Hoping to get a bit of local knowledge here for a new beekeeper, as struggling to get reliable information here.
I’m located on the Sunshine Coast, in QLD Australia. I have a single langstroth hive that I bought fully established. It was in a single brood, QE, super config. The super was mostly old comb, a few partially capped frames with old, dark cappings, a few maybe 30% nectar and the rest empty. I think this hive had been overwintered with the super on. There was quite a lot of SHB in the hive as a whole.
The brood has about six frames of brood in a 9 frame config, two partially filled old capped honey stores, not a lot of pollen that I can see.
I have been inspecting it weekly and took the super off a week ago on a more experienced beekeeper’s advice. I took this opportunity to freeze the super frames and destroy as many beetles as I could. I’m going to inspect it tomorrow and think I’m probably going to be due to put this super back on now that I have thought about it more. All that capped brood I saw is going to be hatching and filling my brood box quickly!
My main questions are:
When is spring/swarming season here? I am thinking of doing a prophylactic nuc split so need to know when to do this.
When are the major nectar flows here? This will help me plan my Varroa management.
I watched a video by randy Oliver who suggested that a single brood shouldn’t have any visible honey or pollen stores in it - as this reduces queen laying area. Is this correct? Is it worth moving frames of brood into the super when I put it back on and cycling more empty drawn frames back down into the brood to improve laying area?
Hi B, welcome to the forum. Greetings from Buderim.
Q#1. Swarming season is about to start in the coming weeks, now that we’re past the shortest day.
Q#2. Nectar flows can start about now, & continue right through until late Autumn. Everything is weather permitting, location & what’s in flower. For example: A lot of tallowwoods are currently in flower around Buderim.
Q#3.I don’t agree. You will always find lots of honey in a single brood box coming out of winter. We never need to worry about space for the queen to lay. The colony will take care of that. The bees will remove honey away from where they want her to lay. As long as there is somewhere else in the hive for the bees to store honey, they will move it.
Right now I’m seeing evidence of bees doing this.
Remember that the nights are still cold, so take care that you keep all the brood frames close together.
Thanks for replying. I think I met you in person a couple of months ago - I bought some honey from you and had a conversation about hydrometers? You did mention something about a forum but…I guess I found the forum you were talking about!
I inspected my hive yesterday. They seem well and had about 8 frames of bees so I put a super on.
I also saw some interesting pollen coming in, grey! There didn’t seem to be much in the way of returning foragers but I did see a lot of orientation flights.
Would you suggest doing a prophylactic split now then, before swarming season starts, or wait until signs of swarming/queen cells appear?
Doing a split right now is up to you. What I look for is signs that the population is about to explode Then I’ll do a preemptive swarm control split. That is before the bees start preparing to swarm. If I go into the brood box, I’ll always do some kind of split. When splitting, I take the most sealed brood, which puts a temporary pause on their population growth, which buys more time. I take the split about 5 ks away so that no bees return to the parent hive.
With cold nights in mind, always keep the brood bunched up together.
I’ve got a couple of meads happening now, with both air locks bubbling nicely. It was a large one that did nothing for six weeks. I broke it in two, added more honey, plus a lot more water with yeast & nutrients. I did the first one last Monday, with the second one yesterday. I got some good tips from City Steading Brews on Youtube. I learned a lot about hydrometers from them as well.
