June in your Central Oregon Apiary
Aaah we’ve got warmer weather, thunderstorms and lots of
flowers.
IT’S SWARM SEASON!
We’ve all bee talking about the swarm season, usually starts
mid may and goes to the end of June.
It’s a natural process of procreation for our colonies and at some
point, they’ll GET THAT URGE. YOU need
to decide what you’ll be doing about it.
There are primarily 4 techniques that work in different fashions. In past years, I’ve thought the nucs were
somewhat immune to swarming the first year as they take time to get up to
speed. This year however I’ve seen several of this year’s nucs filling their
hive boxes and swarming.
- 1.
Let them swarm.
It provides a brood break for mite control, you might be able to catch
the swarm, you’ll probably get a new queen out of the deal. However, they might not requeen successfully,
you’ll lose half your workers and have a month of no new brood setting your
colony back, you might not catch the swarm and your neighbors might be turned
against you because of the big ball of bees next to their front door.
- 2.
Add a honey super (Langstroth) before it is
needed. (that means NOW or last week if it’s
a strong hive), or swap with empties (5 drawn frames or so) of the brood and
transplant to a weaker hive, or if honey bound, swap some empty drawn frames
for some honey frames and checkerboard them through the brood chamber keeping
the honey frames for emergency feeding next winter. All this to reduce crowding, one of the
triggers of swarming.
- 3.
You can make a split (walk-away or adding a
queen) or if there are capped queen cells, an artificial swarm (removing the
queen and 5 or 6 frames of uncapped brood with associated nurse bees into
another box)
- 4.
Finally, next year think about going into spring
with a fresh young queen (that usually means requeening in the Fall)
In May, we may have been resting on our laurels with respect
to Varroa. This month you need to do
mite counts and treat accordingly. Generally,
your nucs and packages will keep their levels pretty low until later in the
summer, but the overwintered colonies can start having some higher
numbers. You need to decide on you’re
acceptable mite levels. Look at the HBHC
tools for varroa management for specifics, however the variables you’ll need to
watch for treatments are average temperature (highs and lows (and this month is
a good month for not too high of temperatures)), whether there is (or will be)
a honey super on and how high the mite counts are. Some are quite good at killing lots of mites
but are harder on our bees and queens (more drastic to “knock down” the mite
numbers). Others aren’t quite as good
with the mites, but with lower initial mite counts, don’t hurt the bees as much
(keep the numbers under control).
Finally, if your colony isn’t doing well at this point
(doubled or tripled in size since looking at it in April) you need to fix
it. New queen, add brood, move to a
better foraging location, treat for mites find other diseases, combine with
another. If they aren’t flourishing now,
there is an issue and they won’t get better through the summer without an
intervention.
Enjoy the springtime and early summer. Remember that sunscreen.
Allen Engle
COBKA Notes - Archives
COBKA Meeting Slide/Video Archives
“Voiceless Flowers”
among greenery
quiet blossom safari
olfactory binds
Naomi Price, 2020 Haiku Contest honorary mention
