Colony Management Summer 2019

it's the very beginning of summer and it is the best time to be a beekeeper the whole season is upon us and what we're going to do is going to influence how well our populations grow how healthy they are and the honey crop that we get in this video we're going to go over three summer management things that you can think about of course there are more than this and we invite you to download our annual calendar for beekeeping right here in this newsletter and from our website but in the meantime in this short video we're going to talk about three different things that you can do the first is swarm management and prevention techniques the second is how to determine when to add a honey super and the third is about varroa monitoring to try to keep our colonies as healthy as possible during the summer if you ever have any questions feel free to shoot us an email and also please visit our website and our Facebook page let's talk a little bit about swarming now swarming is a natural phenomenon it's the way that honeybee colonies reproduce and here in New York State the peak of our swarm season is happening from mid-may to mid-june that season and colonies will start to swarm when they're perceiving a few different cues and the combination of these cues really gets them to decide if it's time to start initiating the process or not some of the cues that colonies are taking in would be a lot of resources so lots of nectar coming into the colony another one is a really big population of nurse bees and so just looking at this colony we can see that there is a very big population and the colony is starting to get crowded the Queen also gets limited on the amount of space she has to lay eggs and lastly her pheromone isn't being transmitted very well throughout the colony because of how crowded it is so once bees are perceiving all of these cues they start to initiate the swarm process and build swarm cells us as beekeepers typically if we're focused on honey production we don't want our colonies to swarm because that means that a lot of our foragers are going to be gone so instead we want to try to prevent swarming and the best way that we can do this is to stay ahead of the bees that means that once our population starts to get big we're going to provide them with more space so that the Queen can have a lot of brood laid in the bottom and most of the honey can be stored up top in supers some beekeepers will also run too deep hive bodies or even three deep hive bodies to provide lots of space for the Queen to lay but for us here at the dice lab we're just giving them a single brood chamber and we'll be adding additional honey supers to provide more space that way once we get to the point where a colony has begun initiating the swarming process meaning that we're seeing swarm cells then the beekeeper has to do a little bit more in order to try to stop that colony from swarming so this is a colony that may or may not have already initiated the swarming process it is quite big in its population size I will say that about two weeks ago we did a split on this colony and just checking back now you can see that a lot of the cat brood that was in this split has emerged and we have a big boost in our colony population so it is definitely time for a to add a super we're going to go and do a bit of an inspection to see if there are swarm cells in this colony and if there are I'll tell you what steps we're gonna take next just to note one we're assessing colony population typically beekeepers are counting the number of frames that have bees on them if we're looking down into this hive we can actually see that all ten of these frames are covered with bees it's a really good idea to start providing more space to that colony once or maybe seeing seven or eight frames covered with bees at this point I won't be surprised if they've already begun creating swarm cells so now what we're going to do is we're going to inspect the brood nest to look for signs that's swarming is going to happen and when I do a call any inspection I really look at about four frames of brood to get an idea we should typically see cells on some of those frames we don't necessarily need to go through all of them but in addition to looking for cells I also want to mention that I'm looking for signs that the colony is getting honey bound and what this means is that after some of the brood has emerged the honey bees are back filling it with honey before the Queen can get back to that area and start laying eggs so seeing honey actually in the brood nest where the Queen would typically lay eggs also tells me that the Queen might be running out of room to lay it and that the bees need another super to actually put that honey into so we just pulled out the first frame from the number two position and I'm taking a look at it and I am seeing that we have lots of brood on this frame brood on both sides I'm also keeping an eye out for any Queen cups or queen cells and I actually see one cup here this is shown right on the edge and I want to look inside that Cup and see if it's actually a cell and the difference between a queen cup and a queen cell is that a queen cup is empty and a queen cell has something in it either an egg a larva or it's a pupa and a half it is a swarm cell there's actually an egg in that cup so now we know that this colony has initiated the swarm process we found one cell with an egg inside of it so what should we do should we cut out that cell right away I'd say no I'd say that what we want to do is we want to actually tell when this colony initiated the process is this the only swarm cell that's in the hive with just a single egg in it if so then we can be pretty confident that they haven't left yet and we can cut out that cell and continue to provide space but instead I want to keep looking to see if there's older cells and especially capped cells inside of this hive a colony can swarm as soon as ten days after that first cell is actually initiated and so if we're seeing any cells that are capped the colony might have swarmed