Disclaimer:

This blog explains how I keep bees. It works for me, it might not work for you. Use my methods at your own risk. Always wear protective clothing and use a smoker when working bees.

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Thursday, September 22, 2016

Late September work

This is where I am at with my bees. I have pulled all my honey. It is sitting in my honey house with a dehumidifier running. The dehumidifier is keeping the room in the 80's. The plan is to extract all my honey this coming week.
 The dehumidifier should get any of the honey that was a bit high in moisture content, down to Grade A status by the time I extract.
 All of my hives have been treated for mites.
Now I am into mass feeding mode. I did have one yard perform poorly on the honey collection and all of the hives are being fed hard with Pro-Sweet as shown in my previous post video. That yard all of the hives needed to be fed. Each of the hives only had about four frames of honey in the top box. My two rounds of feeding should have given each hive about seventy two pounds of Pro-Sweet. That should be enough to fill approximately eight deep frames. So those hives should be good. My other two yards had good honey crops and most of the hives are very heavy with honey stores. I have one hive in each yard that needs to be fed once.
Any hives that need feeding has to be fed now. The later a hive is fed, the longer brood will be present. The longer brood is present, the more opportunity for mites to reproduce. Feeding a hive in early to mid October will have brood in the colony until late November. Beekeepers want the brood to shut down by late October. This will make Oxalic Acid treatments very effective. If brood is in the hive, the Oxalic Acid treatments lose their effectiveness.
 Also the last tidbit. Never leave a partially filled deep or super on top of a hive that is being overwintered. If bees move up from below, into a full honey box that works great. But with a partially filled box on top, the bees may move up again into that box. Leaving the full box of honey below them. The bees will eat all the honey in that partially filled box. Then when the honey is gone, the bees starve even though there are still many frames of honey in the box below them. In winter, it is very unlikely that the bees will move down to get honey.
So feed, feed feed.