Summer is Finally Here!

Look how tall those hives are?

July 14, 2015

Now that June is over, the swarming tendency is decreasing. Usually in July the weather is very warm, and honeybees are very happy. The nectar flow is on! It means, all foragers are fully deployed to gather as much nectar as their little wings can make them fly to wonderful floral sources.
I saw lots of flowers blooming in the past 10 days...white and yellow sweet clover, basswood, and birdsfoot trefoil. Fantastic food!

All we have to do right now is to keep ahead of the bees: Putting supers, as they are filling up quickly. Stack them, two at a time. Ours are so heavy (notice: we have deep boxes as supers!!!! It can weight as much as 80lb.! What were we thinking???) Soon I will need a crane to lift them up! Ben had to help lifting them last weekend. But still I need a step ladder to place the next 2 regular supers on. I guess it is a good thing... it means we will have plenty of honey!

As you can see my 2 Italian colonies are doing well. There have plenty of bees, eggs, larvae and pupae. They already have a huge collection of nectar, pollen and honey. Each queen is laying beautifully, textbook laying pattern.

My Russian hive was doing well, but now it is not anymore. The colony is very small, and the queen is not laying well...instead of depositing an egg per cell in an orderly fashion, the pattern seems very scattered, spotty. In addition, she does not seem to be very interested in laying eggs...she walks on the  frame without stopping, a bit strange.

She maybe injured, sick or has been poisoned. I do not feel that this colony will recover before winter. It is very unfortunate to see a queen not being well, especially one that has survive her first winter. I had so much hope.

I do think that we have a problem with having too little genetics available for prosperous, healthy  reproduction. The gene pool available has not being replenished with fresh "blood"yet.  The honeybees that we all have today are great-great-great grand daughters of the first bees and queens that came to America with the first European colonists! Give or take!

I will check the Russian queen soon and see what she has been up to in the last week or so.