Hotham Family Apiary

The weather the last two weeks has caused the flora to explode. With that, there is an over abundance of nectar, and the bees are working hard to collect as much as possible. I gave all of the colonies a honey super and am now waiting and observing their development. One colony is overflowing with bees and they probably will need a second brood chamber by the weekend. The same colony as mentioned above also displayed some aggressive behaviour which I will need to keep an eye on. I was stung three times by the same colony and I certainly do not want to have bees that like to sting. On the other hand, I will observe them, as they are by far the strongest colony and have already made great progress drawing out comb. Replacing the queen would be a possibility to mitigate the aggressive behaviour, but I'll only do that if absolutely necessary. The weather this week is cooler, but still favourable for the honey flow and for bee reproduction and flight. Things are pointing in the right ...

My last post was July 2017. Oops! I am still in the beekeeping business and it looks like we have a good start to the 2018 season. It is sometimes hard to find the motivation to update the blog especially during the offseason. All six of our colonies survived the winter and were left relatively unscathedfrom varroa destructor. I was diligent enough to be sure to treat the colonies against the mites. In winter the bees received two oxalcilic treatments that rendered them nearly mite free. I have also begun to give each colony a drone frame to jump start the culling of infected drone brood. My plan is to make 1 or 2 nucs sometime after the first honey harvest. I will write about that when the time comes. Hopefully I will stay on top of the blog this season.

It's been a while since I have had time to write blog entries. We have a huge construction site behind our house and it is taking up all my free time. Anyway, today, I took the time to check in on my colonies and my nucs. Things are looking good all around. I will need to harvest the last round of honey next week and soon thereafter begin with formic acid treatments on the full colonies, but I'll save that for a future entry. The nucs have all been placed in their own hive bodies. As you may recall, I started on May 21st by placing three frames from colonies one, two, and three into a single hive body separated by two separation boards. The separation boards are just pieces of wood cut out to fit exactly in the hive body without letting bees pass into the space behind it. The boards are often times used to shrink the amount of space the bees have in the hive, in case a colony is weak in numbers and needs time to develop. The nucs were then placed in my neighbors backyard, due...

Yesterday, June 11 2017, we harvested 75 lbs (34 kg) of honey from three colonies. This is an excellent yield, considering I started 2017 without having any bees at all! There was a bit more honey in colonies 2 and 3 compared to colony 1. We even left a little bit more honey in the hive of colony one just to be sure that they will be fine in the current honey dearth. The next big phase is moving the nucs into new hives. Next Sunday I plan to treat the three nucs for varroa mites using a lactic acid solution. Each nuc colony should have a laying queen by that time. Once the treatment is done, I will wait one more week and then I can move them from the nuc box into regular hive bodies. After that, I will begin monitoring varroa mite populations and will react accordingly.

On Friday June, 2nd I took a look under the covers of my colonies to try to get a feel for how far along the honey production was. All three colonies have some completely capped honey while there is still a lot of uncapped honey as well. I took my refractometer along and measured some of the uncapped honey. All samples were under 19.5%. Basically, the honey is dry enough for harvest, as the capped honey probably has a lower water percentage. I decided to wait one more week (this coming weekend) before harvesting. Today is the day where my three nucs should have their queens hatching. 16 days have passed since I created the nucs. The queens will emerge, and after a few days they will venture out on their mating flights. Ten days from now, I will treat the nucs with lactic acid solution to kill off any mites that they may have. Another seven days after that, I will move them into a more permanent home. On a side note: I was pleased to discover that along the edge of a neighboring woo...

To my surprise, all three colonies have gathered a lot of nectar for honey production. There's a good chance I will harvest within the next ten days. This is an interesting prospect, as I wasn't too sure about colony #2 ever making their way to being a productive colony. One thing that helped in this was swarm prevention. By cutting out the drone frame and by also creating nucs, it is easier to manage the swarm behavior. Swarm behavior normally begins when the bees feel as if they are crowded. By constantly giving them more space to build, the swarm behavior is somewhat circumvented. No swarm ultimately means more honey. Last season I had harvested my first round of honey on May 22nd. This shows how much affect the weather has on nectar collection. This year we are harvesting a bit later, as the canola blossoms are starting to dry up. Timing is still important here, especially with honey that is largely consisted of canola nectar. Due to the higher fructose content in canol...

that is all. Actually, that isn't all. Saturday was one of those touch-and-go days as far as weather goes. Most of the day was pleaant and sunny, temps in the upper 70s. This was good, right up until I was inspecting the third frame of the first colony. It started to rain and to thunder. That's when things started to get hairy. I noticed that the bees were beginning to become more restless. No amount of smoke was calming them down either. As soon as I could, I closed up the hive and decided to leave them alone. Just as I placed the last frame in, a bee stung me on my right thumb and two more somehow made their way into the sleeves of my shirt.The other two escaped without stinging, which was good for me. Regardless, I was a bit frsutrated because I was hoping to get a bit more work done, so I decided to come back later. After the stormy weather, and about two hours, had passed, I went back out and finished up the work. I cut out the drone frames and added a second brood cha...