Hotham Family Apiary

I've been feeding the bees 3.6 kg of homemade sirup (3:2 mix) the past three weeks. Looks like they are handling the amount that I have given them pretty well. I have noticed that they have finished killing off the drones and are fully concentrated on storing the food. I am still a little bit nervous about the whole process as this is my first time doing winter prep. I have noticed that in one of the colonies (Leia) that there are still two frames of wax foundation that have not been drawn out. Now, I am not sure what that means, and what kind of problems that will make for my bees. I will have to ask my mentor or other beek colleagues to see how I should proceed. The other two colonies have drawn out comb on all the frames, so I think I will be good to go with them. I have also noticed that the queens are STILL laying eggs. It is amazing, that although the temps are dropping, the queens are still trying to increase the population of the colonies. Somewhere, I did read that you...

I got back from a three week vacation not too long ago and I was happy to see that the lil ladies were still doing well. Before I left, I gave each colony 800 grams of food (ApiFonda). They were able to store the food and many of the field bees were still out and about bringing in pollen and water. I wasn't able to identify any mites on the mite shelves, but there were several ants running around so even if mites did fall down to the shelves, the ants may have carried them off. One of the first things I did when I got back was begin to feed them for winter. Each colony got 3600 grams of sirup. A day later I peeked in under the inner cover and I was amazed to see that they managed to suck down all that food! I was smart this time, and I tightened up the entry of the hive to one-bee width so that robbers could be easily defended against. That all seemed to work out well. Currently there are also lots of wasps flying around, trying to gain access to the food inside. On one of he col...