This week we continue preparing our bees for Fall. Activities include reconfiguring our hives into their winter configuration. We do this by reducing the size of the hives, moving bees and resources from one hive to another to balence their size, feeding the bees sugar syrup and pollen if needed, and treating for pests if need. Our current plan is to work to bring all six through the winter. An old bee keeping adage says “take your losses early” which means it is better to accept that a colony is not strong enough to survive and take the weak colonies resources and use them to strengthen another struggling hive, rather than letting both fail. For all our hives, the queens are all laying well and the numbers of bees in each is good.
Of the six colonies we have, hive #4 (the bees we removed from the church eave) is the weakest. Last week we moved this colony to the apiary and added two frames of brood that was ready to emerge (from Hive #2) and have continued to feed it. We are hoping to see good numbers of bees when whe check next time.
This past week was vacation bible school. We had about 20 childern ranging from pre-K to 3rd grade out at the apiary getting a chance to see adn learn about our bees.
