September 24 - October 16
We fed the bees around 11 times. 1 - 1.5 kg of sugar in a 2:1 syrup solution each time. On October 15 we saw little evidence of capped honey in the upped warré box, and the outer combs appeared as thought they could be empty. The middle frames of the nuc contained reasonably large patches o capped brood. On one of those frames we also found a queen cup containing many eggs and on the following frame we saw the queen. On the 16th, With the cooling tempratures, the bees had not taken down any of the feed we had left them on the 15th. At this point we turned the top feeder into a quilt filled with saw dust.
November 13
As there was high amounts of DWV in this yard over the fall, we decided to use an organic mite treatment. As we quickly applied the oxalic acid dribble, we saw a modest, but encouraging number of bees for a colony which has struggled to get going all season. In the warré box we obsevered bees on all but the outer-most combs and in lang nuc adapter box there were two combs of bees. On the other hand, this leaves us concerned that they might not have enough stores for winter despite our efforts to feed them. We added 1.5" spacer box under the quilt and used this space to provide about 2.5 kg of dry sugar on top of newspaper as an emergency food supply.
November 15
As it was getting dark and we were cold the previous day, we came back to give the hive tar paper wrap for winter. The high for the day was around 11 degrees celcius and the bees were flying, and to our surprise even bringing back some pollen:
Photo by: Shawn Caza / CC: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License