July 13 2018 - Hot!

Boy, oh boy, is it hot. 

I came out to check the hives at 9:30am.  took me an hour to go through all of them. I'm not going to give a hive by hive report just to say that the treatment is still in. It seems to be effective the queens are laying but at a slower rate. 

There was uncapped brood, larvae and capped brood; good supplies but no extra supplies -- maybe half a frame of capped honey in the stronger hives. 

I'm going to start feeding and put on supers with the intention of forcing them to build out foundation. That should mean having extra room for the queens to lay once the treatment winds down and the queen start producing again. 

There'll be no queen excluders. 

I'm taking some frames from the stronger hives and put them into the nuc and bring the nuc out to 10 frames. That will give me five full hives going into the fall. 

I will feed them between now and the time that the goldenrod starts coming in. Hopefully, the bees will store sufficient supplies. 

When the fall comes, I'll push them all back down into their 10 frame boxes. I will merge weaker ones with stronger queens. 

I may try a fall re-queen or I may try to have them raise their own queensm but only if therecare sufficient drones. 

The nature of all these bees is very calm so I think I've got some good stock if I can get some good genetics mixed in. 

The Amitraz is scheduled to be removed on July 23rd. I've got the option to check the hives one more time between now and then. I may wait till next week that'll be the 20th to put on the frames. I'll feed them this week and then put on the supers with some wax strips so they can draw out new comb on everything.