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NEW ZEALAND BEEKEEPER, DECEMBER 2016
Drawing out frames requires a huge effort from the bees.
For those with a super of willow honey on top of the brood nest, you have to create spare storage space to stimulate the bees to collect more honey. Checkerboard the existing full frames of honey with empty drawn combs in the second super and above. Drawing out frames requires a huge effort from the bees. A good flow or continuous feeding is necessary to keep the bees drawing out wax. This means until you have an excess of drawn frames, you do not produce much honey: enough for the bees to winter with but not much for the beekeeper. Getting more out of your hive One must consider that 30,000–40,000 bees are required to look after the brood nest. In some hives only 20% of the bees are bringing in nectar. We can change this around so fewer nurse bees are required to look after the brood nest and therefore more are gathering nectar by creating a brood break. One method is to just squash the queen. I knew a commercial beekeeper who did this with all his singles. At the beginning of the honey flow, he would kill the queens in any weak hive and add a super of honey frames for the crop. The bees put new nectar in the brood nest initially but once the new queen started laying, they moved the honey up into the honey super. In February, he would remove the honey super and requeen all the hives to set them up for the next season with new productive queens.
The amount of honey crop gathered is also dependent on the amount of varroa in the hive. Mite levels of more than one percent stresses the bees and diverts them from honey production. Make sure any miticide strips are out of the hive before the flow starts. Check mite levels by sugar shake or an alcohol wash. This takes a lot of time but when you know the mite levels, there are no surprises. You will also identify those hives that will surprise you with higher mite levels. These may need to be treated again. Put any honey boxes on another hive for a couple of weeks (check for AFB in both hives first) until the emergency treatment reduces the mite level. We are all likely to see this happening as more mites become resistant to Bayvarol® and Apistan®. If you find resistant mites after a standard treatment, you cannot use Apivar® at this time of the year and get a honey crop as this product requires a two-week withdrawal period before the honey supers can go on again. Use one of the fumigant products that give a quick knock down and disperse just as quickly. Once you have identified resistant mites in your hives, you will have to re-plan your treatments and do far more mite monitoring. The easy times with some treatments are coming to an end. It may change how some commercial beekeepers manage their hives. Perhaps divert or put on a new staff member to monitor and treat hives. continued...
If this is not to your liking, you could Demaree the hives. Find the queen and the frame she is on. Put the queen and frame into the centre of a brood super full of foundation frames, which is placed on to the bottom board. Then place a queen excluder on and rearrange the remainder of the brood so that frames with eggs are placed in the middle, immediately above the queen excluder. Five days later, check the second super for emergency queen cells and rub any out. If the second super looks crowded, add another honey super. It takes a while for the bees to build out the new foundation and in the meantime, the hive will have produced far more honey than it would have if left as is. This works well for a short honey flow.
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