Sometimes when you are getting ready to do a sugar shake, it’s hard to remember exactly how many bees you need to be sampling and what the threshold is. Bee buddy Eliza Hudson helps her students at the Montessori School out by first marking the correct measuring cup with a mark on top (this is …
Tag: varroa monitoring
Varroa Bombs – Take Two
If you saw my post on Varroa Bombs from this spring, you read about how my Purdue hive likes to rob from a neighbor’s hive when they are sick and dying. Well, they did it again. When I did the sugar shake on this hive on June 29th, they had 2/300 varroa mites. On August …
Summer Mite Count Checks & Congrats Bobby!
Bobby Byrd is a new beekeeper this year and he just received his NCSBA Master Beekeeper Program Certification. So, congratulations Bobby! Bobby has been working with me quite a bit in the bee yard this spring and today we did sugar shakes on 2 of the 6 hives to check on mite load in the …
Varroa Bombs and Humility
The hardest lessons I get from my bees are ones that teach me humility. Anyone who knows me knows that I can get pretty snarky when it comes to beekeepers who do not use best practices either in exhibiting proper care in working with bees around non-beekeepers or when monitoring the health of their bees. …
Swarm Check and Sugar Shake – Purdue Hive
It’s the 2nd day of spring (March 21) and I’m checking some of my hives for swarm cells. The temperature is 78 degrees at noon, so there’s lots of bee activity in the bee yard. The Purdue hive is my biggest hive so far. It is 8 frame equipment with 1 deep, 2 mediums, and …