ENVIRONMENT

Attached are the photos we discussed at the meeting. 

1.     Rick Steel’s picture of very dark wax on bottom board (looks like coffee grounds)…  It was thought to be too much in a pile for the bees to have dropped it there.  Perhaps a mouse or something, though the hive wouldn’t likely let a mouse in nor is this the time mice have a need to move into a hive.    Rick might check the frames above where the pile was found.
 
Also, we discussed the difference between white boards and sticky boards. Sticky boards are better white boards since the mites can’t crawl back up.  Although Vaseline, Crisco, and spray oil work, they have some minuses to them per runamuckacres.com.  She uses a little less than three parts oil to one part beeswax, melted, with some essential oils.  Check out the website.
 
2.     Hans deVries – wonky comb.   Happens often if additional wax isn’t added to the frames but sometimes happens even when wax is added.  Usually it is removed by the beekeeper.  Hans and I left one of them on the outer edge of the box for the bees to store honey in.
 
Putting an undrawn frame in between two drawn ones helps.  But there’s still no guarantees.
 

3.    Nonda Zwald – colony die out.  An inch and a half of dead bees in box which was strong a few weeks prior.  Bees were lethargic.  Herb and Nonda tied all boxes up in black plastic bag to kill everything.  Nonda then soaked the frames in a Clorox solution and rinsed them thoroughly.  She brought some in to show us.
 
4.     Michael Sommers -  Large group of bees on the landing board even though the weather was not hot.  He found that the colony was honey bound.  It was decided that using an outside feeder jar would work well for giving bees water in the summer.
 
5.    Theresa Griffin – thought she had a problem but she didn’t.  (Not sure I remember this correctly.)
 
6.    Drones in queen cells – Munly’s had a green drone frame with six to eight queen cells on it.  No worker brood at all. It seemed impossible that the queen could lay eight fertile eggs and no more and all of them became queens.  There’s no picture of this.
 
Research shows that nurse bees do not know when an egg is fertilized or not. If it’s in a queen cell it’s raised as a queen even if it’s a drone egg.  See page 126 of attached research document.
 
If you have queen cells where there are only drones, it probably isn’t a viable queen.
 

 

Additionally, I shared info from Dewey on alcohol washes.  He did several experiments where they did three alcohol washes from the same batch of bees.  In almost every case, two of the three had similar counts (like 4 and 6) and the third test had a disproportionate amount (like 20).