This spring has come on fast and has pushed all HarBee’s spring Management up about a week. For most of the hives they have been reversed and equalized. What reversing means is that the topmost box of the colony in moved to the top. In this photo, the hive to the left, the blue and the orange box switch positions. Equalizing is when you take resources from one hive and put it into another so all the hives in the same location have the same amount of brood and bees. Both this task reduces the tendency to swarm. This is someone that I would like to have finished before all the dandelions are out.
We are also taking out Apivar® from all the hives that was put there in January. This Varroa mite treatment has made our bees health and ready to make honey this growing season. We will be testing all the hives to make sure that the Apivar® was effective in every hive and be ready to treat any hive where it many have not worked. We will be ready with Formic Pro for any hive that has a Varroa infestation rate higher than 1%.
Honey supers will be placed onto all the hives even though the first real honey flow comes later in April. Add supers early in another management strategy to reduce the tendency to swarm.
HarBee is someone making a couple nucleus colonies the way we are doing this is buy queen cells and adding it to a hive that it made queen-less. This deserves its now own post, so continue to follow HarBee on Facebook and Instagram.