Apivar Treatment Completed

Yesterday was a beautiful Sunday morning for a bee yard visit, with perfect weather to inspect our eight hives.  The day's focus was to check on the productivity in each colony, as well as remove the Apivar strips from each hive, ending the varroa mite treatment process.  Mark and I have no doubt that these treatments are key in keeping our bees healthy.  We were pleasantly surprise to see that each our hives are strong and happy. (Click on photos to enlarge).

Our eight hives upon arrival.

Hive 01 has one deep hive box.  We found it was doing very well with six frames full of honey, brood and bees.  Hive 02 also has one deep hive box and was nearly identical to hive 01, but had five full frames.

Hive 01 eggs and larvae in royal jelly.

Hive 01 frame nearly full with brood and honey.

Hives 03, 04 and 05 each have two deep hive boxes. Both boxes in each of these three hives have a little room for growth, but not much.  It is likely that during our next visit, we will need to pull a couple of full frames from each colony and replace them with empty frames from either hive 01 or hive 02.  This will give these colonies extra space, while adding population and food stores to hives 01 and 02.

Hive 03 with some pollen collected.

Hive 03 frame full of capped brood.

Hive 04 frame full of capped brood.

Frame from hive 05 with capped honey.

Hive 06 frame of capped brood.

Hive 06 new comb with larvae.

Hive 06 frame with new comb.

Hive 06 frame with brood.

We saw our buckfast queen in hive 04...she is a rock star for certain.  We've had her for a couple of years and she's never let us down.  This queen is a very productive egg layer. 

Buckfast queen near center with blue dot on her thorax.

Hive 07 has one deep hive box and three of the ten frames are empty.  There is a lot of new comb in this hive.  Hive 08 has one deep hive box and has about two empty frames.  However, there were tons of bees in hive 08 and that made us nervous.  So, we pulled one full frame of brood and bees and moved it to hive 01 where there was extra space.  We put an empty frame from hive 01 into hive 08 to give the hive 08 bees more room.

Frame of bees from hive 08.