With solid pollen flow and some nectar starting to trickle in the upcoming warm weather, and more importantly the warm evenings, is going to kick off the crazy spring bee season. Most of my hives are FULL of bees and they will be gearing up to swarm. Three weeks ago I added drawn comb and pulled all but one or two frames of capped honey to ensure the bees had plenty of room.
Rather than buy queens and make splits with mated stock from unknown sources I’m going to change it up a bit this year and make a lot of smaller splits and use cells from our untreated overwintered breeder queens that both passed the Harbo VSH Assay.
Here’s the planned schedule:
04/08/2024 – Go through breeder queens and pull brood frames to make builders
04/09/2024 – First round of grafts into builders
04/19/2024 – Make splits and set cells
04/27/2024 – Harvest Drones
04/28/2024 – First ii of 10 queens
04/29/2024 – OA Dribble all nucs
05/05/2024 – Check for eggs in open mated and if no eggs set new cells
American Heritage Apiary 