From: Micky Lee <mlee4321@juno.com>
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 21:06:44 -0500
To: BiologicalBeekeeping@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: hives went down stream

Hello all,

Thanks to all who expressed concern. The cold front that pushed the
record warmth east and fired the storms has passed. "Normal"
temperatures have returned. That is 45 to 50 at night and 65 to 70
daytime. I would be very surprised if we got snow, but we could get a
killing frost to play havoc with the flora.

Early in March I removed a box from each hive brought them home. I used
a saber saw and cut the comb from about half of the frames. Last week I
put four cutout frames in each hive and added a box to the three
strongest hives. So I have plenty of equipment to work with.

We went out today and found 6 of the boxes were pretty full of bees. We
found three queens. We set up three colonies with the six boxes. Clean
bottom boards, boxes and covers. We put an excluder between the boxes,
in case we missed queens in the other boxes. The bees were all with the
capped brood. The open brood is dead. The open honey is filthy. We
moved capped brood and sealed honey to the clean boxes. Will go back
Monday and separate any colony that has two queens. We will also remove
any frames we don't like the looks of.

We then walked down stream and found the almost all of our wooden ware.
We lost only about 15 frames.

The two colonies that did not wash away are strong. Last Friday I split
the colony at the house into three nucs with two new queens. With about
6 weeks till main flow I expect I will be able to get at least 5, maybe 8
colonies strong enough to pull a good crop.

The bees had drawn comb in the empty frames. I brought one in the house
and measured it with a Boley Gauge, 9 cells and 9 cell walls measure 52.5
mm. Or 5.25 mm for one cell and one cell wall. Will measure cells from
other boxes tomorrow. I was hoping it would be smaller than that.

Yes Scott, if I buy bees, I'll get them from Ted. You get your moneys
worth from him. And I will pass your greetings on to him.

Micky