After inspecting my brood last week I realised how heavy my flow super was. We noticed allot of capped honey today so we went ahead and tried the flow extraction of honey for the first time. And I must say it was a fast and fantastic. Although the traditional way is fun but sticky and hard work, to get my family’s 1ltr or 1kg fix of honey per week from my own back yard was easy and satisfying with hardly any disruption to the colony. PLEASE NOTE: Bee keeping is more than extracting honey. I do have to suit up, monitor and inspect my girls regularly for pest, disease and to see how my queen is laying, etc etc. I find they are like all my pets, you need to watch and monitor them daily. I do anyway. So I found harvesting the honey via flow frames to be the easiest job of the whole bee keeping experience.
Our first jar 1 ltr of honey filled in 3 minutes, and the 2nd 1ltr jar filled in 10 minutes. I noticed one bee on the edge got stuck during the extraction but as soon as I turned the key back (in upper slot) she walked out.
COULD THIS BE A WINTER THING
Ok, The weather in SEQ Winter has been all over the place. It was still hot well into Autumn and the start of winter. A few cold weeks , wet weeks and a few warm ones. It has been up and down.
QUESTIONS I’d appreciate your opinion on what my girls are up to.!!
Firstly, I have been relaxed with checking the brood only monthly, don’t give me grief on this as my life is far from simple. However I have been checking the beetle trap and Super view windows weekly. From Nov - Feb , we have had all our 7 flow frames filled with honey twice, but the past 6-8 weeks things have slowed right down. Could this be a Winter thing??
I checked the hive yesterday and notices from the last time I took photos in Dec my colony has halved.
Could this be a winter thing??
BROOD BOX …I could not find the Queen, but seemed to have some brood in different levels although not as much as Summer. And honey storage is on the outer frames. My Super flows have had NO action at all. All 7 frames are empty, however they have comb and honey all built in the lip on top of the flow frames.
I guess I need to put a mat on top of the flow frames and if so what size.? Do I make it cover the entire area where no bee or beetle can enter lip space? Should I delay this step, and let them get through winter before I put the mat in and remove honey from lid?
Please find some photos (many lol 17 of them) of my inspection and feel free to analyse them for me with how you think my girls are going? And if you spot the Queen, I’ll give you a high five!x
Appreciate your time in advance.
I think this raises an interesting point. There are many image eg.'s of what frames should look like during different phases of colony development, but it would be very helpful to see some images of what to expect on frames as colony prepares to overwinter, from a healthy hive & experienced beekeeper. I might have missed something on forum, already? Not everyone has access to in person mentor or actual hive for comparisons.
Complete newbie here, Cant spot your queen, nor have any idea if this is normal, However is that an emergency queen cell on 4.jpg, right upper quadrant.
Best of luck with your answers
Probably a “play cup”, but impossible to tell unless you know what is in it. If it is empty, it is a play cup.
Otherwise the hive looks in pretty good shape to me. A little low on stores, but that wouldn’t be surprising in late winter - they should have enough to get by for now.
By the way, for what its worth, I think monthly inspections in winter are fine, unless you have a specific concern.
It is normal for the bee population to decrease a lot in winter, but this will very much depend on your climate. I am not familiar with the nectar and pollen availability in your location, but looking at the food stores in your hive, I would say that there isn’t enough food to support a large amount of brood, so it isn’t surprising if the bee numbers have dropped.
There is a very nice graphic showing beehive population throughout the year on Dave Cushman’s web site.
It is based on a northern hemisphere hive, but you can see that in winter the hive population may drop to as low as 10,000 bees, but by the end of summer, it can be as high as 60,000. I think what you are seeing is very likely normal.
Hi Amelia, sorry for the delay. I think you have a queen there for the brood to be present. I don’t like the look of the brood comb with dark sunken caps with holes in them. Could be afb or chalk brood. There’s a bit of both in the area. Do you still have my phone #, we can talk about it further if you like, cheers
Hi Amelia, take a look at the brood beneath those dark, sunken caps, also the ones with holes in them. If the brood looks like dark chocolate sitting on the bottom of the cell, put a match or twig in & test it for ropiness. If it’s ropy, it’ll be afb. If it is white & chalky, naturally it’s chalk brood disease. If it’s afb, I can help you, but I can’t do it here. It’s too lengthy to explain.
