Sunny afternoon to take apart the package hive. Cleaned out all the dead bees and generally scraped things down. Not too moist inside. The base is fairly wet, partly from honey dripping down. Frames themselves were pretty much as an active summer hive.
Salvaged about 10 frames with usable honey. Some frames had honey but looked like beginning of some kind of black mold, so did not put those aside. About 10 of those. In all, i think there were 19 frames that look bad, and i saved out 10 to extract from.
Bees were scattered throughout the hive, quite a large number of them with heads or more down in a cell. Just stuck there or anyway died there. This generally in areas where there was honey, but also in some of the dry areas, which were completely stripped of honey and just brittle wax. (It was about 41 deg.)
There was virtually no pollen in the hive. Can only remember one frame that had an area of pollen, about the size of my hand.
Put the damaged or probably unusable frames back in the boxes and stacked the whole thing back up again to keep dry and await decision about whether they should be tossed or are salvageable. Need to take pics to send to Cam Lay, State apiarist.
No comments:
Post a Comment