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Colony Update here in MA

241K views 1K replies 69 participants last post by  Pepperell Bee and Honey 
#1 ·
Have long been a fan of Allen's "Colony update here in PA" and Squarepeg's "2015 Treatment Free Experience" threads and thought it worth while starting a similar thread for experiences a bit further north.... I have two outyards in Marshfield (3 production colonies and 4 nucs) and Needham (2 production colonies and 4 nucs) and plan on moving two hives from Marshfield to my place in Quincy for spring pollination so should be able to give a good running report of what is going on in the greater Boston area here. Nucs are Mike Palmer style split deeps (each with a single deep super) and production colonies are double deeps with a single medium super. All colonies are outfitted with broodminder's for temp/humidity monitoring and I have a scale setup to weigh the production hives. All colonies still are still in winter wrap with Mike Palmer style mouse guards. The weather reported is through my weather station located in Quincy.

Red maples and crocus are blooming (since 7 Mar roughly a month early) and all hives/nucs are bringing in pale and yellow pollen.

Weather this week has been unseasonably warm with temperatures typically with the lows in the 30-40F range and the highs in the 40-60F range. Rain MTD = .=0.71" and YTD = 6.22".

Marshfield Outyard - Based on the broodminer readings, two of the 3 Marshfield hives started brooding the third week in Feb with the last one brooding at my last check (13 Mar) after feeding pollen patties. All hives/nucs are being fed fondant and pollen patties and are taking them. Two hives are very large and one is fairly weak. The weak hive was the last to kick off brooding. One nuc is strong and one is weak but both are expected to survive. Hive weights are stable to slightly down from the previous week.

Needham Outyard - Based on the broodminer readings, both production hives started brooding the third week in Feb. All hives and nucs are being fed fondant and pollen patties and are taking them. One hive is very large and one is fairly average and both are very active. Both nucs are strong. Hive weights are stable to slightly up from the previous week.

I normally check in on my outyards on Sundays so should be able to update early in the following week. This next Sunday is expected to be rain/snow so I may not be able to check in with results next week. (19 Mar)
 
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#121 ·
I thought I would be able to time my stuff off your reports. I'm only 30 min north. But so far i'm amazed at the difference. I saw almost no dandelion and at my biggest yard spent 10 min walking through 200 square yards of it in full bloom and saw very few bees. just strange. The guys to the west in NY and MPalmer up in the north had it but for some reason my area was different. Very cool you are taking the time to post this info
 
#123 ·
I guess as has often been said, "All beekeeping is local!".... I live on the coast and work in Foxboro which is only 25 miles or so inland and am still amazed at the temperature and overall weather differences I see during my daily commutes.... The ocean has a huge moderating effect on the coastal sites that you just don't see a few miles inland.... I also see differences in what is going on in my various outyards but thankfully it all seems to even out on a week to week basis.... Hopefully at least what I am seeing can give you some sense of what is coming your way in the near future....
 
#124 ·
Okay, I went into my hives today. I'm down to 4, which is a nice number, altho I'm planning on making several splits this summer.

Not seeing a lot of nectar collection yet, but I am seeing a big surge in brood. This is good because the baby wax makers/comb builders will help me build up many, many foundationless frames. Young bees, warm weather, wax.

One hive now has 8 medium boxes - like Jack and the Beanstalk. With all 4 of my hives, I am adding boxes by pulling comb and honey frames out of the lower boxes and putting some in new boxes to add on top. So my hives are pretty well checkerboarded. I'm putting a lot of extra room on there because it's spring flow time, and This. Is. It. So all 4 hives got an extra box today.

I want to make splits, and have 5 double nucs out there waiting, but am holding off until the mother hives get really well established. I planned to split by now, but can't seem to interfere in a hive that is just about to increase with many frames of capped brood. Let that brood add to the colony size and strength, and then I'll pull some spare frames of brood out to start splits.

3rd year Russian queen is very productive. Beautiful brood pattern. I thought they'd requeen her by now, but guess not. My last 100% Russian queen. Hoping to get at least 2 more of these queens this summer.

Laying worker hive is pathetic. Leaving that one to dwindle out (that's hive 5). They don't seem to be laying anymore drone brood.

Lots of pollen frames in the hives. No capped honey yet, no frames that really look like capped honey potential yet. I think they're still surviving off what they bring in plus winter stores. I'm seeing more bees on the dandelions now.

I consider this the beginning of main spring flow. 75F today and tomorrow, then back into the 60s and some rain in the forecast. I have a hive out there that is a deadout with many honey frames, so in a pinch, I think they could rob that out, which I don't think they're doing yet, so they must have found adequate sources.

