How to speed up the drawing out of wax on frames on a package of bees

This video is how I manipulate frames on package bees with new foundation. This also works for any hive that is making comb on new foundation.
I have seen hives draw out frames slowly and won't do other frames in the box. It is like the hive is stuck and can't move forward. By moving the outside frames near the brood nest, either turning a frame around or moving a new frame next to the brood area, helps a hive move forward and it is little easier on the bees. I was working with Tom from Nature's Nectar LLC, my voice is muffled due to my mask that I was wearing.

The warm weather is coming, look out

Warm weather will be moving into the upper Midwest by Friday. Seventies will be the norm for highs for the foreseeable future. Long term temperatures according to my favorite weather forecaster, has upper eighties possibly for Memorial Day weekend.
 It looks like spring will come roaring back. For farmers and gardeners the warm weather will bring planting and new growth coming up through the soil. For beekeepers, LOOK OUT overwintered colonies will be swarming.
For overwintered colonies divides should be happening if you have eight frames of brood and bees.
 Also, Mites are also a concern on overwintered colonies. Mite checks should be done NOW, on all overwintered colonies. Mites counts will start creeping as we move towards June. Failure to check or treat for mites soon, may result in your hive going south by July.
 If you want to treat for mites right now, it is a good time for Formic Acid. If the formic can be put on soon, before it gets too warm. Using MiteAway quick strips would work well on strong colonies. The treatment period for Miteaway is seven days. Formic Pro, the treatment schedule is two weeks. With the Miteaway, the hive could be treated and a divide done right after the treatment is done. But swarm control should be in effect on all strong colonies.
 The fruit bloom has slowed down with the of cold weather that we have been experiencing. New colonies have also been slowed because of the cold. Bees have been having a hard time expanding their brood nests. But now with the warmer weather, new colonies should pick up the pace of their spring development. With the warmer weather, nectar and pollen should be coming into the hive at a much greater rate.
 Watch your hive population, keep up swarm control, watch the mite count, divide as needed. The cold weather is in the rear view mirror now, moving forward with a big colony, the main nectar flow is a little over a month away.

The Fruit Bloom and Spring Divides

Wild Plums in bloom. I love to stand out in the thicket of Plum trees and smell the fragrant flowers and listen and watch the bees work the blooms. A simple pleasure.

The fruit bloom has started around the Mpls and St Paul area. I was driving down Hwy 36 today and noticed Wild Plum trees in bloom. I have Wild Plums at my place and they have not started to bloom yet. The Wild Plum trees on Hwy 36 were south facing and in full sun. Perfect ingredients for an early bloom. This is the beginning of what I call Ice Cream time for the bees. There soon will be an explosion of flowering trees and bushes. This will last about three weeks, then there will be a dearth of pollen for about two weeks. So, pollen patties should go on the hives around May 21st.
 This is also the time when spring divides happen. Some beekeepers have been dividing their colonies already. But for most of us, spring divides usually happen during the fruit bloom. The timing is perfect if your hive is ready to split. Ample pollen coming in and a nectar flow from all of the flowering plants.
 If you are unfamiliar or need a refresher on how to do a split, here is a great link to Gary's home page. He has a nice graphic and describes the divide process.
How to do a divide
Things to remember about doing a divide

• Do not let the bees try to make their own queen. It is too early in the spring for honeybees to make a queen reliably. You can't make queens reliably in MN or WI until about June 10th. 
• Do not do a walkaway split. All that is, is a waste of good brood this time of year.
• Use the queen excluder method and wait four days to divide,  that is how Gary explains in his How to Do a Divide pdf. 
• Shaking the bees off the frames and let them crawl up through the queen excluder would not be your best method this year. The weather may be too cold for this method. The bees may be clustered if it remains cool. The bees may not move to cover the brood quick enough. The brood may get chilled and die. 

Spring divides are necessary on strong overwintered colonies. If the bees are strong today, they will swarm in the near future and you can look at your surplus honey hanging in the tree. There are people that will buy divides if you have too many bees. Nature's Nectar LLC buys divides.
 If you have a strong overwintered colony and a spring package that you started. A great strategy is to do the divide, leave it by itself overnight. We want all the field bees to fly back to the parent hive.  Set a single sheet of newspaper across the top bars of the new package of bees. Put a 1/4" slit in the newspaper. Put the queenless divide on top of the newspaper. Put the covers on the hive. After a few days the hives will merge together and be one happy family. This new hive will become a powerhouse and swarm control will be needed in June. But if the nectar flow is strong, the hive will be a bin buster.

