Winter Damage,
April Honey Recipe - Puppy
Chow
Well, I finally finished checking
all of our colonies and found we have about a 50% winter
loss, which is very high (10% is good). The long
and cold winter certainly did not help the honeybees but
varroa mites caused the most damage.
Varroa mites are a small mite the size of
a pinhead that can weaken and kill the colonies. They hurt
the bees but do not damage the honey at all.
It seems like every 3 to 4 years we
get a lot of damage and many bees die off over winter, then
the next few years the winter loss is much smaller.
Last year's loss was only about about 5%.
We are using a multiple pronged approach
to controlling mites at our farm. Using grease
patties with wintergreen oil is one treatment we use. We
also are trying to improve the genetics of the queens in
our honeybee colonies with our queen breeding program. Every year we purchase
2 artificially inseminated breeder queens that are more
resistant to varroa mites. We will use these queen mothers
to raise new queens for our colonies this year.
What do I do with this kind of winter
loss? Usually I make "splits" by taking
colonies, split them in half and adding a new queen cells
to the new one. This year I also purchased some packages
from Georgia and they will be shipped here in late April.
They are sold by the pound - in 2 or 3 lb packages - they
look like shoe boxes with wire mesh on them. I will have
some pictures about how we install page bees for next month's
newsletter.
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April Honey Recipe - Puppy Chow
The recipe .....
This
Month at the Honey Farm
