August 4
Photo by: Shawn Caza / CC: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
top nuc box - Only very small patches of brood remaining and lots of honey.
middle warré box - eggs as well as both capped and young brood.
bottom box - Six drawn combs. Not really being used for brood, but there were loads of bees.
In the bottom box I pushed four established combs to the edges and moved two brood combs down. One with eggs and young larvae. I left an undrawn comb in the centre of the middle box.
I was very distressed to find a couple of bees in the grass that didn't appear to be doing very well. It looked like k-wing, bloated abdomens and scruffy / greasy hair:
Photo by: Shawn Caza / CC: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
Photo by: Shawn Caza / CC: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
This one appeared to have a wound. Possibly from mites?
Photo by: Shawn Caza / CC: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
And this one a deformed abdomen:
Photo by: Shawn Caza / CC: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
and ants were attacking this immobile bee:
Photo by: Shawn Caza / CC: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
This left me suspecting problematic levels of varroa or tracheal mites or both.
There was a good amount of activity from healthy bees at the entrance:
Bees were spotted nearby foraging on astilbe:
Photo by: Shawn Caza / CC: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
August 6th
I returned with the intention of collecting bees with k-wing to dissect and look for tracheal mites. I did not find any. Just one bee with a deformed thorax:
Photo by: Shawn Caza / CC: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
A few days later
The only bee I was able to spot in the grass flew away.
August 19th
All combs significantly filled out, but not 100%.
Only small amounts of brood in the bottom box, but lots of pollen.
Photo by: Shawn Caza / CC: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
Photo by: Shawn Caza / CC: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
Pollen frame 3rd from the west edge separating brood combs.
The middle box had a good amount of mostly capped brood:
Photo by: Shawn Caza / CC: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
Photo by: Shawn Caza / CC: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
They were starting to make some honey here.
We cut out a section of drone comb from the above frame, but did not find a high proportion of mites. Neither did we see any bees in the grass and the bottom board had been kept clean.
We added another skid below the hive to raise them up a little higher in case of winter snow drifts or flooding. We turned the top skid so there were no gaps for bees to fall through in front of the entrance. We also removed the eke that had been used to give the hive feed when we first set them up.