For anyone interested in beekeeping – be aware that it has a steep learning curve and until you get it right, it can be expensive. As we enter our third year, we once again only had one colony survive the winter. After doing some research and speaking with another local beekeeper – we think that we treating for varroa mites too late in the fall. This causes an unhealthy hive which eventually dies from the mite infection.
Our surviving hive interestingly is the one from our first year. It swarmed last year but pulled through and they are very happy, healthy, and productive. With the weather turning a bit warmer than usual, we’ve even had to add a honey super already and it’s the first of May!
To expand the apiary (third times the charm) – we are going back to nucleus colonies (nuc). They are a Pacific Northwest hybrid bee and we feel they have better genetics than the Carniolan and Italian varieties. After all – our surviving hive was a PNW hybrid bee colony. We picked up three nucs from Glory Bee on May 9th – got them home with only a small amount getting free and got them installed with little fanfare – they were all pretty mellow.
We did not see any of the queens. However, we did see eggs, larva, and capped brood – so we are optimistic all is good. We will do a more complete inspection next weekend after they have settled into their new home.
We decided to bump to a total of four hives. for 2020. We think that is our limit with our other commitments and we really want to have better survival rates and more honey production. More than that we might be asking for trouble.
3 new nucs 
nuc frame 
five frames in each nuc 
getting ready 
bee escape 
All four hives
The last really big change we are going to do this round is single brood chamber beekeeping. Instead of a traditional two deep box for the queen to lay and brood her young, we are limiting her to only the bottom box.
We’ve read and watched quite a bit on this method, and it makes sense given the life cycle of bees and how efficient they are with their resources. It makes hive management much easier as well. Put a queen excluder over the bottom box and then just stack honey supers on. That limits inspection of the brood boxes to only the bottom single box.
First-year nucs, depending on how productive they are, typically don’t produce much honey as they need to build up the colony. We hope to have a repeat of our first year where we were able to harvest a little honey – we’ve run out of last year’s batch! But having a higher survival rate is our principal goal.
