Well, it sure has been an interesting month! As the weather intermittently warms up, the bees have slowly begun to escape from their self-isolation, and now we must stay in ours to protect ourselves and others around us from COVID-19. Huddling inside without social interaction has been a struggle for me for the past two weeks. I can’t imagine living like that for months! While I’ve been waiting all winter for our bees to be able to get out and forage, I’m now 100% sure they probably wanted to be out and about more than I wanted them to be.

On the handful of the warmer days that we’ve had in the past couple weeks, I’ve walked out to stand near the hive, watching our ladies fly in and out, some with pollen, some without. They seemed a bit rambunctious, pinging off my clothes and eagerly flying circles around me. I’m not quite sure if they remind me more of a dog happy and eager to see its owner or a cat curiously and vigorously exploring something they’ve never seen before. If the pinging and circling keeps happening, I’ll start walking away. More often than not they will keep following me across the lawn. I wish my cats cared this much about my presence!

After a day of boiling sap to make maple syrup with friends, Tim and I went in to check on food stores in the hive. Their attitude was a lot more chill. We were just excited to pop their roof off and check on them! A few came out to say hello, but most stayed inside, peering up at us from between the frames. We quickly shifted around the “pantry box” that we put on the hive last month – stores from Big Girl’s deadout – then shut them back in. A few peered out at us from the hole in the top shim. That made my heart happy. Soon we’ll be doing this more often and the fun really begins!

Starting the process of managing our mite load now

While we aren’t yet in hands-on hive manipulation mode, we’ve started using our varroa monitoring tray (or sticky board) to keep an eye on our Varroa destructor mite counts. Since we lost Big Girl to mites, we don’t want any of our colonies to suffer that same fate. Some people use the sticky board to do these mite drops throughout the whole winter, but we aren’t those people. We left the boards in for longer periods of time, checked them for glaring signs of underlying issues (excessive bee diarrhea, hive beetle or wax moth adults or larvae, etc.), cleaned the boards off, then reinserted them beneath the hives. To the left is a photo of Tim holding a board that was under the hive for about 6 weeks. You can tell where the cluster was spending most of its time!

We’ve started doing weekly 72-hour drop counts. Our first drop resulted in 3 mites over the 3 days – 1 mite a day is not too bad! However, if all is moving along according to plan, our queen should be laying eggs all day, every day now, and we all know where the mites like to hang out and reproduce: within the capped brood cells. We’re sure to see more mites drop as they grow their population alongside the growth of Kha-bee-si’s population. But the good news is we’re staying vigilant and we’re ready to take on that pesky mite early on in the year.

Just a quick final thought

A couple days ago, we got about 6 inches of fresh snow, coating the freshly budding trees and the tips of tulips trying to break up through the soil. Today, it’s 50 degrees and the bees are out flying again. Things change so quickly! My heart goes out to all of you through these crazy times. We all have to stick together and hope for the best. Hang in there and bee well!

Your Betterbee-ginner Beekeeper,
Quinn