Aprici

Another two colonies lost.  That makes 4 colonies lost to something fast acting and mysterious.  One week the colonies are strong, the next they are all gone, or almost all gone.  One of the colonies had a few bees left.  No sign of disease, the bees are just gone.  No sign of queen cells either, so they did not attempt to replace their queen or swarm.  Very odd.  The wasps have been very strong recently, killed dozens of them and the traps have caught hundreds, but it is difficult to tell if they are the culprits.

Fed the six new colonies and medicated all the bees yesterday (22 Aug 2009).  The in-frame feeders are working well. Medication was Fumagilin-B to combat Nosema.  The colony that appeared to have some form of Nosema has been recovering well, probably from the last medication.  The medication was applied in the sugar spray used to control the bees during inspection.

The main irrigation line has been laid: 1200' of 2" pipe around the property, with irrigation nodes at the ends and every 150' or so.  Each node will have 4 zones and run between 8 and 12 sprinklers per zone.

Results of apple tasting:

My first queen from a graft has hatched!  I inspected the three nucs I created from the queen cells grafted earlier, and found the new virgin queen.  Looks lovely.  If the three new nucs survive I will be up to 11 hives.

Picked up four new nucs from Tugwell Creek Honey Farm and Meadery on Sunday (17 May).  The bees seemed a bit more aggressive than the nucs from Quadra island, but that may be due to the amount of disruption they were undergoing.  They seem to have started settling in nicely already, building new wax on the new frames and some bees coming in with fresh pollen from the area.

Created queen cells and grafted some brood into them yesterday at ~4:30pm.  Placed the grafted cells into a special box full of nurse bees and food: honey, pollen, and a pollen paddy I made since the frames seemed low on pollen.  Grafting was a bit trickier than expected, the right-sized brood are extremely small, just over 1mm in size and hard to see at the bottom of the cells.

The two new nucs arrived from Quadra island on Friday evening (8 May 2009).  These nucs consist of 5 deep frames of bees, brood, and a queen.  The bees appear to be italian, quite gentle.  They are settling down nicely and already gathering pollen.

When checking the hives yesterday I noticed that one hive was relatively weak while the other is very strong.  There are signs of varroah mite, and the weak hive had a closed bottom board.  I have replaced the bottom board with one of the new open meshed bottom boards that I built.  I think also that the queen is probably getting old and should be replaced.  I noticed one of the cells in the weak hive has been made into a queen cell and there is an egg yesterday, so this will need to be monitored closely.  It should be ready in a couple of week's time.

The cost difference between using well-water (pumping cost) and municipal water appears to be quite significant in this area - about 26 times more expensive.

The irrigation rate for electricity is $3.54 cents per kWh.  For a 1HP pump (roughly 1kW) pumping at 20GPM (under average pressure) this results in about 1200 gallons/hour, which means a cost of 0.00295 cents/gallon.

Municipal water at the farm irrigation rate is approximately 20.5 cents per cubic meter.  One cubic meter is approximately 264 gallons.  This translates to 0.0777 cents per gallon.