Found drone brood in one hive with 2 mites right there on top of the capped brood. I squished those mites and brought 4 drone brood frames from the hives in to the freezer. Most of the drone brood that is mixed with regular brood I left alone. I left one or two frames of uncapped drone larvae in the hives for it to get capped and then I'll hopefully get back in there to retrieve it and freeze it. Using drone brood pulling as one of my mite controls. The laying worker hive hatched lots of drones and they are going hive to hive, most likely spreading the mite population as they do.
 
#126 · (Edited)
Weather has warm and sunny almost all week with highs ranging from 58 to 74 and nighttime lows from 42 to 55. Measurable rain for 2 days. YTD rain is 12.07" and we have 1.25" of rain so far this month (May).

Significant flow is still on! With my two strongest hives (Quincy/Needham) again putting on 30+ pounds each. These two hives are third year queens that I originally got from Full Bloom as Carni Mutt Nucs and are very productive. Lots of nectar with edges now starting to be capped and no dripping during frame inspections. With luck it looks like I might be able to do a small extraction in a week or two for the early spring honey.

Had a call from my Rockland site about robbing that I had to respond to Tuesday. This site has two strong overwintered hives and an overwintered nuc (now in a 10 frame deep) that I built last summer. This was one of the last things I would have expected given the season but it was a typical robbing scene with angry bees everywhere and a pile of dead bees as well as fighting in front of the middle hive. Another weird thing is that the strong Italian hive was trying to rob the strong Carni mutt hive and not the smaller Carni. Luckily I keep robber screens on all hives in a yard with mixed size colonies so it was easy to deal with.... Closed up the two bigger entrances in front of all the hives and just left everyone with the smaller top entrance and they calmed right down... All hives in this yard lost weight so there must be a local dearth. Hopefully this will be a temporary condition as I have had high hopes for this yard....

Had a chance to attend an awesome queen rearing session hosted by the Plymouth county beeks on Sunday and I have to say it was simply outstanding.... Hands on grafting and cloake board manipulation as well as great discussions and information sharing... What an awesome day!
 
#127 ·
Dearth sounds unusual, esp. since your other yard which isn't all that far away is putting on 30 lbs.! Maybe your Rockland yard was being robbed out by someone else's bees?

Since tomorrow is scheduled to be above 90F, I did the weekly hive inspection today. Made 3 new nucs; two of them used 4 brood frames from the 8 medium hive, and one of them used 3 brood frames from a 5 medium hive. Both queens lay wall to wall brood and are very productive, so I hope those genes carry on. I wanted to make a split with brood from my pure Russian hive, but that queen has always been on the unproductive side and she needs all her brood. She's an excellent survivor, a 3rd year certified Russian, but she doesn't believe in hoarding. She is a beautiful black queen tho and my token certified Russian, so I just let her putz along.

I yanked 2 frames of drone brood out of the hives that I'll put in the freezer.

Plenty of queen cups but no queen cells and no backfilling so that's a relief. At this point I don't believe I have to worry about swarming (altho I'll keep checking weekly for the next few weeks). I was going to pull the queens from their hives to give the hives a brood break, and put those queens in their own nucs, but a recent thread on beesource questioned the validity of brood breaks for mite control so I think I'll just let them be. We'll see. I may split the queens out later. Altho spring is the time to do it, when the population is building up.

June 21st the queen starts winding down, and that's less than a month away! Whaaaa.

Also, bees were bringing in yellow pollen, I don't know from what. Dandelions are pretty much over. I'm not seeing a ton of stores in the hives yet, but then all the brood that has been hatching the past couple weeks is still pretty young, they may not have hit peak forager yet.
 
#128 ·
Weather has warm and sunny almost all week with highs ranging from 60 to 92 and nighttime lows from 51 to 66. Measurable rain for 1 day. YTD rain is 12.18" and we have 1.36" of rain so far this month (May).

Black Locust is starting to bloom which is good since there was no significant hive weight gain last week after two weeks of gangbuster performance. Girls are bringing in lots of tan colored pollen and still no sign of swarm cells. Moved 2 hives back to the Marshfield yard and 3 hives to the new Needham site.

Two of my mentees (one in Needham and one in Mansfield) reported signs of robbing in their yards. In both cases their yards had carni mutts and at least one Italian hive. In both cases a single Carni hive was targeted to be robbed which is the same as what I saw in my Rockland yard. Could be a pattern developing....
 
