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Wellington Beekeepers Association Inc. About the Apiary - April 1996 |
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April 96 Well, for most, the seasonal work is all done and now its just a matter of getting rid of your surplus honey. However, in the hives the last of the brood is being reared and the bees are dragging down honey from the top and outside frames and packing it around the brrod nest ready to go into a cluster. I sort of panicked the other day when inspecting brood to see some had been chewed - as sign of starvation. On inspecting the upper supers of the hive as it was being reassembled, I found there was plenty of honey so it must have been areaction to the cold weather and the bees deciding they didn’t require any additional brood. The poor old drones are being chased out of the hives - no longer needed now that inter is just abut here. Now is an ideal time to replace those old black vicious queens with light coloured gentle ones (if you can still get queens). Most queen breeders are on their last cycle and these queens are ususally left in the nucs to overwinter. Black bees seem loathe to accept a new queen, but once the brood rearing has finished, they have no option about accepting a new one as they cannot produce one themselves without new brood. When you put in a new queen after killing the old one, (they can be very hard to find at this time of the year), feed the hive with a litre of sugar syrup. This provides the ideal environment for accepting a new queen - a flow in progress! For those hives that didn’t perform well last season - analyse why!
All can be fixed with a new queen. Order your requirements now if you want early spring queens! If the hive didn’t produce and you can’t figure out why, look at the conditions of the hive. Damp situation, shortage of food, drafty conditions can all cause stress in a hive which leads to increase of Nosema Apis (the old spring dwindling problem). This disease is an infection of a tiny animal whose spores can eat out the gut lining of the bee, preventing it from getting any nutrition. It can’t produce royal jelly and shortens its life by half. If you think this was your problem, take a sample of thirty bees off the landing board and have them analysed by the MAF Lab. If this shows high levels of nosema, there are a number of things to do:
and if you have plenty of money purchase a small bottle of Fumagil B (cost approx $45 to treat 10 hives - available from Airborne Honey, PO Box 28 Leeston), and feed this in sugar syrup to your hive. One feed now and onother in spring will help control Nosema. Storage of Honey Supers If you have ever looked at your hive during the night, you would see all the activity going on. Bees fanning, walking about over the front of the hiveguarding it. hedgehogs visit and cleanup all the dead bees and try a few live ones occaisionally. (Incidentally, one has made a nest under one of my hives in Wainuiomata). And wax moths can be seen trying to get in through cracks at the entrance. If they can’t get in, they lay eggs along the edge of the supers. When the larvae hatch, they crawl into the hive and start eating the wax. The bees manage to find most and kill these but they don’t get them all. It is most important that you protect your spare frames from the wax moths during the winter as there are no bees to protect them and the moth larvae will quickly make a mess of them in no time at all. You can store spare supers in a windy, cool situation without using chemicals, but most beekeepers will stack them in the corner of a shed or garage, so will need to protect them with PDB as wax moth thrive in such warm sheltered situations. There are several methods you can use: 1. Put the frames (and supers) in a deep freezer for 48 hours to kill the wax moth eggs and larvae, then store the supers in plastic bags or stack newspaper between each super (no other treatment required). If care is taken to prevent re-infestation, freezing is an easy an effective method for controlling wax moth. 2. Stack the supers up to six high, placing several sheets of newspaper underneath them to seal the bottom super, and seal any gaps between the supers with paper or tape. On the top super’s frames, place two heaped tablespoons of PDB on a piece of paper and then seal over the top of the super with more newspaper. The gas produced by the PDB is heavier than air and will fill the internal space thus killing all the wax moth larvae (but not the eggs). Repeat in a month to kill any larvae that have hatched after the first treatment, then leave until spring. Air the supers for a few days before you use them again. 3. Storage on hives in cold areas: supers of empty comb can also be protected by leaving them on hives over winter. Put them over a half-mat or an escape board with the bee escapes removed to allow limited bee access. As bees do not heat the air arounf them in order to stay warm, they do not have to heat this extra space. Just a little tip - I store foundation frames or newly drawn frames on the outer of supers. That way, if the moth larvae get in, there is nothing for them to eat and they soon starve if they can’t find a dark frame to feed on. |
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