Advice for aquired hives.

[jbeshearse]

I need some advice, sorry for the length. ( I know it is worth what you pay for it).

I picked up two hives this past Thursday. Opened them up yesterday. I live in northwest Florida and the daytime temps are around 75, bees are flying and bringing in pollen.

The hives consist a 10 frame deep brood chamber, with a 10 frame medium super with a plastic queen excluder between the two. Solid bottom boards and a piece of plywood for the top, no inner cover. Or anything else.

On opening the hives, there were lots of bees, found the queen in one, but saw eggs in both hives, so assume the queen is there in the second one also. Saw about 10 small hive beetles. The guy I got the hives from said I needed to put some checkMite strips in. He obviously used these exclusively.

The medium supers were empty, had some drawn frames but mostly bare plasticell. From there it gets ugly. Opening the brood chambers I found a mixture of medium frames and deeps, the deeps had medium foundation and some of it had fallen, sagged, etc. There were 9 frames in the 10 frame box. As you can imagine the combs are a mess, hard to get in and out, because of the uneven spacing in the hive. Bees had built between the sagging foundation, etc.

My main question is how to go about cleaning up the mess and when. I am reluctant to do much as we are going into winter and these bees are woefully short of stores. What would the best course of action be?

Thus far I have but SBB on, inside covers, and started syrup (2:1) feeding. Removed the queen excluders. Placed an empty medium supers above the brood nests with some drawn comb (fairly straight). And with additional frames with beeswax foundation. It is my hope that the bees will move up into the medium and I can discard the deeps as my intention is to use only mediums in the future anyway. The 24 hour mite drop was 11 mites from the stronger of the two hives and 1 from the weaker. I do not trust the counts since the comb is so uneven.

Last item. There appears to be a supercedure cell in the stronger hive and capped drone present. But this hive’s queen looked great and seems to be doing a good job. Bad time of year for supercedure. Will they really try and replace her now?

Thanks, jeb

[RayMarler]

This is just my take on it and my opinion from what I can gather from what you've said.

Take off the supers and queen excluders. Put a super on top of each, with no frames in them, with newspaper on top of the frame top bars of the bottom box. Fill the empty super with 10+ pounds of dry white granulated sugar, and put the top cover back in place. Pop the top cover in 2 to 4 weeks to monitor their sugar and add as needed. Keep this up till spring warm up.

Goto http://www.youtube.com and do a search for FatBeeMan. He has a video on how to make cheap hive beetle traps that are very easy to make and install. Put them in the hives as instructed in the video.

In spring, add your supers and as the queens move up, then remove the bottom deeps, put on another super with queen excluder on top of it, then add the deep on top (two mediums on bottom, queen excluder, deep on top). As the queens fill the bottom mediums, they'll store honey in the deeps on top and you can remove them and take the honey, then add mediums. Keep 3 mediums as their brood and stores, only taking off what is extra beyond the 3 box brood area for yourself.

I doubt if you'll be able to get them to draw wax now, even with feed, as it's too close to the winter solstice. That's why I'd do it this way as I laid out above, try to keep them crowded from here thru early spring. Adding space now will only hurt, not help, in my opinion.

Congrats on the new hives and best of luck to you in this beekeeping adventure.

[alpha6]

The only thing I would add to what Ray says is instead of dry sugar I would feed them 2:1 as the temps are well warm enough for it. Dump the queen excluders next year until they have drawn out the comb at least...bees will not move up into plastic or undrawn frames through a queen excluder from what I have experienced.

[jbeshearse]

Thanks for the advice guys. I have removed the excluder. They are taking the syrup at about a pint a day now. So I gather it is better to confine them to the single deep until they start to build up coming out of winter. Then start adding my mediums for them to move into.

Is it too late to add checkmite. Ther mite load looks fairly manageble right now, but between the mietes and the beetles, I thought it may be worthwhile to chemical treat once before going to the IPM practices completely.


jeb

[beedeetee]

I would do a 72 hour count and then divide by 3 to get your 24 hour count. The counts that you listed above are way below my personal requirement before I start treating.

[RayMarler]

I've never used checkmite so don't know about it. I'd say get a package of it and read the instructions to see about treatment temps and other conditions for treatments using that product. Or, maybe someone else with experience with that product will come forward with advice.

[tecumseh]

might I suggest that considering your location 1 to 1 syrup would work just fine. 1 to 1 will also encourage the hive to expand population and requires less energy to cook the stuff up.

first and foremost and before expending a lot of energy into building shb traps reduce the space in the hive to the very minimum necessary for whatever population is now in the box. 10 beetles ain't so bad and the girls should be able to eliminate these themselves if you feed the girls a bit and reduce the excessive space they might need to secure.

a screened bottom board I would guess has merit, but the down side is it also represents a revolving door for the shb thru the bottom of the hive. even highly propolizing hives which have a great natural mechanism for dealing with the shb and will quite typically corral herds of those little nasties into the corner cannot propolize a 18 x 20 inch sheet of hardware wire.

ps.. the top you descibe is called a migratory cover and most migratory folks commonly place 9 frames in a standard 10 frame hive. the placement of 9 frames in a standard 10 frame box is only done once the frames are pulled and is generally never done with foundation.