Episode 75: Summer Heatwave and Varroa Treatments

Hi, I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to Episode 75 of my podcast, Beekeeping Short and Sweet.

I’m sat in my office preparing this week’s podcast in 32 degrees heat which for us beekeepers here in Norfolk in the UK is somewhat uncomfortable but as I gradually melt my thoughts are turning to Late Summer Treatments in preparation for the coming Autumn and Winter months ahead. I’d like to share with you my plans for treating my bees against varroa and talk a little about preparing my bees for the colder months ahead.

Veterinary Medicines For Honeybees can be found listed HERE
Thorne Beekeeping Supplies for Apivar Varroa Treatment

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It’s been another interesting week of beekeeping, the hottest so far this Summer and it’s seen me heading out super early to carry out inspections before dashing back to shade and shelter away from the burning sun. It’s no over-exaggeration to say it can be quite dangerous being out beekeeping in such conditions and while I understand many beekeepers tend their bees in these kinds of conditions on a regular basis when you’re not familiar with this kind of heat and humidity it can catch you out quite quickly. Dehydration being the number one problem I think, so having plenty of drinks has helped. Of course, if you only have a couple of hives to inspect you can delay inspecting until the cooler part of the late evening or perhaps get up a little earlier and get started before the sun gets too hot. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing, inspecting from 6:30 in the morning until about 10 o’clock or thereabouts. By that time the heat is really starting to hit home and I struggle to see the bees through the sweat in my eyes! Even with the 70’s style bandana, I struggle so it makes sense to just stop and go back another time.

Most of my colonies will be fine if left alone, not many are attempting to swarm now so I’m happy to leave them an extra day or so.

You might recall from last week’s podcast that I had to reduce a virgin queen from a queenless nuc colony that set upon her and would have surely killed her if not for my intervention, I popped her back into the hair roller cage with a plug of fondant and crossed my fingers in the hope she would be uninjured and able to be accepted, get out and mate and settle into building a colony of her own. Well, I went back at the weekend and had a look fully expecting her to be either dead or too seriously damaged to be able to mate but I was very pleasantly surprised to see that not only was she alive but she had indeed been out to mate, had successfully returned and was already laying eggs by the frame load. It must have been a very quick mating from being released from the cage, especially when compared to quite a number of queens this year who seem to have taken forever to start laying. But I’m so happy she survived and I’ll now need to move them over to a larger box so she can continue to build the colonies strength.

In other news, my queen mother that was donating all of the eggs for my queen rearing program disappeared last week, she finally got the better of me and swarmed. It’s the first few weeks I’ve seen swarm cells in that colony and thought I had removed all of the swarm cells but obviously missed one. I can’t be too disappointed as she was a yellow dot queen and it was the first time this colony had tried swarming in almost three years, I guess I must have become complacent in thinking they were never going to swarm. The good news is, I’ve been able to raise several batches of queen

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