Due to a crazy year starting a farm and also finding a new job my beekeeping records and especially this blog have not been adequately updated. I thought I'd do a post now that things are settling down to summarize the year, especially the developments/differences from last year.
It was a super wet spring so the spring flow was late, but we had plenty of rain all summer so there was essentially no dearth. Brief review of this year:
- lost one of two colonies over the winter
- installed three packages into new equipment I assembled and painted (April)
- did two late spring splits into nucleus hives (nucs) (May-June)
- encouraged raising of three new queens (for the two splits and requeening the overwintered hive which had a 3 year old queen) (May-June)
- split a weak colony and divided the bees to be combined into two slightly weak hives. (Hive 4 was split and combined with hives N1 and N2) (yesterday)
I will hopefully be doing some fall extracting by the end of the month. I had one hive that just went crazy building comb in the spring and they have 4 supers on the hive even after doing a split! I also plan on feeding any colonies that are low on food going into Nov.
I need to find out a better way keep records. I may do a single post for each hive next year and just log each record with an update to each post. The way I did it in 2010 did not scale.
