8/4 Gville hive inspection

Pink hive: decent number of bees, good brood pattern in med super, with some oddly grouped brood in the deep.  Plenty of capped honey and other food stores.  Spotted a queen in the deep.  She's a very pretty dark color.  This suggests she's less Italian than my other queen.  My understanding from Jerry Latner was that the hives I got from him were a mix of Italian and Caucasion, so perhaps she's more along the Caucasion line.  I wonder what she's been bred with?  Overall her brood pattern is relatively uneven, but she's still young - she's only been laying for 3 weeks at most, so hopefully this will improve.

Worth noting that this hive continues to have a concerning number of beetles.

Also worth noting that even though I haven't fed these bees in well over a month and it's now August which should be relatively short on nectar flow in this area I did see a good amount of uncapped honey and noticed some shake out of water even with gentle manipulation.  This suggests they're still collecting nectar from somewhere.

While I had the deep open I moved some of the wooden/large cell frames toward the outside of the box in favor of moving some of my small-cell frames in toward the brood area of the box.  As I do this I'm trying to avoid breaking up the brood pattern as much as possible.

Hill hive: this hive is PACKED with bees and doing wonderfully with both brood and food stores.  Didn't spot the queen, but I'm not surprised given the sheer mass of bees in this hive.  Because of the dense population I was concerned for swarming, so I made sure to check for swarm cells.  To my pleasant surprise I found no signs of queen cells on or under the frames in either box.  Since this hive seems to be doing well and have plenty of food supply, I decided to throw a medium on top w/ nine frames to see if they'll draw comb.  Hopefully they will so that I might get some honey from them this fall.  Will continue to monitor this hive for signs of queen cells, if they show up and the hive continues to otherwise do so well, I'm inclined to split this hive and forfeit a chance at honey this fall... I'll let the bees decide which to do.

A little behind... time to catch up on notes

Since my last update back on July 8, I've missed some notes.  Here's a brain dump of what I can remember. Dates and details are to the best of my recollection.

Weekend of July 8 John and I put sticky boards on our hives to get a mite count.  We did a three day count and then averaged by /3.  My hives in Gville showed some mites, but were well below the economic threshold of 60/day.  One of John's hive didn't get a good count because part of the catch and release swarm glommed on to the bottom of his white hive and caught a bunch of bees on the sticky board - to minimize the damage we removed the board.  The other hive; however, got a count that was right around the ecomomic threshold, so John has been applying the "Dowda method" or sugar shake to help cut down on the adult mite population.  He's now ready to put in some more sticky boards to get a new count.  If the sugar treatment didn't help, we'll have to revisit options and decide where to go from there.

Other notes: post tropical storm Debbie there has been lots of standing water and hence mosquitoes throughout N. FL.  The mosquito levels were at a point that the gov't considered it a threat to public health, so they've been spraying.  Where I live in town they spray with a truck that runs at night.  To my knowledge they've sprayed my neighborhood at least 3 times.  So far I haven't noticed any problems with my bees, but they're back far enough from the street that it's my hope that their exposure is minimal.  Our in the country where John's hive are located, they done some night-time aerial spraying.  To help protect his bees John had to cover his hives with a tarp after dark for several days.  Here's hoping there are no ill effects to the hives.

Lastly, on the weekend of July 15th I did a top-super only inspection on my hives.  I noticed the pink hive has eggs and some larvae, so it looks like they've successfully reared and bred a queen.  Horray!  The hill hive continues to do very well.  Both hives had signs of laying queens as well as plenty of capped honey/sugar water.  I've stopped feeding them for awhile now, as I'm under the advice that once a hive is putting up stores (capping honey) it means they have decent food stores and there's no real need to feed them.