Hive prep Part 2

On a rainy day with the family visiting, the 4yo and her cousin helped paint the hives.

Hive prep

This weekend, we started cleaning up the boxes and frames. Prepping for the bees arriving next month.

Step 1 has been to scrape off the crud; old brittle comb, propilis, dead bees, and other detritus, like wax moth and spider webs. Step 2, shown below, is using a paint stripping heat gun to sterilize the surfaces and joints.

We brought exterior paint from the remnants shelf at Benny Moore's. $5 for a gallon of blue, and $6 for two quarts, one purple and one green. Next, we'll clean the outsides of the boxes and paint them. We'll also clean the frames too. Our cleaning solution will be washing soda (if we can figure out where to buy it).

Cherrywood Bee Farm becomes Borealis Bee Farm

We sold our hive in Austin before we moved in the summer of 2016. Now mostly settled in Seattle we a renaming the blog and starting over. We just ordered a package of bees from Matt at Cascadia Apiary. So excited to start beekeeping again, and to harvesting delicious honey.

Now we need to clean and sterilize our old hive equipment and get the kids suited up. Here is a pic from 2012 of our son in his suit that is now probably too small.

Pre-winter hive check

The bees are mellow and enjoying the late fall warmth. There are lots of bees, some brood and a fair amount of honey. I intend to feed with 2 to 1 sugar through out the winter. Switched back to deep on bottom, medium in the middle and another above the queen excluder. Moved hive from wobbly base to the original hive base.

Hive Check

Hive 2, it will always be #2, has flourished in the absence of the old hive.
Layer 2 - medium. About half brood, and half honey.
Layer 1 - deep. Some brood, some pollen and honey, but only top 2/3 rds of each frame has comb.

I switched layer 1 and 2, so now the medium is on the bottom and the deep is above this. To try and encourage the comb to be expanded down in the deep.

I added an empty medium over the top of the queen excluder. And I will feed them up over the next 6 to 8 weeks to prep them for winter stores.

Tour de Hives

I participated in the tour de hives, Austin on August 15th, 2015. I showed the damage wax moth can do :-( And between visitors I stripped out all gunk from the four boxes of the old hive.

Hive Check

Since I last checked everything seemed fine until about a weeks ago. It looks like hive 1 (my first hive) has way less bees than normal? Maybe they swarmed I thought, so I went to check it out. But found larva crawling out of the entrance. Uh Oh! I pulled the hive apart to find only a few thousand bees left. And wax moth, everywhere. larva, moths, cocoons, and the ugly silky web they leave, the entire hive is gone, and I am sad. I guess there will not be honey extraction!

Hive 2 has bees and looks OK on the surface. Didn't want to probe to deep in case I transferred wax moth eggs over to my one remaining hive.