09/06/2026
Honey Bee Update:
After Summer Solace, bees dont build out combo as much and focus on nectar, pollen and preparation for winter brood. So being our hives are late season swarms, we bought some drawn comb from another local bee keeper, awhite's honey bee rescue near Wooster, Ar.
The drawn comb is empty and been frozen and some old wax moth webbing removed, and added to the hives one frame at a time. Both hives have cleaned it out and have the start of some nectar in our smaller swarm catch and our other (OG) hive queen has started laying on one side. This will hopefully boost winter bee population.
Pests: we have had a total of 4 hive beetles on our OG hive -killed and none in the recent swarm catch. We did try Apivar 2.0 strips for varroa mites but this is what made our swarm leave and comeback a week later as soon as we removed it. It also started killing a good number of of bees in our OG hive from evening to that next morning so we removed. We now our using oxide vaporizer lite , and preformed first treatment yesterday evening and will repeat about every 7 days for 4 treatments. The OG hive had about 5 mites on the boad and the small swarm catch had ... still a lot. Hopefully this will prevent hive death and queen to be more productive in getting some brood going.
