Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Apivar in

Four days ago I removed the final super and put the Apivar in the hives.  I had thought all the brood had hatched but I overlooked one frame.
Fortunately it is not a large number of bees lost.  You can see a few bees emerging.  Since I left the super in the garage for a few day, the cold killed all of them.
I had planned to take honey from Olea's hive.  I found only a couple of bars with capped honey and on them, only about half the cells were capped.  I decided to leave it all for the bees.  I did take out three bars that had empty comb on them.
The instructions for Apivar say one strip/frame full of bees.  Pretty straightforward.  However, I don't know how to convert a top bar comb full of bees to a Langstroth frame FOB.  I guess that each top bar is about 1/2 of a Langstroth.  I had 10-11 bars FOB, so I put in only one strip.  On retrospect I may have underestimated the size of the comb and probably should have put in 2 strips.
Each brood box of hives #2 & 3 got two strips.  I put one strip into the nuc.  In 6-8 weeks I will remove the strips.
Today I scraped the comb with capped honey off of the two frames from the super and Maidi strained in obtaining 6 cups of honey.
I put the frames outside for the bees to clean up.
This photo was taken about 3 hours after the bees got to it.  The white foundation had been coated with honey.  Only a few bees were still on either frame.