already so how can we tell we can tell by looking for eggs inside the frames that'll tell us that the Queen has been here at least three days ago and if we see the Queen herself then that's a really good sign if most of the swarm cells that we're seeing have very young larvae or just eggs and we're also seeing lots of eggs in our frame then we can be pretty confident that the colony hasn't swarmed we can cut out those cells and we can provide the colony instantly with more space if we are seeing that there are some capped Queen cells then I want to go through all of these frames and actually find the Queen to make sure that it hasn't swarmed yet the last thing that I would want to do is to cut out all the cells from a colony that has already swarmed because that means that there's no way they're going to be able to rear a new queen so let's start going through frame by frame and seeing what we can find so the first thing that I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to look for eggs and we had a lot of young larvae on here so I feel like we might find eggs too and we do we have eggs on this frame because I'm seeing eggs I know that the Queen has been here at least three days ago now typically the egg-laying rate of the Queen does slow down as she's preparing to swarm but the Queen can continue to lay up until the day she leaves so just because I'm seeing eggs I am still not a hundred percent confident I want to keep looking at frames to look for older cells and to actually keep my eye out for the Queen I'm just gonna lay this frame down here I'm also keeping a mental note that that first cell that I saw was actually in frame position number two all right first thing I'm doing is looking out for the Queen okay I don't see her on this frame but now I'm gonna look for additional swarm cells and I see a couple more things going on here so one thing that I'm seeing is right here and this one is actually just a cup there's no egg in it no larva and then I also see a couple more up here too so taking a look inside there hi I see a more advanced cell so inside this Cup I'm actually seeing a larva that looks like it could be around four days old which means that the process was initiated about a week ago we're going on to the third frame now so you'll notice that a lot of the cells that we were looking at they tend to be along the bottom of the frame and when colonies are producing swarm cells they'll generally produce a lot of cells usually at least six and sometimes you know more than a dozen and they're typically found along the bottom and the edge of the brood nest in an area where the cells can really hang down and fit and so if we see a colony for instance that's superseding their queen or rearing an emergancy Queen typically not always but typically we're seeing just a few cells in that case and the location is often kind of in the middle of the brood nest not necessarily around the perimeter so those are some cues to tell you if it's actually a swarming situation or if it's just a super seizure or an emergency queen and so in this case we are confident that it is a swarming situation we've seen a couple cells already along the bottom I anticipate seeing more it's at a time and the colony is totally crowded there are eggs in the colony still so it's probably not an emergency queen situation and even on this frame I can actually see a little bit of that backfilling that I was talking about so in this case we see where some brood has emerged and all of this shininess in these cells are area or areas where workers have actually deposited nectar this girl's depositing nectar right now as we speak and so in this case there's enough honey coming in that the bees are not storing it above the brood nest they're finding space to put it and so the the spaces that they're putting it in our space is that typically the queen would go back and lay in so she might be running out of spaces to lay her eggs based on what I'm seeing so far it looks like the colony has just recently initiated the swarming process so we might have luck and simply cutting out those cells and providing a bit more space at this point in time I'm probably just gonna go through these next frames just a little bit quicker for you keeping an eye out for the Queen and looking for more advance swarm cells there's the Queen so let's just put her in a cage to keep her safe okay so we know that the colony hasn't swarmed yet we found the Queen we see obviously eggs and the frames and we're also seeing that these cells are pretty young in age the oldest one had a four day old larva so what we're gonna do now is we're going to stop them from fully swarming by cutting out every single one of these cells and so what we're gonna do is you can either cut them out with your hive tool or you can just pinch them shut with your fingers and the goal here is to go through absolutely everything and make sure you're cutting out every single cell if you miss one then this process was a bit pointless because all it takes is one miss cell for the colony to still go on and sworn we won't show you guys on cameras going through every single frame here but you want to make sure that you're finding every single cell the other thing that I will mention is that just by squishing the cells that's not going to stop the swarm process remember they initiated it because they were crowded and they were running out of space so in addition to squishing the cells we want to provide more space for these bees so what I'm gonna do right away is I'm going to provide them with a super and a super is the typical way that beekeepers provide more space but there are a few other ways that you can provide space to bees one way is called expanding the brood nest and what this means is we remove frames that are full either of capped brood or full of honey from down below and we can give those to other colonies after we've determined that there's no disease being transferred and then we can replace those frames with actual drawn comb and by providing drawn comb right into the brood nest that's