Taking down syrup

Saturday, 27 May 2017

A beautiful day to get lots of outdoor tasks finished. After a week and a half of rain, it has dried out so the garden was finished today.

Hive A emptied their feeders, so after I replaced the duck cloth on both, I filled the feeders on both hives though there was still ~1/3 in Hive B in each bottle.

Lots of activity and pollen coming in - there are purple flowers all over the land and the workers are enjoying them.

Despite neglect, they're thriving

We were in Europe for 2 1/2 weeks, I came back to two active hives, the large one with empty feeders and the small one with 2/3 empty feeders.
I filled them both.
All is good.

New bees

April 21 2017
60 degrees and sunny, no wind, perfect day to hive the packages.
4 boxes on the big hive (A) - due to comb/honey, 1/2 pollen patty, queen cage sitting on top of the bars.
3 boxes on the small hive (B)
All is good.
Saturday morning, april 22, Earth Day, I removed the grass from the opening.
All is well.
Feeders on

Yep - lost my hive

Opened my  hive today, Saturday Feb 11, 2017  - full of dead bees, capped honey and sugar fondant on top.
Time to order another package and harvest some of this honey, I guess.

?did I lose my hive?

february 6, 2017:
went to listen to the hive and didn't hear much!
but this happened to my small hive last year and it made it after all, so I'll see.
also the droppings are brown, not yellow.

I'll know within a month I think

Added some sugar

Friday Jan 20 2017: It has been warm, 30s-40s all week with rain, so I thought I better check the stores. I took off the roof, then the quilt box and partially lifted the top bar cloth. There was plenty of activity with bees on the remaining sugar blocks (fondant). But I put another block (broken into two pieces) under the cloth. Then I tried to cover it up again - not an easy task because the sugar pulls up the cloth - there isn't any excess - that's why I have two cloths overlapping to do the job.

Plenty of bees flew out and a couple circled around me but no stings, thankfully!
I hope this gets them through, though I do have one block of home made fondant left if needed.

January 14 2017

Well, we just went through our third polar freeze and the girls are alive. There are a lot of dead bees around the hive, but stethoscope to the escape hole yields buzzing.