27 Oct, 2008 - 11pm

Although I have visited the hive several times since the last post this is the first time I took the time to post an entry.

The weather here has been very cool for this time of the year. Its been in the 40s at night and now this week a day or so in the 30s at night.

Todo List:

* install entrance reducer this week or next.
* Medicate bees( fumigilin-B & terramyacin)
* dunno yet, but there must be more stuff

My daughter created a variety of labels to use for the honey jars that were recently filled. My favorite is the one in the lower right corner.

13 October, 2008 - 6 AM

On 9 October I went ahead and pulled two frames from the top brood super so that I could "rob" some honey! The frames had nothing but honey. After extracting the honey, those two frames provided six eight ounce jars of honey.

Since I have taken that honey I can begin medicating the bees in preparation for fall/winter.

I will be putting Apigard VAR in the hive to deal with the varroa mites. I will also continue to use powdered sugar for varroa mites as well.

1 Oct, 2008 - 10:00 am

Checked on the hive to see what they were doing with the honey super. Looks like they were not doing anything in it. So I removed it. Now there are two brood boxes. I will leave the hive like that until next year.

I removed frames from the top brood super. I wanted to see what was going on in there. Looks like there are 3 full frames of honey!! The rest of the frames have brood and honey/pollen. No signs of wax moth, but I did find about 6 hive beetles in the honey super that I removed. I found the queen in this brood super, she was in the middle of the box doing what she does...

There were 4 frames that had about 75% brood and the rest honey/pollen. About 3 frames with 40% brood and the rest uncapped honey/pollen. And 3 frames with all honey


I had to removed the top brood super to check the bottom super. The top super must weigh over 50 pounds.

I put that box back together and opened up the bottom brood super. There are alot of bees but no where near the numbers found in the top super. This bottom super has some honey and pollen and about 3-4 frames of brood, but not very much brood. It seems that the hive has shifted to the top brood super. There were no pests that I could find.

Once I had the hive back together I dusted the bees with powdered sugar.

I went ahead and put down some pesticide.

BTW, I am still only using a spray bottle of sugar water instead of a smoker. So far so good. I noticed I must handle the frames/bees more delicately.