So, you have been inside you hive by now or you have begun planning for your inspection. This is wonderful! You will be prepared to look for honey stores remaining, pollen stores remaining. Your First Hive Inspection was all about ensuring your bees dont have shortages in honey production, and how you can feed your bees to help them through. What is also very important to look at, is the consumption of pollen. Have a look at this generalized chart that I have put together for you to help you visualize the growth pattern of brood, consumption of stores, and pollen flow.
- Climatic averages: Nighttime around -5c
- Weather average: 14 day forecast of +12c
What I want you to look at is the March-April area. You can see that pollen consumption is on the increase because of brood development. This is the ideal situation. You want as much brood development in your hive for:
- Succession: replace winter bees with summer bees
- Number of bees available to produce wax in the dandelion flow
- Number of bees available to gather nectar and pollen during the dandelion flow
- Increases resiliency for disease if you have larger numbers of bees by mid-April and well fed future workers
- Ensures a hive has a healthy queen or increases the number of eggs for the workers to build a future queen out of if she fails
- If you don’t have enough pollen (at least 2 frames of pollen) in your beehive, it may be smart to feed your bees pollen pattys (Global Patty’s in Airdrie) or raw pollen grains (Light Cellar, Bowness sells some from Vancouver Island).
- How do you inspect your bees to do the following:4
- Increase brood production
- Decrease ‘Honey Bounding’ of your queen
If you put your hives to bed last year the way that A.B.C recommended, you had:
Top Bar Hives
You are wanting to have the honey on top because your brood nest will move up in winter, and they will need access to food. The switch takes place as weather warms up, to allow the bees to move down and access the honey. You make room in the top box by adding empty combs (no drone comb!) in the top box with pollen surrounding the brood. If you are going to use a pollen patty, you will want to place the patty above the brood in the top box for their ease of access. If you don’t have honey available, feed your bees Bee Candy. It is too early in the spring to be Feeding With Syrup.
Other things to do in this inspection?
Integrated Pest Management and Varroa Mite Sampling
- Sticky Bottom Board
This is the best way to sample entire colony. Cover a white piece of heavy white card stock with Vaseline and slide into the hive on top of the bottom board. As mites fall or are removed from bees they will stick to the board. Leave board in hive for 72 hours (divide that number by 3 to get your 24 hour mite drop count), remove and count number of mites. More than 8 indicates that mites/24 hour interval = levels are beyond the normal threshold. Ideally a beekeeper will keep doing this throughout the Spring and Fall months to trap mites, but also to keep an eye on mite population changes and to aid in making decisions on potential management (treatment) choices.
2. Sugar Dusting
When you use a baking sifter filled with powdered sugar to lightly dust your bees, you are not only feeding your bees, you are encouraging the bees to groom eachother. This will increase the rate of mites dropping on to your mite board below. Increasing the capture of mites (removing them from your beehive) but also increasing the success of your analysis of mite loads.
If you do this, you should have great success with brood build up in the spring, assuming that your queen is vital and energetic!