Finally the weather's fine enough for us to do a full inspection, a whole month later than last year (and by this time last year our single colony was already strong enough to swarm. At least we won't have that problem this year after the winter we've just had!)
First Hive (Bea):
Some very worrying signs on this varroa floor. It was cleaned only one week ago and now it is covered in dead varroa mites already!
We counted over 100 dead mites in total! I was only expecting to see one or two, a dozen at most. This is looking like a dreadful situation already - at least it was warm enough to look inside and examine the state of the colony.
The supers still contain some overwintered honey stores, but not much. They've taken some more of the fondant, but not a great deal.
The wax had built up heavily on top of the brood frames after all this time...
... but it was soft and easy to clean off in this warm weather.
The health of the colony actually looks pretty good. The bees seem the same as ever and the pattern of brood and stores seems fine.
We found this good long section of brace comb on this frame - it's ideal for 'drone brood removal', one of the means of removing varroa mite. Varroa prefer to breed in drone cells if it's available, so if we leave this brace comb here until it's full of capped drone brood, I can slice away a huge number of varroa in one go - and I only have to sacrifice some non-essential drone bees.
Another section of drone cell brace comb here and this one has larvae in. One week more and I should be able to chop this off too, along with all the varroa mites lurking inside (they only sneak into the cells shortly before they're sealed up, hiding behind the fat larvae, so I have to wait until after they're shut inside)
This is an encouraging sign - an adult drone bee (in the centre of the photo, with large eyes). Drones are usually only raised when a colony is strong enough to support them (they do no work at all and have huge appetites).
We were just on the very last frame thinking that things weren't as bad as we first feared then saw this in the picture above. A newly-hatched worker bee with a varroa attached. I really wanted to pick it off the poor thing!
On the same frame we saw this - two more worker bees with varroa attached (top middle and lower right). Varroa is evidently a massive problem for this colony but the productivity doesn't seem to be greatly affected yet. I'll need to look up just how long we've got until this colony faces total collapse because it doesn't seem to be beyond saving yet..
Second Hive (Charlie):
More varroa on this floor but not nearly so many - we counted 12 dead mites.
That's massively more than last year (we usually only found between 1 and 6 in a week) but far less worrying than Bea's colony.
Everything seemed to be pretty much identical to the first hive - a good amount of stores from winter and a bit more fondant taken in.
We cleaned up the brood frames like normal, very satisfying after building up for six months!
We quickly noticed that there seemed to be more bees in this colony but apart from that everything looked almost identical...
... there were even the same handy sections of drone cell brace comb for me to slice off next time!
We saw Charlie very easily (she's in the centre),
... and she seems full of vigour still (with a few traces of that blinking green smudge from about 10 months ago!)Now I need to do some research about what I should do about this varroa infestation...
