Voice of experience

Margaret kindly came on site today to take a look over things. She confirmed that what I thought was varroa is varroa, but was unsure what the other, tiny mites are. We did a very quick inspection of each hive (couple of frames of each) and in hive1 we uncapped some drone brood. An important part of the varroa mite life cycle is inside capped brood cells, and they do prefer drone brood. The rule of thumb is that an infestation of 2-3 mites per larva is thought of as a bad infestation. In my hive, of the 5 drone brood we uncapped we found 6 mites, so yes I do have a varroa problem, but it's one of a level fairly typical of hives these days. I'm going to buy some Apiguard and apply it to reduce infestation levels. I can only apply this, though, after I take off any honey I want to, so I've got to get cracking on this.

Another observation we had is that hive1's brood-and-a-half is a little superfluous since hive has enough space in the main brood body. Therefore the next inspection is going to be a matter of finding the queen, making sure she's in the main brood body, putting the queen excluder above this box and replacing the 2 supers above it. I'll then need to wait the few weeks to make sure all the brood in those supers emerges, and then I can take off some honey. Then I can apply the Apiguard. This will leave me too late in the year really, so I'd better get cracking, and shave some time somewhere. Also, I'll need to be careful to leave the bees with enough stores. I know I'll need to feed them this winter, but I am keen to leave them a generous supply of their own honey too.

It's fair to say that Margaret was pretty impressed with how healthy and vigorous the bees seemed. This is an enormous relief to hear. It's the first time a more experienced beekeeper has looked inside my hives, and it's comforting to hear that I've not done anything stupid. Yet.

The site issues are still of great concern to me. Given that I have to move the hives off to another site, I'd prefer to do this sooner rather than later. This will be tricky.