dansar

Gravity hasn’t effected so much. No ladders required to change light bulbs in my house😄

I made them with Red Cedar, finished in clear Cabot’s deck oil.

Sorry I wasn’t precise enough, there should have been an additional ten 9’s after those 6. That way no forestry or privately owned dwellings were at risk🤔

That was the mistake right there unfortunately. There would have still been mites under the cappings in the brood that would be emerging after this 3rd treatment. 4x4 and even 5x5 treatments to cover overlapping brood ages would have been the best option. It isnt 100% kill either so with colonies still rearing brood the mites continue to increase through winter, that’s what a lot of beeks are finding out now. Sounds like you won’t repeat the same process next season 😉

Yes the foundation is very expensive. there 100’s of thousands of colonies on plastic frames. 99.999999% of the time the frames are fine.

I under supered every one of those boxes. One more full Depth went in there. Boxes 2 and 5 are FD. Box #2 went to the top of the stack with a new FD at #2 position😁 Yes they go that high with FD boxes (this was before I culled out of my gear the annoying 3/4 depth boxes)🤪

Sometimes in the perfect season the bees just keep collecting and storing rather than curing and capping. In that case you can’t harvest weekly or even fortnightly.

Yep it’s called “an employee”. A good number of people doing it. Some “employees” own the business and have another “employee” working for them. 😁

I admire you for using oxalic vapourising method. When was the last treatment on your hives? Hive 3 from your description sounds like it is beyond recovery with insufficient bees to care for brood and quite likely varroa has been the demise of this colony. i trialed organic treatment on a colony last season. It didn’t have any synthetic treatment since the previous Spring. Spring build up was almost the end of the colony with varroa absolutely hammering in. I used a combination of oxalic/glycerine Pam’s cloth strips and fogging with FGMO and the occasional oxalic/glycerine fog. It took the whole season to get the colony to build up to one and a half box of bees. They managed to store enough honey to see them comfortably through winter. And are still alive after Apivar autumn treatment. What I am saying is that while effective in keeping the colony alive they certainly didn’t thrive. As a new beekeeper I had the advise to use synthetic treatments first. Learn go keep the bees alive and understand their biology over a number of seasons. Only after that (and you can spare a colony to experiment on) delve in to the organic treatments and use the skills of monitoring mite counts etc that were learned previously. i have this feeling you might be down to one hive by spring and struggling to keep that one healthy. i hope I am wrong.😁

HT means the pallets or timber have been in a heat chamber to kill any wood boring insects that may be inside the timber. Nothing special about them. Almost all pallets are untreated. sometimes you’ll see a stamp that has DB HT XXX. That means the timber was de barked and heat treated.

Overcast afternoon. Venturing out to the back yard recovering from a migraine. Over the past month or so I have been feeding a couple of nucleus colonies 1:1 syrup with seaweed extract added. Also 1/3 of a Megabee premade patty. Nucleus 1 has continued to increase the brood area and there is a continuous emerging of new Bees now, and in turn the population is noticeably getting larger to care for the corresponding increase in brood. I added 1 Apivar strip after adding some bees from a queenless colony that had missed the treatment round. A few dead varroa were noted on the floor of the nuc box. Nucleus 2 has been treated the same way. This colony started the process with no brood. The colony is smaller than Nuc 1 however the queen started laying with the addition of 1:1 syrup and later pollen substitute was added. Brood area and newly emerged Bees have seen this colony also noticeably increase in size. Both nucs have brood areas that, when emerged will start to have a significant impact on how the colony functions. They will be getting to a point of criticle mass and will continue to increase in numbers very quickly. looking good so far - Nuc 1 Nuc 2

Well that was practically last week you were there wasn’t it?! 😊🤣

Hey I just cheeked the gob dustcription and sp3lling wasunt in the celektion The Jim Beam obviously had an effect far greater than I anticipated 😉😆👍

The gib tape is hydroscpopic. Potentially RH% will affect the amount of product they can soak up. Possibly (just assuming here) if a batch of strips were made up in advance - perhaps days of weeks in advance there is more surface area exposed to soak up moisture from the atmosphere as opposed to taking straight off the roll, laminating and then soaking within hours.

I have friends on Aitutaki that are looking at expanding hive numbers on the island. No Varroa there.