When last I posted I was on a bit of a high in terms of how well the bees were faring. I knew we had cut things close with space, and hoped I had added another hive body before the swarming hormones fully engaging. However, I failed to find the queen the next inspection two weeks later on May 14 despite bulging honey supers mostly filled with capped and uncapped honey, part of which I happily harvested because there were plenty of stores at that time in the brood nest. I was ecstatic harvesting frames for the first time and then learning how to uncap and extract the delicious sweetness from them.

During that inspection, I also learned a valuable, albeit sad, lesson about the queen excluder. As experienced beekeepers are likely already well aware, drones, like the queen, cannot pass through it. That would not ordinarily pose a problem, but when I added the additional deep hive body for more space, I moved the medium with a mix of brood (larvae and pupae, aka baby bees) and honey above the queen excluder thinking that the brood would hatch from their cells and the cells could then be used for honey. That worked fine for any workers hatching above the excluder, but the larger drones were unable to pass through to the hive exit. When I removed that hive body, out fell several dead drones who had spent their short lives trapped in the hive unable to fulfill their destiny of inseminating a queen.

The various manipulations likely stressed the bees by adding too much space and spreading the brood out too much. I won’t do it that way again. I kept multiple brood frames together and had honey and pollen stores near them, but it still required the nurse bees to cover more area to keep all the brood warm and there may not have been enough of them. Further support for using a single-size hive body, which would have made things more interchangeable, rather than a mix of deeps and mediums.

I also did a sugar roll to assess the number of mites in the colony as part of Mite-A-Thon, a citizen science project to measure mite loads across all of North America. I had nine mites in my sample of approximately 300 bees, which equals three mites per hundred bees. I thought my measure was a little short, but when I discovered upon rechecking the protocol that it generally takes only a half-cup, not a full cup, to approximate 300 bees. The mite estimate was lower than I expected since I had been seeing a large number of mites on the bottom board. The sugar roll method tends to underestimate, so it is possible that the actual number is somewhat higher. Treatment is recommended above three mites per hundred bees, but chemical treatments including Apiguard cannot be done with honey supers on the colony leaving me with only non-chemical methods like a break in the brood cycle or powdered sugar treatment.

Sooooo, back to that missing queen…

(and just like a rollercoaster ride, this one’s a cliffhanger)