I was out over the weekend looking in on my bees. I expected them to be dead, but I was surprised to see that they are still chugging along. The fondant that I put on the top of all\u00a0 the hives is about half gone. It is hard as a rock, but they are nibbling away at it. I will move some fondant from the hive that died over to the other hives this weekend. I may put water on it to soften it somewhat before I feed the surviving hives.<\/p>\n
I have to make a decision about new hives this spring. I have found someone who is buying a truckload of packages in North Carolina and is willing to stop by my house to drop off a couple for me on his way back. These are mixed bees, which I have decided might be better than the pure Italians that I have been getting.<\/p>\n
There are other places within a couple of hours drive who are selling nucs, so I may buy some of these. All of these are mixed types – some Russian, some Carniolans, feral bees, and even some Buckfast.<\/p>\n
My reasoning is that if I buy a variety of bees of different breeds that I might get lucky.<\/p>\n
The guy that I bought queens from down in New Jersey had nucs last year, so I am going to phone him and see what I can get. The advantage is that this only about 15 miles drive and with the price of gas it makes his hives a bargain. He has recently divorced so I am also hoping that he may be wanting to get rid of some hives that I can pick up now.<\/p>\n
My brother may have a bunch of nucs for $50 that he can get from a guy who does swarm captures.<\/p>\n
I will also place some swarm traps on a few rooftops (one at my mother’s house and possible one in the village of Nyack).<\/p>\n
My target is to have 8 hives so I would need 5 or 6 hives, depending on how my three make it through the winter. The hive that was smashed during Sandy, does not appear to have much population, so I am a little worried about her.<\/p>\n
That would be $600 to $700 worth of bees. That would require that I sell about 150 bottles of honey. I am not sure that these bees will produce honey the way the pure Italians did. They are all of them “Survivor” bees of mixed types.<\/p>\n
My fear is that one of these diverse hives will be sick with “foul brood” or infested with small hive beetle or varroa. This could wipe out my investment in a very short time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was out over the weekend looking in on my bees. I expected them to be dead, but I was surprised to see that they are still chugging along. The fondant that I put on the top of all\u00a0 the hives is about half gone. It is hard as a rock, but they are nibbling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}