Cool Weather: Why Beekeepers May Need Pollen Patties

We are currently experiencing some unseasonable cold weather for the foreseeable future. Highs in the 50's to the low 60's at best. The cold weather will limit the amount of time colonies will be able to fly. Bees may not be able to get enough pollen through foraging to sustain a colony. It would be a good idea to make sure pollen patties are on all colonies right now.

Laying Workers

I got an email from someone concerned about laying workers in their hive. So here is the quick scoop on laying workers.
 A hive that has been queenless for a long time can turn into laying workers. Laying workers are workers (unfertilized females) that start to lay eggs. What's that you say "only the queen (mated female) can lay eggs".
 Here is how it all happens:
 In a queenrite hive, the queens pheromone that gets spread around the colony, the pheromone inhibits the development of ovaries in the worker bees. The pheromone is present around the hive and in the brood. When a queen dies, and there is still brood in the colony, the workers ovaries will still not develop. Once all the brood has hatched out, the queen pheromone will decline. This now can lead to the workers ovaries developing and the workers can now start to lay eggs. The symptom of laying workers is the beekeeper will see multiple eggs in cells. Maybe 5 to 8 eggs in a single cell. With several laying workers laying eggs there will be many cells looking like this. The eggs will be laid willy nilly in the cells. Having said this, don't be confused if you see this with a new queen. A new queen may lay multiple eggs in some cells. But she is new and needs a couple days to get her act together. She usually settles down and gets down to business laying eggs properly. One egg per cell attached to the back wall of the cell.
 To stop this laying worker development, measures need to be addressed.
 When doing a hive inspection and you don't see eggs and larvae in the cells on the frames, you may still see capped brood. This tells you a couple things, there maybe no laying queen present, either the hive has swarmed or for some reason the queen has perished.
 The first thing you do is grab a frame with eggs on it from another colony. This will do two things, delay the workers from starting to lay because there is still brood in the hive and also, by checking this frame after a few days to see if emergency queen cells are being built off of several egg cells, telling us that the hive needs a queen. (It is usually better to purchase a new queen in the spring, letting a hive try to make a queen in the month of May and early June is very unreliable because there usually is not very many age appropriate drones being produced yet). If no queen cells are being built on the frame, this can tells us that the hive may have swarmed and the bees, unbeknownst to the beekeeper, made a new queen already and is in the hive and will start laying in a couple weeks.
 If the beekeeper does come across laying workers in the hive and there is no brood present. A new queen is needed to save this colony. The way to requeen a laying worker colony is this:
 Do this on a warm afternoon. Take the hive and knock all the bees into the bottom box and leave it one deep, wait about a 1/2 hour. This gives the bees time to get back onto all the frames in the box. Now take the box of bees about 100 feet away. Shake all the bees off the frames and into the grass. Bring the box with the frames back and set it back on the bottom board that it came from. Now all the bees will fly back to the hive. The laying workers cannot fly and they will stay in the grass. I would give them an hour or so, then I would put in a frame of brood and the new queen with a candy plug for a slow release. This usually works, I have recommended this method and the beekeepers who did this, most had success.

Asian Hornets

Asian hornets were found in western Canada and the state of Washington last February or there about. Five Asian hornets can overcome a colony of 50,000 honeybees. Kill the bees then eat the larvae. How widespread they will become is unclear. I am not sure if they have climactic limits, such as cold weather. Here is a video of Japanese honeybees that have developed this resistance to the hornet.

Dandelions

Dandelions are starting to pop open around the metro area. They are about right on schedule for their normal bloom time. Which is usually around the first week of May.
 This is the first widespread nectar flow of the season. Strong colonies can put up a lot of dandelion nectar. Many commercial beekeepers try to time returning their colonies from Texas, California or other points south to right before the dandelions bloom. Returning their hives before the dandelions bloom can save commercial beekeepers thousands of dollars in feed costs. If the commercial beekeepers get back late, they may have to spend the money and feed their bees syrup.
 Strong overwintered colonies should have supers on their hives right now. A good Dandelion flow can put up a super or two of Dandelion honey. Personally I don't care for the flavor of Dandelion honey, but there is a market for it.
 New packages may cut back slightly on their syrup consumption when the Dandelions are out. But, beekeepers need to keep syrup on their hives if comb is being drawn out. New beekeepers with new equipment need to keep syrup on their hives until their boxes are finished being drawn out with wax. Sometimes that can mean feeding syrup until almost mid June.