Atlanta Community Garden Assoc.

This Sunday I will be speaking about bees in the community garden at the ACGA.  I'm very nervous.  This is the first time I have done a talk with all adults and no hive inspection.  I find it much easier to talk about what is in front of me.

Same bee yard different things happening

The CSX split has one deep fully drawn and full of mostly brood. Yesterday when I opened them there was about 30 small hive beetles on the inner cover.  They are doing a good job of keeping them corralled on the inner cover, but to help them out I put in 4 AJ's Beetle eaters.  To get them ready for winter they are going to need more stores, so I filled the feeder with 2.5 quarts of syrup.  Today when I checked on them they hadn't hardly touched the feeder so I put on a medium with fully drawn out frames.  I think they are out of room, but it also gives the SHB a better chance to take hold.  I will keep a close eye.

Package number one is doing fine, but needs to be fed as well.  They have taken about half of the feeder.

Package number two had the most stores and bees.  It was pretty testy, but I did see plenty of eggs, so I believe it queen rite and just had more guard bees.  The feeder was empty on this hive.

The Demeter combined split is doing fine and for now has plenty of stores.

Demter is full of brood and has enough stores for now.

All the other hives were SHB free.  Next week, I will be doing mite checks to see which hives will need to be treated.

Demeter has a laying queen!

According to bee math on June 20th, if the superseder cells I spotted then did just hatch I would have a queen right about now.  I just looked and YES I do have eggs and some larvae!  The hive seemed like it's content self again.

Solar wax melter update

The hot Georgia sun makes for quick work of cleaning my wax.

 Bag of cappings.

In the solar wax melter before melting.

Slum gum (dirt) that was left after melting.

Clean wax!

Dennis vanEngelsdorp: a plea for bees | Video on TED.com

Dennis vanEngelsdorp: a plea for bees | Video on TED.com

Solar wax melter

 I used a styrofoam cooler I had laying around in the garage, painted it black and put a piece of plexiglas on the top.  Inside is a large glass bowl with about 2 inches of water on the bottom, a piece of hardware cloth to hold the paper towel over the bowl and then the paper towel.  Then I add the wax capping that have been cleaned by the bees and then rinsed.

Robber screen

There is not much of a nectar flow right now in hot and dry Atlanta.  The split combo looked like it was having some robbing issues from Demeter so I put on the robber screen to help them fend off the other bees.

By moving the entrance to the top of the screen and leaving such a small entrance they can now effectively stop the robbing without an all out war.