Shortcuts
Ed Colby
My 63 colonies emerged from our Colorado Winter in pretty good shape. As of today, April 10, I’ve lost only one. Its queen gave up the ghost, the poor darling, so I united these bees with another hive.
That’s so far I’ve lost only one. I do have a few weak queen-right hives. Some have strong brood patterns. I’ll leave them be and hope for the best. I once had a Spring colony that had dwindled to a single frame of bees, yet rebounded and made a super of honey!
The gal Marilyn owns a brick 1890 house in town that a real estate agent might call a handyman’s dream. She rented it for a song to a struggling couple who told her they hoped to live there “forever.” They were behind on the rent when they broke the lease and moved to South Carolina last month, only informing Marilyn at the 11th hour. They left behind pretty much everything they owned, notable exceptions being the ‘68 Corvette, the Bronco, and his AK-47.
A forfeited $500 deposit is scant consolation for Marilyn. These people lived here for five years. You wouldn’t call them tidy. Can you picture a rundown old house crammed full of life’s accumulated stuff, just abandoned? That’s what Marilyn’s up against, and I’m not. I refuse to go down that rabbit hole.
I did work on the toilet at her house today, but I have to be careful. This is a slippery slope.
I outlined our quandary to Marilyn: “You’ve got three jobs and a honey sales business, a junk-filled diamond-in-the-rough house that you need help with, plus the farm is a wreck, and I have way too many bees. There’s no way we can keep up. These are my golden years, and the minute I start to feel overwhelmed, I’m going to drop everything and go fishing!”
That, ladies and gentlemen, was an exaggeration. The bees have to come first – even before fishing – or I won’t have any. But once I get them squared away, I’ll fish all I please.
Pat up in Steamboat used to work fulltime at the grocery store while he ran 900 colonies in his spare time. I asked him how he did it. “I take every shortcut there is,” he confided. Maybe “every” shortcut is going a little overboard, but reasonable shortcuts allow us to be more productive in less time.
Last Fall I put some extracted wet honey supers back on my hives. After the bees finished cleaning them out, I put one super between the inner and outer cover of each hive, for Wintertime hive-top insulation. I never had to load them on the truck and stack them in the barn for the Winter. Would you call that a shortcut?
But I wasn’t finished cutting corners with those supers. When I took 20 colonies 65 miles down the road to Palisade a couple of weeks ago to pollinate the apricots and plums, I left them on top of the hives. So now if the bees start making honey in the orchards, I’ve got honey supers on scene.
Marilyn’s putting up a honey booth at the Palisade International Honey Bee Festival this Saturday, so I’ll tag along. I can use her car to check my bees while I’m down there, and I won’t need to make a special trip. Plus I can drop off some copies of my book, A Beekeeper’s Life, Tales from the Bottom Board, at a local bookstore. More shortcuts!
You might consider my bee equipment pretty ratty, but my bees love it. I have plenty of perfectly good spare hive bodies I could put into service as replacements, but why would I bother? Those cracked and warped boxes in the bee yard provide innumerable little hidey-hole entrances that the bees find irresistible. Who am I to question their hive layout plan? And leaving well enough alone qualifies as a shortcut!
I knock down my Varroa mites with a weak oxalic acid dribble in November or December when the colonies go broodless. I don’t fool around with oxalic vaporizers. I’d probably gas myself. The dribble knocks mites straight to the Varroa promised land. In the Spring, any survivors find their way inside capped brood to reproduce, so when I test I rarely find an exposed mite before June. I’m a devoted mite-tester, and I do a lot of sugar-shaking for mites. But prior to June I run just enough tests to assure myself that my December dribble worked. This saves me time and qualifies as a shortcut.
I customarily install 30 or so queens each year, when I make splits or pull nucs, or to replace problem queens. I don’t routinely requeen annually, like some of the experts tell you to do. It feels too much like murder, and besides, why would I trade a productive three-year-old queen for an unproven young replacement? New queen survival is never a given, and you can make queen introductions as complicated as you want. I normally expose the candy plug in the queen cage and let the resident bees eat their way through to greet their new ruler. I stay out of it. I don’t even check on them for at least 10 days. These are all shortcuts.
I still have a few brood boxes to reverse. I put the top super with all the bees and honey on the bottom, and the largely empty bottom super on top. Bees like to move up in the hive, and this gives them room to do it. It helps with swarm control. It shouldn’t take me long. Then I have a bunch of other bee projects to get after. If I take enough shortcuts, I’m pretty sure I can still find time to go fishing.
