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NEW ZEALAND BEEKEEPER, FEBRUARY 2017
Dyers’ bugloss (a type of comfrey) on a bank in the garden. Bees find it very attractive.
Removing honey I don’t remove all of the honey, as I have found that the bees continue to build up after the main honey flow, stimulated by a dribble of nectar coming in from late sources and plants like catsear that flower after rain. Bees can chew through a full-depth box of honey before winter and then starve during the midwinter build-up, so I leave my honey on until a lot later in the season and use bee escapes during the robbing season. I like my hives to go into winter with a minimum of a full-depth super of honey. The alternative is to remove the honey now as it’s worth more, and feed back sugar syrup. I find this too much work and I don’t have the equipment. I’ll be giving my hives a number of flash treatments with formic acid: 40 ml on a paper towel on the slide of the mesh bottom boards. More than 40 ml is not necessarily better, as there’s very little difference between killing mites and killing bees. Formic acid is heavier than air, so this treatment is effective only in the bottom super. Drone brood in the second super remains unaffected. I don’t use queen excluders, so I have been reversing brood chambers to put most of the brood in the bottom box to make this treatment effective. This method also allows the queen to move away from the fumes. I do, however, close the entrances down so the bees can better defend themselves from robbers and wasps. If you are a registered applicator, put out poison baits around the apiaries to kill nearby wasp nests. I’m not sure that this will be necessary in my area with all the rain, as not many nests have been established. I was seeing the odd queen wasp flying last month; perhaps wasps have also had a hard time as they depend on nectar as well as insect protein.
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