Today was a March afternoon disguised as a June morning. Beautiful blue sky, 50 degree temperatures and just the slightest breeze to give the balmy calm air some variety every once in a while. I had to do errands all morning, but after 1:00 I changed shoes, found my safety googles and hauled the pump sprayer out of the cellar. I used All Season dormant oil today – it is petroleum based and not organic-rated, but it is a remarkably passive way to deal with all the various pests that over-winter on fruit trees. I add a few tablespoons of Crocker’s Golden Fish Oil (don’t open it in the house) every time – it adds “stickiness”, is a terrific foliar feed, and repels deer. Perfect. Both these substances are fairly innocuous as pesticides go, but you won’t like them in your eyes, hair, clothing – wear goggles and rubber gloves, please.
Then I went to check on the bees, and found them boiling over like an unwatched pot. I had to reach into the mass at the front of the hive and open the gate-stick a little farther. Fortunately they’re very accommodating even when just waking up, and all that happened was that I had to brush them off my hair, and the back of my neck, with a pine b0ugh.
Soon the fruit trees will wake up, too, and there will be honey in the comb!
I put newspaper directly over the frames, leaving a small gap to accommodate the upper entrance, then replaced the shim and inner cover and piled more newsprint over that. You can see that I’m using The Islander and Barrons. Tony J. is partial to the WSJ. The first layer of hive-wrap is on, too.
My primary tasks for today were to check for a laying queen (through the presence of eggs and larvae) and give them some additional living space (if necessary).I use medium supers because I’m not strong enough to move a full hive body weighing over 130 pounds.
These two hives are named “To Bee” and “Not to Bee”. “Not” is a nuc start hive and is still a little more populous than “To”. The bees in “Not” were completely unfazed by my invastion this morning – didn’t even come up to check me out. “To” was fairly agressive, coming up to the face veil and following me about 20′ from the hive after I was finished. Here’s a close-up of the free comb with bees still attending. It was actually fairly difficult to determine absolutely that the queen was not milling around there somewhere.
