4th inspection

[barry42001]

now thats what I wanted to see, a solid deep frame of brood. drawing out more and more of the deep frames and both colonies the one that I had to put the mediums back together is solid brood. one where I had to cut the comb out of the frame because of no bottom bar of course the extra comb was drone comb, I did notice some varroa , and tied it into a deep frame and put that back in.

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[pistolpete]

looking great!  As Apisbees is fond of pointing out, each one of those brood frames will shortly produce bees to cover two full frames.   I am looking forward to some spring, but it is still snowing up here.

[apisbees]

Somebody's been listening to me rant and rave. All the brood in your hive that is capped will emerge over the next 12 days eggs and uncapped larva will emerge over the following 9 days. The queen will only lay an area that there are enough bees to cover, 8 frames covered by bees will have about 5 frames of brood, 10 frames bees 7 frames brood.
You will have brood in your hives Pete. I have the girls bringing in pollen and they have just had a good brood hatch out and are working on the second round.

[efmesch]

Barry, those frames look great and are very promising  BUT----if you are already seeing varroa, give serious thought to applying some method of treatment before they become too numerous.  They have a tendency to sneak up on you and reach damaging levels and you don't want to wait until honey is coming in before you get to it.

[barry42001]

the gentleman I purchased these nucs from is a believer in a survivor bees ( could be lazybeekeepers brother lol) to a degree I expected to see both small hive beetle, and varroa. but I definitely will be paying attention. they seem to have excellent hygienic traits.

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[barry42001]

interesting thought though,
if you manager colonies for a couple of years so that only worker brood is raised,
and virtually nothing in the way of a drone brood, would that not disrupt varroa? don't they need a longer maturation time of drone brood to complete their life cycle?

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[Perry]

They prefer drone brood for the reasons you mention Barry, but they will make the leap to worker brood if necessary. That's why colonies start to crash in the fall, fewer drones being raised and more mites hatched out. That's when you usually see DWV show up.