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I took advantage of this warm Sunday morning and did a little work with the winter nus. I had tried to winter over 12 nucs in double deep five (5) nucs in an effort to cut ties with package bee suppliers

See the third bees with white in its pollen basket Only a few bees at the top of the feeder; almost none down on the sugar syrup. I have also been trying to get the bees to take a little stimulative sugar syrup using a hive top feeder. So I decided to do a quick in and out check of the hive to check on their overall health. I will need to keep watch on this hive because it looks to have the potential to swarm later this spring.

This syrup should be fed internally (don’t use external Boardman feeders) because night air temperatures are too cold and the bees will NOT utilize cold syrup. As discussed in a previous blog article, this past 2018-2019 winter was slightly more severe than the 2017-2018 winter when all of us had poor winter survival. I had ended up with miserable 40% hive survival for the 2018-2019 winter and 0% winter nuc survival. The survival rates of the different queen types were all similar; with a range of 83 to 90%.Given good mite control, queen type appears to not make much of difference.

The Wisconsin Honey Bee Breeders Association (WHBBA) has provided a listing of honey bee queen producers located in Wisconsin. This listing is shown on the Resources page of this blog. The goal of the WHBBA is to locally produce queens that are adapted to Wisconsin's weather and mite resistant. Typically Wisconsin bred queens will not be available until mid to late May because weather conditions do not permit queen rearing to begin until late April or early May.