Charlie's monthly beekeeping calendar

Your monthly guide of beekeeping tips for you and your hives

April 18, 2024

To all SBA Members,

April has arrived and I think spring is finally here. We have been in this roller coaster pattern for quite some time now with the night time temperatures in the low to upper fifties and the day time temperatures are between sixty-five to seventy degrees. I hope the weather will settle down with more consistent temperature.

Checking the Hives in my apiary

This spring has not been very good for me in the apiary. I lost four of my honey production hives and found two more of my production hives dwindling in population. I know that my mite loads were in check and they had ample food stores going into and through the winter.

One observation that I did make is that the nucs that I sold this spring had four to six frames of brood and the queens where first year over wintered queens, this had me thinking about the queens in my honey production hives. The light bulb came on in my head and I have come to the conclusion that my queens where either poorly mated or just too old.

I knew that my queens where at least two years old if not older and I did have queen issues last year in the middle of the honey season. With this information I asked for advice from my commercial beekeeping friends on my live chat on Friday nights, and unanimously they all agreed that my queens were too old and that I need to replace my queens after every two honey seasons or sooner if the brood pattern is spotty.

This year I will rebuild my Apiary and change my business model to more of a honey production side line business and scale back on my nuc production, but still have nucs in my apiary for backup and resources if I need them.

Swarm Season

You will need to keep an eye on your hives' populations since we are entering the swarm season. Hive populations are really building up right now.

I recommend going into your hives on a good warm day and reversing the brood boxes to make sure that all the filled brood frames are in the bottom box and the empty frames are in the top brood boxes. This will give the queen a place to lay eggs and reduce the swarm impulse. I would also recommend putting queen excluders and honey supers on now if you haven't already done so to give your hives room to store any nectar coming into the hive. This reduces back filling of the brood nest as well as congestion in the hive.

For the new beekeepers, your packages and nucs will be arriving soon! You should have your new hives completely set up and waiting for that phone call or email telling you to pick up your bees.

Single brood chamber management with my modified Demaree method

All my honey production hives that made it through the winter have been setup in the single brood chamber management configuration and I have added honey supers to each hive to reduce congestion in the brood nest in order to reduce or eliminate the swarming impulse.

I also will use my modified Demaree method on these hives, by removing half of the capped brood frames and putting them in a second brood box on top of the hive stack, with honey supers between the top and bottom brood chambers using a queen excluder between the bottom brood box and honey super.

The goal in doing this is to reduce or eliminate the swarming impulse while increasing honey production.

What are you going to do for April?

1. Install packages or nucs.
2. Remove your hive entrance reducers.
3. Put on your honey supers and queen excluders if you use them.
4. Watch for natural pollen coming into the hive, a sure sign of brood rearing.
5. As temperatures get warmer, keep a close eye on your brood frames and the amount of space for the queen to lay eggs. If she runs out of space, she will want to swarm.
6. If you see the worker bees back filling the brood frames with nectar after the brood has emerged, the hive is preparing to swarm. Remove these frames and put them in the honey supers and give the bees foundation to draw out.
7. Check for swarm cells and queen cups on the brood frames along the bottom of the frames. You will find these frames in the middle of the hive.
8. Have a nuc box hive ready in your beekeeping tool shed so you can make a split when you see that first swarm cell. A nuc box is one of the best and most useful tools you can have in your beekeeping tool shed.
9. If you have wrapped your hive for the winter, leave the insulation/black roofing paper on until the night time temperatures stay in the forty-five to fifty degree range.
10. Clean up dead colonies, and look for evidence of what went wrong.
Happy Beekeeping!

Charlie Thomas
SBA President