The Old Switcheroo

Today was a balmy winter day with temps in the high sixties and little fluffy clouds drifting across the sky. How many people, or bees for that matter, are lucky enough to say that in the 'dead of winter?' In the Bay Area we are lucky with the weather, but it also means that we get an early spring and early swarms. So, we wanted to take advantage of the weather to make some swarm precautions. We checked out our hive at the local nursery to see how they were progressing and then decided to swap the bottom and top boxes. The bottom box was pretty much empty, and we wanted to encourage the bees to move up by letting them know that there was lots of empty comb up top just waiting to be filled with food and babies.

The colony seems to be doing pretty well overall. The mites have taken a toll, but we haven't seen any wingless wonders or nosema. We didn't feed either of our colonies this winter, which seems to have been a good move because both still have some small stores, which I think will get them through to spring. I've already started to see some blossoming trees here and there.

The queen in this colony has consistently been a good layer--the brood combs are absolutely solid with capped brood when she's laying, and the bees brought in a fair amount of honey last year when you consider their location for the majority of the nectar flow--they were up in the Fremont hills, where for most of the summer, they were surrounded for miles by dry grass and not much else. Now that the bees are at the nursery and have loads of drawn out comb from last year, I'm hoping that they will be really good producers. We will see.

Happy New Year

Today was a perfectly spring-like winter's day. Not a cloud in the sky, barely a breeze and a high of 67! We took advantage of the weather by doing an inspection of the TBH in hopes of preventing the insane swarming that we experienced last year. If we saw a crazy number of bees and loads of food, we were prepared to open the brood nest and add some empty frames.

We went through the whole hive, from one end to the other. At first, we didn't see much action. There was a lot of empty comb, and I found myself amazed that the bees had worked their way through so much pollen--the first five or six combs were literally jammed with pollen when we last looked in late fall. No more--those combs were pretty much empty except for a little bit of honey stored along the top.

Around the fifth frame, we started seeing some scattered brood, with little stores of honey at the top of the combs. We saw our lovely black queen on about the sixth comb. This particular queen has never been a very tidy layer, so scattered brood isn't a suprise. The next few combs were brood combs, with a little more brood than the previous ones but still pretty scattered. Then we got into the pantry in earnest. A few of the combs were maybe 1/4 full of capped honey.

Other observations:

• There were a few drones. I'm not sure if it is normal for them to hang around through the winter or not, but there has been a small drone community around the TBH consistently. We have noticed the bees chucking out what I call 'half-baked' drones for a while now. They seem to be aborting them for some reason.  It's either that they don't want the mouths to feed with such meager stores or that they are infected with varroa mites. I suspect the latter.
• There certainly are mites. They have fallen through the screened bottom board and onto a piece of cardboard underneath, and I've also seen them on a few of the workers. We can't seem to find a good way to treat the TBH for varroa though.

 .