Cleaned off the inner cover of swarm hive and got chased for my trouble. Put on the bee hat and finished up. Put some comb with honey extracted in to see if they'd be interested.
Sunny, calm, and 56 deg, as nice as it's been so far. Several dozen flyers, some coming as far as the kitchen window. Yipee!
Got about 40 lb of honey out of the scavanged frames from the dead (pkg) hive.
Bought 5# of MegaBee Powder. Hypothetically, this will make 12.5# of patties. Patties cost $2.50 each without shipping. MegaBee with shipping is $29.00 from Western Bee.
ReplyDeleteMegaBee comes well recommended on web. W Bee sells MegaBee patties also.
MegaBee recommends mixing MegaBee with 2:1 sugar water in a ratio of 1 to 1.5 by weight. So 1# of powder forms 2.5# of patties. Altogether I will begin with 5# for five patties.
This may leave some for fall feeding which sounds important given your recent posts.
All three hives out west seem to be functioning. Hard to tell on a cold day. Maggie thought she could hear the hum of the clusters in each hive. All had some dead bees next to them.
a. West hive is tallest and a combination package/swarm hive. This is the one in which the queen died in 2012.
b. Central hive is the swarm hive from July 1, 2012.
c. East hive is the miracle queen hive. It has an unpainted hive body. She had most dead bees. This probably means the largest number of surviving bees. She is a survivor.
Exact weight of honey recovered from dead hive was 37#.
3/4/2013 Love ya, Chris