#129 ·
A quick update. On my walk today I found the following blooming:

Sweet Arrow Wood Flower Flowering plant Plant Leaf Tree


Tulip Poplar Tree Property House Building Roof


Poison Ivy Flower Flowering plant Plant Leaf Tree


Rosa Rugosa Flower Flowering plant Plant Rose family Rose


I also caught up with my last yard yesterday and found that while my other 3 yards did not show a significant weight gain the Needham #1 yard is still going strong. I guess it just goes to show how much of a difference local conditions make:

Text Line Font Plot Number
 
#131 ·
You are probably right.... My big production hives are absolutely loaded with bees and brood and they are the ones which tend to swing everything weight wise since they have the most available foragers... I think it all boils down to local forage and conditions... A couple of Black Locust or a street lined with Basswood coupled with decent weather can make a huge difference this time of year...

Black Locust Tree Plant Woody plant Flower Botany


Basswood Plant Tree Flower Leaf Woody plant


The basswood picture was taken today and you can see the flower buds are closed and a week or so from blooming.... Will be interesting to see what next week's weights do.....
 
#132 ·
This is the perfect time of year (in my opinion of course) to make splits. I just made my last 2 splits for now. I had 5 empty new nucs in the yard, and 4 overwintered hives. May 27th I made 2 nucs from the largest hive, and one nuc from the next largest. Today I made a nuc from my 3rd year Russian queen hive, and a nuc from the 4th hive.

I think this is a good time to make nucs because the queen has until 6/21 to really ramp up that laying. If I swipe a couple frames of brood from her, she has time to make up for it. After 6/21 she starts winding down. Plus, there's a lot of nectar flow out there right now, so hopefully the new queens they make will be healthy and happy.

The nucs are 5/5 mediums. The bottoms just have foundationless frames for now (the newly hatched bees can make wax on those if they have nothing to do) and the tops have 2 frames of brood and 3 frames of honey/pollen.

So that makes 4 overwintered colonies in the yard and 5 new nucs. As the summer goes on I may be getting 2 more Russian queens; if so, I'll make new hives out of them too.

I checked the queen cells on 2 of the nucs I made on the 27th. They are not quite capped and I was very nervous that I could squish them, so I didn't check the 3rd nuc for their queen cell. I'll wait another week to check on the queen cells, when they're almost ready to hatch. If they didn't make it for whatever reason, I can still put a frame of open brood in there. I only found one queen cell in each of the two nucs; I thought maybe they'd make a spare or two, but it doesn't look like it. That would make me nervous, not having a spare.

Most excellent day. The next few days will be cool and gray I think, and that should be good weather for the nucs because there are basically no foragers in there anyway.
 
#134 · (Edited)
Wow, those are some pretty charts.

Glad you started this thread because I forgot what day I started my last 2 nucs, and I had it written in this thread. (Was it really only 3 days ago??) Who needs notes when you have a forum. :)

Edit: Checked two hives today, an 8 medium and a 5 medium. The 8 medium is packed with bees (even after taking 4 frames of brood to start 2 of my nucs last week) and I put a 9th empty foundationless on top. At this point I am standing on some spare supers with a lid to reach the top boxes, a little nervous that stack could wobble over. I doubt they will do anything with an entire empty foundationless super, but who knows. It's going to be rainy tomorrow and they could get bored enough to draw some comb. The 5 medium hive had plenty of empty foundationless frames in the top box or 2, but they weren't building comb as quickly as I'd like to see and I was nervous that the queen was running out of room to lay, so I stuck a medium with empty built out comb frames from a winter deadout under those top 2 mediums. The bees need to clean those frames up (still some dead bees in there, some old honey, some broken comb) and the queen should have plenty of space to lay, unless they decide to make it a honey depot.
 
#135 ·
Checked the hives yesterday, seems like the flow is getting into high gear around here now. I found one hive getting ready to swarm so I made a split with the old in hope that she will decide that she doesn't need to swarm anymore, leaving the old hive with the started queen cells to raise their own queen. I've had good luck with this in the past, we'll see how it goes.
 
#145 ·
I just put my honey supers on last week. Needed them to build out the lower boxes first. 1 is a lower entrance with excluder and the other is an upper entrance with queen excluder.

Checked on the hives between rain today. Upper entrance hive with honey supers is packed with bees. Lower entrance hive has a few bees.

I will give it few weeks to see what happens. Testing the waters here. Wondering if the queen excluder is better for upper or lower entrance. Will be helpful for the fall flow when Honey is really on.

Archie
 
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