giving immediate space for the Queen to lay and folks can either do just a couple frames or they can actually intersperse the frames with a frame of drawn comb a frame that currently existed a frame of drawn comb a frame that currently existed and so on one thing that you want to keep in mind is that you're not actually expanding the brood nest with frames of foundation remember foundation isn't going to be providing immediate space for the Queen to lay it's going to take time for the workers to draw out those cells so we can't still have colonies initiate the swarm process again even if we give them frames of foundation so drawn comb is definitely the way to go but what we're going to do to we're actually just going to add a super that we've already got set up over here after you have provided more space and have closed up this colony we're actually gonna want to come back here between seven to ten days from now to do this whole process over again you're going to want to look to see if they are initiating swarming one more time and if so repeat the steps that we talked about now what are we gonna do if we find that our colony has already swarmed we're seeing capped cells in here the queen is gone she's nowhere to be found there aren't any eggs left in this colony well the best thing that you can do is just close up your hive and let nature take its course come back in a few weeks to see if that colony has reared a new queen and if she's gone out and made it and is now laying alright we've cut out all the cells I'm gonna just double check this last guy before I put it in and then I'm gonna give these girls a super and don't forget to release the Queen at the very I'm afraid clothes of the hive and we'll come back in a week and see if the space helped or if we need to repeat the process all right a lot of us get into beekeeping because we love the idea of producing honey and it is a bit of an art to know when it is time to add another super of honey and so right now we're going to go through this colony that currently has two supers on and we're going to see if it's time to add a third and I'll talk to you about some of the considerations for doing so so the configuration of this colony right now is we have one deep that is our brood nest area and we currently have two supers on here this super was the first one to go on it was pretty full the last time I checked and we'll see if it's completely capped now this is a super that I added about two weeks ago and I added it when it was just foundation so there wasn't any drawn comb on this super and because of that I actually removed the Queen excluder because I had the super on for about a week and the bees were a bit reluctant to climb up here and start working that foundation so I removed the Queen excluder the Queen could be anywhere there could be some brood up here that's okay right now if we're seeing that this super is fully drawn with comb then I'll make sure that the queen is in the bottom and I'll add a queen excluder at that time I tend to under super my hives and a lot of folks do this as well what that means is that when we add a fresh super we put it on below our other supers so it can either be directly above the brood nest or it could be between some other supers that you added depending on how much you really want to lift off because these things can get a bit heavy but the reason that I do this is because sometimes if you have a super that's already full of honey the bees might be reluctant to pass that full honey super in order to start filling the box above it so by putting it into the immediate area of the brood nest they might be more likely to fill that with honey instead of plugging up the brood nest with honey so if I'm going to be adding a new super today I'll probably put it underneath this one as I'm peeking down all of these frames I can see that a lot of this honey is capped at least at the top okay and then just pulling a one frame that's toward the edge we can see that they'd have fully cactus honey - we're actually ready to harvest this honey so this looks excellent now I'm gonna go one box down and see if they've started filling out what I've added since I removed the Queen excluder to make things a little bit easier for them about a week ago let's see what's going on in the next box here so before I even smoked these girls we can see that they are filling out some of the frames we have at least one in the center that looks like it has some honey on it and a lot of that honey at least on the top is capped we have a frame here with a little bit of Berko more brace comb another frame that looks like they're depositing honey and we might still have some frames a foundation in here so let's take a closer look and see if it's time to add another super okay so this is an example of a frame that they are just starting to draw out that plastic foundation that I have and we have some bees that are starting to fill it with nectar because I have seen a little bit of brood I want to be mindful of the Queen being up here I don't mind if she is up here in laying some brood I really want them to dry out these frames of foundation and after they're all drawn out I'm gonna sequester her in the bottom and by the time I'm actually going to extract this honey all the brood would have emerged and been back filled with nectar so here's a frame that is some parts of it are fairly drawn they're at least getting started across the whole frame we have some girls filling it with nectar here you can see that there was some old brood here in the past so this might not have been just a pure foundation frame but one that was drawn out a little bit earlier on okay so now we have a comb that has some drone comb on it some nectar a little bit of everything but I'm excited to see that they're starting to draw it out the next frame I'm also seeing a lot of honey I'm just going to scrape off some of this Brees comb that I see in here because I want to try to discourage the bees from doing that and it could just be that I didn't push my frames tight enough together