Thanks for the offer Claire… I’ll touch base with you sometime later about the alcohol test. BYOB?
I took the deep super because there were two more deeps below it that were loaded with stores. Of the three mediums, the top one was only added fairly recently, so not too much going on with it. But I took one of the other mediums below it. Now that colony consists of 2 deep and two mediums.
My nuc from this spring is doing fine, and I’ve got another hive going from the swarm that I captured in the first of June, it doesn’t seem to be very strong so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Queen replacement?
It's going to be hard to top that story! I love that it has a happy ending.
Was the deep you took off on the top of the stack? Otherwise I don't quite get why you didn't take honey from the mediums. That deep box of honey is gold to the bees. It makes a great nest for them in the worst of winter. They don't have to go far to get honey.
I hope you will do an alcohol wash. I will come and do it with you. There are hives like yours that have 5% mites and more. One hive with two deeps filled with bees had just completed the 14 day formic pro regiment. We did the alcohol test a few days after it and we stopped counting at 25 mites when there shouldn't have been more than four. Carolyn Breece of OSU said she had the same experience.
I'm expecting to hear a lot of people in our club who lose hives this winter say "but they were SO strong in the fall." It will be sad. Even if you already treated you need to test again.
As for the honey, use a queen excluder above your brood boxes and below your honey supers. If the queen got up there and laid brood before you put the excluder on, just shake all the bees out of the honey super. The queen won't be able to lay any more up there and when that brood is born the bees will refill those cells with honey.
Smoke the bees, take a frame at a time, put them in nuc boxes or totes and cover the box up between putting in frames.
If you have multiple hives and the others don't have as much honey you may want to move it from one colony to another. Otherwise it sounds like you may have more honey to take! Let me know how I can help.
My overwinter hive (which swarmed in the spring) is still going strong. We’ve built it up to 3 deeps and 3 medium boxes. Last week I decided to pull some honey. I took the uppermost deep box, which was loaded / full of capped honey. (Note; super heavy, remember to switch over to all medium supers in the future)
As I walked away with the deep honey super, I sat it down on it’s end so I could blow the bees out with my leaf blower. I did that 3 times before placing it in front of the garage. The bees would NOT stay away. I’d blow thru one side, then the other, and they’d be clustered on the other side.
I had to get more aggressive, so I continued blowing them away and then quickly placed it flat on a piece of plywood and covered it with a lid. Bees were swarming like mad but they weren’t able to get back in the box. (Or so I thought) I decided to leave it right there for the night and deal with it in the morning.
The next morning, to my astonishment, there was the QUEEN on the outside of the box, surrounded by about 5 other bees. I didn’t know where my queen clip was so I grabbed the clear plastic tube that’s used for marking the queen. I quickly gathered her and 2-3 other bees and brought them inside.
I went ahead and marked her (white paint I picked up last year) and transferred her to the queen clip. I brought her back to the colony and they gladly accepted her so I propped the clip open so she could move down into the frames.
This is how not to mark your queen! I’m happy that I found her, and that she survived outside of the hive overnight. This was the first time I’ve seen this queen since they swarmed about 5 months ago; she was very big and now she’s got a white spot, hopefully it’ll be easier to spot her in the future.
Getting back to the deep honey super I pulled; I decided to just pull out several frames of capped honey and replace them with new frames & foundation’s. I had a few that were drawn out already.
Surprise! Right there in the center, between 9 frames of capped honey was a frame of brood. This box was also being used for rearing bees. Now I know how the queen nearly died due to my ignorance. Next time I’m going back to just pulling capped frames one at a time.