Parasites do not bee-long here...

I’ve talked a lot over the past two years about varroa mites and the need to treat them. This week we’ll be using a mixture recommended by master beekeeper Phil at the Honey Exchange.

I’ll be treating the bees for 3 weeks, every seven days to ensure that those varroa that came out on larva that had been capped during a previous treatment, are caught during successive treatments.

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Bee-fore We Finish for the Winter...

Sorry for the hiatus! We spent a lot of time this past summer trying to get footage, but the sun on the camera combined with the heat prevented us from recording.

Today we checked the honey boxes, and are going to complete a treatment for those pesky little varroa mites (that will be in a separate blogpost). If you don’t keep the population of mites down, you can lose your entire colony.  You can never really rid your colony of these parasites, but you can keep their population manageable.

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Bee-cause it's too hot...

Today, on one of the hottest days of the summer of 2018, I went into our hives to perform general maintenance.  It was so hot, my camera shut off before I could get too much work done on film. So to catch everyone up, I made a video after my phone cooled down a bit. Even after it cooled down, however, you can see the video quality is poor from the overheating.

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