Originally Posted by Iowanian
2022 is off to a booming start.
I'll start by saying there are a lot of moving pieces this year in honey. Canada suffered heavy honey bee losses, and Ukraine is one of the top honey exporters. I know a guy who keeps 4,000 hives and lost 1,700 of those last November alone. That's all leading to a pending honey shortage...and skyrocketing prices. That's good if you have honey on hand I suppose.
Sunday was finally nice enough weather(but windy) and I was home and healthy enough to get into my hives. I still have 14 alive, with 2 that area either weak in numbers or appear to have a queen issue. I inspected all of the hives, found quite a few of my queens and then reversed/flipped the boxes. Typically, the bottom box is where the bees live and queen lays eggs and the 2nd box is supposed to be full of honey to survive the winter. Well, in the spring, the top box should be cleared of honey for the most part and by switching it to the bottom, it gives the queen a lot more room to lay eggs, thereby growing the hive number quicker.
I made it through 12 and everything was fine. I did find one that had a large field mouse that had done some serious damage and I'll have to supplement that one with frames of babies from a strong hive to get it back, which I did. It was getting a little later and I opened the last 2 hives and encountered some unfriendlies. Something set them off and I got climbed on pretty good. I had let my smoker go out, which was a mistake but once they started stinging the mask, I could smell bananas and that's trouble. For some reason they got after my jeans. When the dust settled, I probably had 100 stingers in the back of my jeans, the ass of my pants and crotch. Some stingers do get through pants and I had a number of welts on my ass and hamstrings. It wasn't too bad, just itchy for the most part. Glad it was done.
Yesterday, I had a vist from a local middle school FFA chapter. I've acquired about a dozen bee suits. We had a nice tour and saw a lot of native pollinators in the same pear tree honey bees were working. I showed them equipment for raising, feeding, working and processing. Then I suited them up in groups and took them to the hives and dug into them and let the kids see bees, brood and the resources the bees collect. We did find some queen cells during the inspection....It must not have sucked too bad, because I had the attention of 25 middle school kids for 2hrs and they didn't want to leave.
After they left, I went back down, pulled some frames of bees from strong hives, took the frame with the queen cells and did 2 splits(creating new hives from existing) and moved them to my new(2nd) bee yard.
My goal this year is to have a min of 30 hives by the 4th of July. We'll see but that's my goal.
I'll keep this discussion going if there is still interest, or I'll be happy to just do my own thing.
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