and so they might have built that there and it's a shame to scrape this off but hopefully we'll be able to use this wax for something else and a lot of people will actually put nine frames and their supers because then they can draw it the honey nice and thick and it's really easy to uncap for me I find that it's that it's a good idea to do after your cones are already drawn if I were to space these combs out right now then they might build a lot of brace comb instead of building on the foundation but I can see that these last four frames are just foundation at this point in time so I'm still going to give these bees another week or even two weeks depending on if we have a nectar flow come in that time before I give them another super so they're not quite ready yet I'm also not going to add a queen excluder yet because i would like to see them dry out all of these frames before I do so all right so where my moves at this time are I can extract this honey right away if I want to I can add a bee escape and get this off and get a nice spring varietal honey or I can just leave it as is and sometimes having the smell of honey above them will continue to entice the bees to move into this box another thing that you can do is you can actually checkerboard your honey frames and what that means is I can actually take frames that have honey on them and I can space them alternately with frames that have foundation on them and that is another great way to encourage the bees to draw those frames and fill them with honey and the ones that just have foundation on them so that's another thing that you can do in this situation so if you really want to encourage those bees but I'm already saying that the bees are starting to fill those frames there is some nectar coming in we are hoping to have a flow coming soon so if that is the case then they should be you okay just doing it on their own so we will come back to this hive and see all right let's take a look at this one and see if this one is already so this was also another super that we added about two weeks ago and I remember this colony was pretty strong when we added it and I knew - when to add that initial super because I was seeing that almost all of the frames downstairs were full of bees and that they had all drawn comb down there so they were ready for a more space I would say about eight out of ten frames were full of bees so they were getting a little bit crowded down there one thing that is good to remember when you're adding supers is that you want to try to stay ahead of the bees and this is where the art really comes into play you want to give the bees room to store honey above the brood nest before they start to store it in the brood nest if we're starting to see that there's honey being plugged in the inside of the brood nest where typically the queen would be laying eggs we consider that backfilling and what that means is before the queen can get around to lay more eggs into the cells that have already emerged they are already starting to fill that with food because there's not a lot of space to put their food elsewhere and so that's kind of what we want to stay ahead of we want to make sure that the queen has lots of room to lay because once we're starting to get crowding and not a lot of room for the queen delay they're gonna start to think about swarming a lot of these foundation frames are already getting filled with honey which is great to see this is another colony since the super was filled mostly with foundation that I didn't add a queen excluder yet so there could also be some brood up here okay this looks great alright so if we're looking at this frame here we can see that they've drawn out this foundation with fresh white wax and they filled most of that with nectar just kind of peeking down a lot of these frames here we can see it on the next few I'm seeing that a lot of these frames are the same situation and the bees haven't yet capped it but they are definitely filling it if all of my frames are looking like this then it is definitely time to add another super I just want to see that the frames of foundation are drawn out and they are filling them with honey even if not all the frames are totally filled with honey if they're about halfway filled then that's a good time to add another box that looks great I'm just going to quickly check that the Queen isn't on the back of this before I put it down on the ground just because there are a lot of bees on here all right and the second frame looks to be about the same they've drawn it out and are starting to fill it with nectar and as we look down a lot of these other frames I can see that they've drawn out the foundation on every single one that we have in here so it's definitely time to add another super and I'm going to under super and put the box on underneath all right so the super that I grabbed it actually looks like a decent amount of this comb is drawn comb stuff that we extracted last year and so you know I might actually add the Queen excluder because I think that they will be fine enough to just start working this and a lot of folks ask how many supers they should be adding at a time and I always tell folks that if your apiary is really easy to access then you can add a super one-by-one for instance here at the die slab were about 10 feet from our office so it's very easy to pop out and check what our situation is and throw on a super as needed and that that makes us feel good because then we know that the bees are adding the honey filling the boxes or at least drawing out the boxes before we add more and it tells us that the bees are defending the amount of space that they can the population suits the size of the box but for beekeepers that aren't necessarily coming back to their yards all that often maybe they're not coming back till after a month or even two months then it is a good idea to throw on a couple extra boxes because it's better to give them more space to use then to risk having you know them swarm and not making a lot of a honey crop so this is kind of a decision based on what