through winter.  The top box only has 9 frames built out, the 10'th frame is a filler.  6 of those 9 frames are not Zander size but simplex size.
I also added a sugar cake on top of this hive on monday the 15th of october.
As the weather is still good this hive shows about the same activity as the Simplex Nuc, if not more! 

You can see a flashback video of how it came to be here (video live 23/10/2018):

I ended up removing the middle deep, And added some bees later on - you can read up on that in the hive report from 12 august 2018!!

Apiary 2:

I went back to this apiary to take care of the long grass around the hive stand.  I've cut it down (wearing a bee suit) and now it looks all tidy again!

TO 1 2018: This hive is in a 6 frame nuc polystyrene, packed with bees.  I have not opened this hive since putting the queen cups in there on the 19th of may 2018!!  I was tempted to open this hive up more than once but never did it.  I'll leave them be till 2019!
I do have a good feeling about this hive since it's packed with bees and has shown good activity on all of my visits to the apiary.

TO 2 2018: This hive is in a 2 Zander Deep configuration and it has me worried.  After cutting up the grass around it I spotted there was almost no activity here.  I kept looking for about 10 minutes and only saw 1 bee go in, and none came out.  I decided to give it a quick peek under the lid and spotted only 3 frames with bees on them.  I closed the hive back up without doing a full inspection, but I'm half expecting this hive to collapse before the winter even starts.  I'm not even sure if the bees I spotted in there were robbing it or living in it...  Next spring will tell us I guess.  I was really hoping this hive would be booming! You can see me prepare this hive in this video (live 16 october 2018)
The beginning of the video is a bit noisy, but that's only the first bit, so hang in there!

SD 1 2018: Is also in a 6 frame nuc polystyrene, good activity but not packed like the TO 1 2018 is.  Near the evenings you can only see some watchers hanging out, where the TO 1 2018 has bees hanging out of it!  I'm surprised they didn't swarm yet!

That was it for the hive report.

To Do List

As you can see in this post I worked a bit towards my first point from last blogpost; Putting out video content.  As for point 2...  I did feed the sugar cakes to my bees, and I had half a mind set to make more, but then I had to pinch myself in the arm not to pamper my bees.  Bond!  As for the handy man that needs to make me a box to start the queen rearing, I think I'll give him more work to do than just that!  But I'll keep that for another topic in my part 2 of the end of season cleanup.  I hope to give you a couple of scenario's and lay out my plans according to those scenario's.

My actual to do list:

1. Ad a part 2 of the end of season cleanup! I would like to put up another blog post, hopefully very soon, where I'll link a video where I spot wasps on my JH-hives and how I inspected them (and lost them). - I also want to include my plans for the spring.
2. Get to work with my friend to set him and me up for next season.

That's all folks!


Bob Out