May in your Central Oregon Apiary
Now things
are changing quickly. Still not a whole
lot of flowers, but the fruit trees are blooming, even if you can’t see them
and many bulbs are blooming, as well as forsythias and the bitterbrush. We can’t really plant our tomatoes (frosts
still) no matter who in the area carries them.
And, we’re getting more and longer strings of warmer weather.
Achtung, Attention, atención, Dude, arreta,
attenzione:
Swarm season is starting!
Especially
if your hives are in town, there’ve probably been a bunch of flowers and forage
plants that you didn’t know about (but your bees did). It’s a “first world problem,” but if your
hives are bursting at the seams, the next step they’re going to take, unless
you intervene, is organizing a swarm. If
you remember, recently Clyde Dildine talked about swarming, it’s causes and
possible mitigations. Remember swarming
is natural, it’s up to you to decide if you want to allow a swarm or try to
mitigate it. If you do nothing, they
will likely swarm. If they’re
bursting at the seams, I like to inspect weekly until the swarm season is past
(middle of June generally) as queen cells can emerge quickly.
If they
haven’t started preparing for swarming (no queen cells (not cups), no increase
in drone population, queen is still laying)…..you probably have time to
“redirect” your colony to continue their increase and away from swarming. As you know, some of the causes of swarming
are: a “feeling” of overcrowding, no place for queen to lay or for workers to
store honey, too many young workers. At
this stage, fixing these problems can help mitigate the swarming
tendencies. If all the bees and
especially brood are in the upper box (Langstroth), reverse the hive bodies, if
not you can add a super if applicable (80% rule). Think about doing a split, removing primarily
capped brood and it’s associated nurse bees for the split backfilling with
empty drawn frames in a checkerboard fashion. Or you can remove capped honey and backfill
the same way. Stealing some brood or
honey to strengthen a weaker colony. If
you can keep ahead of the bees, you have a good chance to stop the swarming
before it starts.
If they’ve
already started preparing for swarming (filled queen cells, increase in drone
population, queen is no longer laying) You need to be a little more drastic and
timely. My favorite technique is the
“artificial swarm”. You take the queen
and several frames of brood (and associated bees) out of the hive and put them
in another hive body, or nuc, being VERY careful not to damage or move any of
the queen cells to the new hive. If
there are many cells in the old hive, many beekeepers like to reduce the number
to 2 or 3 of the best looking ones.
Because the new colony has lots of space and little open brood and a
reduced number of nurse bees, they “think” they’ve swarmed. In the old colony the queen cell will hatch
out, go out and mate and start laying.
If she doesn’t successfully mate, you can just recombine them later, or
add a queen.
If you
have colonies that are just slower than molasses in January with their spring
buildup, now’s the time to figure out the problem. At this point, if they aren’t building up,
they won’t unless you “fix” the problem.
If everything looks good with food and mites, the queen might be old and
need to be replaced. If they just don’t
have the “beepower” to keep the brood fed, think about boosting them with some
brood and/or food from another healthy colony.
Of course,
you’ve been keeping your mites under control through last winter, and the bees
should be out-reproducing the mites during the buildup. However, now would be an excellent time to do
a mite count just to make sure that those winter treatments actually did work
(this is especially true if you see symptoms of a bad infestation (DWV, mites
on bees or on drone larvae)). If your
mite levels are elevated, or worse very high, treat. Keep in mind the temperatures required and
when you’ll be wanting to super. Apivar
and essential oils have periods of 1 to over 2 months after application before
you can super. As always, check the BIP
tools for Varroa management for specifics, videos and strategies.
Enjoy your
Spring,
Allen
Engle
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