your situation is and behind-the-scenes I just checked this box first to make sure that the Queen was in fact down below that's a good practice to do before you add an excluded because you don't want to accidentally trap her up in your honey super so we'll be back in another couple weeks to see how well they've done on this super and we might be adding another if it's time varroa mites and the viruses that they transmit are one of the biggest problems for colonies here in New York State the best thing that we can do as beekeepers is to understand our varroa levels over time and that means monitoring regularly by monitoring regularly we're going to know exactly when our mite populations are exceeding our treatment threshold and we'll be able to time our treatments really well that means that we'll be able to knock down our mite levels before they've grown to very high levels and hopefully before a lot of viruses have built up as well we recommend monitoring monthly as your weather and time permits but at least four times a year is a really good habit so right now we're going to go through how to do an alcohol wash this is the most popular method that beekeepers use here in New York State and we really like using the varroa easy check which is a device by Vito Pharma you can pick it up at a lot of be equipment supply companies here in New York State I know that better B sells it too and so with this device it makes it really quick and easy to monitor varroa we're just going to put alcohol in the bottom of this cup and we just pick up isopropyl alcohol at the drugstore and then we're going to put about half a cup of bees into this device it sits inside here and then we have our lid on you'll also notice that there are a lot of holes in this device when we are shaking our bees the alcohol and the shaking motion is going to help dislodge the mites from the bees and the mites are going to fall through these holes into the bottom of this device and the bees are going to stay inside of the cup so when we are monitoring it's always a great idea to monitor before and after you use a treatment and when you're monitoring after it gives you a really good idea of how that treatment worked so typically what we like to do at the lab is we like to bring our monitoring kit with us when we're pulling out our treatment strips or our treatment pads and that way as soon as we're taking the treatment off we're quickly monitoring to make sure that the treatment worked and that our mite levels are below the treatment threshold so when we're monitoring for mites what we're going to be doing is we're going to be looking for a brood frame we like a brood frame because mites prefer to feed on nurse bees and they're found more often on nurses so we're going to be selecting a brood frame I have two leaning outside here which are pretty good can it's these frames have a mixture of closed and open brewed on them we're also going to make sure that the queen is not on this frame before we sample her because we do not want to accidentally kill her in this process so we're just gonna pour some alcohol into this container here and the good thing about doing alcohol washes is that you can reuse the alcohol for a lot of different colonies before it gets too murky to really see what's going on in there you can also use your own device so you can make a homemade device using a mason jar and screen or you can even do a sugar shake method if you don't like the idea of sacrificing bees in order to do this test I'm just going to scoot these bees directly into this container and I'm hoping to get to that level of that second line and I might need to flip it over to get a little bit more if it's easier for you you can also shake these bees into a bucket and pour it into this contraption all right so that looks pretty good all right then I'm going to plop it right in here and I'm going to add the lip and now I'm going to get us a very vigorous shake okay so let's remember what our treatment thresholds are for this time of year so typically from early spring until August we use the treatment threshold of two mites per 100 bees and then later in August September October November we're using a higher threshold of three mites per 100 bees so if we have about half a cup of bees in here which is about 300 bees then we're hoping to see fewer than six mites in this container if I'm seeing six or more than it's time to apply a treatment in an early summer when we have honey supers present and lots of brood present the most common treatments that beekeepers are using is formic acid so that's usually in the form of mite away quick strips or formic probe there is another treatment that is registered for use with honey supers which is called hop guard - that's not quite as effective as formic acid when there is brewed present in the colony but we encourage you to visit our varroa IPM guide to learn a little bit more about different treatment options all right let's see our verdict well I'll be there's no row in here which is fantastic that's what we really like to see we will come back in a month and do another monitor on these colonies I will say that at this time of year row levels tend to be a little bit lower that we have started to see them creeping up the levels continue to build up throughout the summer and into fall and we typically start seeing fairly high levels across the state in the months of August September and peaking in October so keep diligent with monitoring make sure you're aware of what your levels are and if you ever have questions about treatment options don't hesitate to reach out to us so I hope that these tips make you feel a little bit more prepared this summer especially with regards to swarm management varroa monitoring and supering good luck with your beekeeping and I hope that you have a good season

Channel: Dyce Lab for Honey Bee Studies

Views: 251,769

Rating: 4.8932128 out of 5

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Id: VxFwZQWchgM

Length: 33min 47sec (2027 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 26 2019