Bee Chronicles

August 1 2017

I think this will be a short write up. My friends know what that might mean.

I am never at a loss for words but there isn’t much going on in the hive for the next 3 days. Now is the time for you to catch up to your bees and prevent fall swarming. The hive is at its maximum population. It is full of as much honey as it will get for the year. And it should be full of bees. Queens are getting nervous. I recommend pulling 4 frames out of your really strong hives and making good nucs. Feed the dickens out of the nucs and they will get strong enough to make it through the winter. As the nucs grow consider 5 over 5 frames vs. 10 horizontal. Some beekeepers think 5 over 5 works better in the winter.

Pull all your capped honey. There are so few flowers out right now the bees will start eating their stored honey now. They will start with the unripened honey because it is easier to eat. They have to collect water and mix it with capped (dehydrated) honey before they eat it.

If you only have a little spring honey and a little sourwood you can just mix it together and call it honey. I think I have significantly more sourwood than spring honey. Too much rain. Then the rain slowed down for the end of sourwood which I noted at my house as 15 July.

As you take off and clean your honey supers for storage you might consider scraping the propolis out of the “rabbet” area and the edges of the box where they are glued to the other boxes. Also, take time and scrape the ends of the top bars on the frames. The average for a box should be about 44 grams. I think I have a market for us to sell the propolis either as flakes or 70% tincture. We can all learn to make tincture, and I can be the point of contact for sales. I am hoping for $2.50 per ounce of flake and $8.00 per 3 ounce bottle. We will see. Any way we can recoup some money from our bees will help. The same broker is looking for pollen.

By balancing your bee hives now, and getting everything in order, each colony will work harder and do better starting in mid to late August (September) when the goldenrod starts to bloom. The harder the colonies work the goldenrod the more winter honey they will put up. If you feed sugar water syrup at the same time as the goldenrod (actually starting now) the bees will mix the wild nectar and the sugar water nectar making a better winter honey food for themselves.

Feed for next Spring this fall