June 2020

It’s almost here. The honey season is on its way. It’s been hot and dry this June which is totally not the norm. Maine in June is typically cool and rainy, but it hasn’t rained in 3 weeks.  It’s also been in the upper 80s and 90s for a bunch of days. This is making me nervous because it seems like plants are blooming sooner than normal and since there’s no rain my assumption is there’s not a lot of nectar coming from the flowering plants and trees. Dandelions and white clover are coming in and that’s a huge part of the forage for bees in early June. If the season peaked early, then only the biggest hives will be producing honey.
As for the bees, I’m evaluating hives, spring feeding is wrapping up, and I’m testing and treating for varroa mites. I collected a few pounds of pollen using pollen traps on some of my bigger hives. This is somewhat labor intensive, but having real pollen will allow me to feed it back to the bees in the fall or next spring. I make pollen patties for the hives which they convert into “bee bread” which they feed to developing larva. Bee supply stores sell substitute pollen which is fine, but having a little actual pollen is probably better.
June is the month when bees really start to create bees wax using glands that secrete the wax. They can also take wax from places in the hive and put it other places. They create “burr comb” which is a darker yellow wax and they use it to keep everything within the hive locked in place. They also use propolis to both disinfect and glue things in place. Propolis is incredible stuff and has a number of medicinal properties.  Some beekeepers scrape it off the frames and boxes and purify it or sell it raw.  I tried collecting some of it last year, but didn’t really get much of a yield. I’m probably sticking to honey J
Getting into the hives in June I’m looking to equalize hives to about the same strength or number of bees (mid-June the hive probably have about 20,000 bees). The reason I do this is to keep the bigger hives from robbing the smaller hives. I’m also trying to make sure each hive is healthy and building up at the proper rate so that I have the optimal number of bees once the nectar flow really kicks in early July. At the beginning of June most of my hives have about 6-7 frames of bees and 3-4 frames of brood. The other reason to equalize is to prevent swarming. May through July is what they call swarm season and if the hive gets too big too quickly or if the bees store too much nectar in the brood box, the bees will want to split their colony into two. They do this by creating queen cells which house a second queen. The original queen and about half the hive fly off and find a new home leaving the new queen with the other half of the hive. That is obviously bad for the beekeeper since the right population at the time of the nectar flow is what generates honey. So equalizing and taking brood frames away from hives that are getting too big can keep them from swarming.
So what do we do with extra brood frames? We create new hives called nucleus colonies or “nucs” pronounced nukes. I like to maintain genetic diversity in my apiary so I purchase mated queens from numerous places. I simply add a new, mated queen to a 5 frame nuc and then have a new hive that I can either expand as the season progresses or keep as a resource hive.
As for genetic diversity, I currently have 4 breeds of bees in the apiary. When a queen from my apiary get mated there will be drones from all my hives and any neighboring hives mating with it (queens mate with 4-20 drones) which creates diverse genetic northern mutts. These bees do really well in cold climates which is the most important trait in my bees.
This year I’m going to create my own queens from hives I like. Each year I evaluate hives of factors like overwintering ability, temperament, efficiency, ability to keep varroa mite populations low, honey production, etc… If I find a hive I really love, I can make my own queens from that hive. I’m planning on making queens this year from a Buckfast hive that is perfect in almost every way.