[FairWeather]

Pretty open ended question here. What should my double deep hives be looking like at this point? Yellow clover is tapering off and white is blooming. A week of 90s is on the way. I’m tempted to go through and equalize brood frames in hives. I have 40 in various stages and 12 nucs. Can I expect a strong nuc to store 5 frames of feed by winter? Is it worth going into the bottom brood box of double deeps? Thanks everybody.

 

[JWPalmer]

According to Kirsten Traynor, now is the time to get your hives properly configured. Move the bees down into the lower brood chamber, get the honey frames up top, except for the two on the ouside positions of the lower box. Open up the brood nest if needed. She likes to think of the hive as a hardboiled egg and the brood nest is the yolk, centered between the boxes. Check for mites with an alcohol wash. My take away was that she does not use sugar shakes but I could be wrong.

I am starting to go through my 20+ hives and it is a lot more work than I realized to yank all the frames, inspect, and put them back according to best position. Good time to have the queen safely stowed away in a queen clip.

 

[FairWeather]

Thank you. That’s pretty much how I was leaning, but I guess the amount of work intimidated me. I got through 12 yesterday. I was disappointed in the numbers of bees in many hives. I had 3 hives that were superceding. I’m not sure what is going on but I strongly suspect mite loads. Need to do some washes next. Then decide on treatment.

 

[Eikel]

More related to the "summer chores" in the title, it's tough to think about winter when you're sweating your tail off but ……… as you noted, adjust the real estate, reduce where appropriate, hammer the mites and Aug starts the "take care of the bees that take care of the winter bees." Don't forget to BTa the drawn comb when you remove it.