Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum
BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => GENERAL BEEKEEPING - MAIN POSTING FORUM. => Topic started by: Bush_84 on April 18, 2017, 02:38:15 am
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So I'm looking for some advice here. I live in Minnesota. It's been a pretty mild spring considering a few years ago we still had ice on the lakes in may. Still some cold days and some nice days. I have three hives. One came out of my bee shed huge. The other two at the time seemed reasonable but now I'm starting to second guess myself. Now I'll say that my big hive is an anomaly. It's filling three 8 frame deeps. Trees are just starting to come out in force. Dandelions still a little bit away. Historically trees and dandelions are all for spring build up. I don't generally collect honey off of those flows. My other two hives cover 4-5 frames with a couple frames of brood. Both are queen right. Weekend check shows palm sized capped brood on at least two sides of a frame. It was a quick check. Was windy and not terribly nice. So I didn't look close but have seen queens and eggs in both quite recently. I may be overthinking things a bit. I'm just looking at my big hive and thinking that the other two are behind but the voice in the back of my mind says that they are the norm and the big hive is the abnormal one. The two smaller hives are bringing in pollen. No sickly looking bees. No crawlers. Should I be considering swapping positions of my big hive and one of the smaller hives? With as big as my one is I could probably do it with both given enough time. I do have a queen coming May 6th. Am going to take a nuc off the big hive FYI. Thoughts?
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I am not to far from your area, I wintered most hives with 2 deeps and a full super.
1 1/2 months ago, I had one hive that was huge compared to the other 20 some here at home. I thought it would be a great one to make up some new hives from.
It crashed and died for some reason, and it wasn't from lack of food.
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These are just thoughts ...
Some of the bees from the small hives became traders and moved in with the hive in the shed. Maybe it had more honey at the start of fall. These hives are exciting but can crash because they harbor a higher mite population through the winter. I would split into three and force a brood break. The other two small ones I would not touch. I would consider them production hives until they prove otherwise.
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I just put a fourth deep and a super filled with mini mating nuc frames on it. Queen had eggs in the top deep and bees were filling all three deeps from side to side. I have a queen coming in a couple of weeks. I may get another and make two Nucs off of it.