Hotham Family Apiary

Yesterday, I performed an inspection on both of my colonies. The weather in Seidmar was beautiful, 19°C, sunny and a very light breeze. I figured it would be good to get an evaluation of my colonies and see if I should expand the hives as I mentioned I would do in my previous post. The cherry blossoms are out in the lower elevations (under 500m above sea level) but in Seidmar, which is at 539m above sea level, the blossoms have not yet opened. I knew that both hives were thriving but I was surprised to see how many bees were now in the hives. The frontrunner is the queen Adriana. Her hive was literally overflowing with bees. Adriana's colony is overflowing. Time to expand. Copyright Jason Hotham 2016 The bees were hanging all the way through the frames right down to the varroa screen on the floor. On one frame, they had actually begun building large chunks of burr comb. They were busting out at the seams. Although there aren't any cherry blossoms out, I still decide to...

The cherry blossoms are starting to emerge, which means it is just about the right time to expand the hives. There are basically two things we can do. The first option, we can add a second brood chamber to the hive. To do this, we place an empty hive body on top of the hive, and fill it with empty drawn out frames, preferably frames that we used in our honey super the season before. The second option, we can place the queen excluder on the hive and then place a honey super on top of it. These are the normal steps that a beekeeper can take at this time of the season. I, however, have a special case, in that I do not have any empty drawn out frames from the previous season, as I only had nucs to work with. I can still choose one of those options, the only difference is that I will be working with wax foundations. I think I will go with option two and go ahead and give each colony a honey super to work with. This isn't a big problem, as I can snatch up a drawn out foundation from la...