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Must be southern IL. Locust blooms in June here.

Northeast Kingdom at 1200 ft blossom report- Tuesdays sun brought forth the first few Dandelion and started blossoms on cherry trees. Willow is ongoing with weeping starting today. Crab apple is swelling to pop and apple still two weeks away when Dandelion have already peaked.

I hear you about overwintered Nucs getting very crowded. The ones that didn't run low on stores are booming! That's where I got the brood to boost things. Only took a frame from each and added a box for expansion. Those nuc stacks will be the back bone of queen rearing and started colonies in...

Warmer weather has taken its time to arrive. Unwrapped hives and completed full inspections last week then reversed boxes. Was pleasantly surprised to see capped drone brood meaning I could start queen rearing. That has to get pushed back a week because I had unsold package bees that need to be...

Don't make a candy board. You are warm enough to be feeding 1:1 syrup. Hot tap water and sugar, shake well and let sit for 5 minutes. Voila! Syrup. Old milk jugs and a funnel. Pour in 4 lbs bag of sugar and add the hot tap water. Fill 3/4 way to shake well then top it off.

Troy still has 6 breeder lines that survived that hard year he had to treat for mites. He requeened anything that had to be brought in to get him back up to full production that year.

My Carni are hygienic. Low mite treatment is working. The queens I brought in after Sue Colby went to Slovenia had a slight propensity toward paralysis in fall of second year. A friend of mine brought in 30 of those queens from Strachen and found the same thing, about one third showed paralysis...

@Apis mellifera I run Carnica and like the moderate brood nest pre pollen then rapid growth. How are the Russian with spring buildup? Being they are Caucasian lineage (mitochondrial) I'm under the assumption they are a little slow to start spring.

@WannaBeHillBilly Sissonville, WV post office opens today at 8:30 am. Get down there!

They should be fine arriving tomorrow morning. Saturday morning might be pushing it for the syrup provided. I've kept bees in packages for almost two weeks by misting one side of the screen with sugar water once or twice a day. You should call the post office to ensure they don't have bees...

Unless they banked queens over winter they likely won't be local queens. This year's color is green, red is last year. If a green queen then it's not local. MI won't have a new crop of queens until sometime in June.

Formic acid is good for summer when you have supers on. Formic pro is the newer pad. Has a longer shelf life. The storage time has to do with the membrane degrading. I will be playing with formic this season with flash treatments. The pads are a slower release and I'm confused by the idea of...

Consider a level teaspoon of Oxalic crystals as 4 grams. Mix that to 100 ml of warmed 1:1 sugar syrup. Ensure it's all dissolved, may require more heat. You can get the plastic 60 ml syringe from an Agway or Tractor Supply type store for 5 bucks. Does not come with a needle and you don't use...

I do not recommend powder sugar for treatment. It does kill bees and is not that effective. Wood bleach, Oxalic acid, is an effective treatment in late season when little brood is present. Very mild on the bees in either method of sublimation or syrup dribble.

You do not need to deep clean dead out hives. Little mold and what not is all cleaned up by the bees. I cringe when people tell me they scrap clean all the drawn wax because of a mold. It's a shame. People also will take hours or days cleaning up a dead out and I scratch my head about that. I...

So what we were talking about was making cell builder colonies and using premade queen cell cups that attach to bars in a frame. Usually multiple bars to that one frame. Using a grafting tool (Chineese, german, or home made tool) to scoop up larva that are less than a day hatched from a worker...

There are so many ways to make queens and too many people using acronyms to be understandable. In general it all goes back to the basics of the three ways a queen is made, emergency queen cell, supercedure queen cell, and a swarm cell. Most common would be to have a queenless hive and they...

Was in the garage today and decided to check how well the JZ protector fits the JZBZ cage. Kinda but no. Found where I'd read a person doing that to realize they were laying flat in incubator. Well, that's not going to work. I will make a wire queen cage to fit the JZBZ cell cups like the image...

Will the roller cage fit on a JZ cell cup? I didn't think they did. Are you just tossing the virgin in a queenless start if she is a day old? I've been wary of using virgins due to the horror stories of acceptance but am coming around to the reality that if they are young enough it's a breeze...

@Apis mellifera I've learned smaller number of grafts in a 5 frame cell builder is the way to go. More cycles of queens is much easier to deal with. I've tried large batches of queens and it's devastating if you are late getting to the yard to find virgins hatched, or you get a great take and...