It will be warm the next 5 days so I opened up the hives.
Went into winter with 4 but lost two already. I Will leave the two dead outs up until mid to late March.
Filled the feeders on the remaining two colonies and added a third deep on the two remaining hives as they had a lot of bees already.
So I am using Hive Tracks for tracking the colonies and while good for mapping and showing the configuration, it's a bit rigid for my tastes but I will push through and see if I become a fan. My immediate draw back is if you simply take a look no way to capture that inspection and I must say that is a bit disappointing.
So on with the inspection, but if you didn't take the boxes apart how did you do an inspection? So besides going into the hives there are a few ways to gain information. Here's the skinny.....
Executive Summary:
I have four hives in my backyard in an interesting configuration. The bases are 90 degrees from each other. One facing south and the other facing east. I have cement blocks with 4x4s supporting each. The south facing hives looking north has Florida and Virginia and the East facing has South Carolina and Georgia.
So the two that have come out of winter are the south facing hives and that might be a clue why they survived. So Florida and Georgia are growing and to be honest I thought Georgia would fail as it was weakest of all four. So a bit more detective work and keep in mind this post spans two days. I reduced the two east facing hives to one deep box and moved those two boxes to Florida and Georgia so they are in a three deep box configuration as the boxes have drawn comb and stores.
The next thing I did was pull the inserts from the screened bottom boards for all four hives. The immediate observation is the bees absconded from South Carolina very early in winter as it was clean. both Georgia and Virginia had a lot of dead Varroa Destructor mites which leads me to my first ah ha moment. The mite counts need to be more religious and I have to weigh what I will do to fix/prevent that problem this year. I am not a fan of chemicals and this will be a huge step for me if I go in that direction. I use screened bottom boards left open so mites and beetles drop through. I now feel I will need mats under the hives that would keep the grass down and give me a way to control the beetle larva that crawl to burrow into the ground. I also had a large count of hive beetles in all hives.
I may start with beetle blasters to control the hive beetles and order some pest strip for the Varroa. It gives me hope that the two colonies I do have were strong enough to survive the Varroa infestation.
All this without out going into the hives.....now for the actions....
So below are Florida(top) and Virginia...... splits and fun this year as I grow as a beekeeper.
