Sweet T's Bees

09/16/2026

Overfed this five frame nuc. I definitely won’t have to add any sort of supplemental food for a while. It’s such a tough balance when getting Nucs and single deep boxes prepped for winter. They need to be fed enough food but you still have to let the Queen maintain her brood nest. It’s a Russian colony so it may not need food until next spring. Russians are very frugal in that aspect which is a big upside.

09/03/2026

08/27/2026

08/23/2026

08/21/2026

Mite washes vs Mite drops

I’ve read a lot of opinions about watching your mite drops after performing an OAV treatment and how that correlates to the varroa infestation. I’d like to address that and show why it can be incredibly inaccurate. I performed a mite wash on this colony and it indicated that it had a 2.7% infestation. Immediately after I performed a OAV treatment and 24 hours later this is the IPM board with roughly 150-200 dead mites.
Now this is where the issue lies. If the 150 dead mites was an indication of my mite levels then that would mean I had about 6000 live bees in this hive.
This hive is a 4 medium brood chamber set up. There is no way there is only 6000 bees in this hive. I don’t believe the mite wash is the ultimate test to knowing your mite load but I think it gets you pretty close. With all this to say I think we as beekeeepers need to get away from strictly relying on mite drop as our indicator of mite levels and start doing more mite washes.

08/12/2026

08/12/2026

Know your mite count! I know I know it’s real annoying when people always come back with that after your hive dies, but there is truth to that. It’s critical this time of year that mite counts are so they raise healthy winter bees.

I randomly checked a hive for a quick assessment. It was kind of random this hive did not have extended release pads on all summer so I kinda knew going into it that It might not be great.

10 mites out of 300 bees….did someone say mite bomb?

08/07/2026

Drawing foundation in August. Can it be done? Yes…..and no. There’s a lot of factors at play. The first thing required is a thin one-to-one mixture of sugar syrup. The next thing that’s required is the right age beesto be able to draw that wax out. It takes a lot of syrup to draw out a box of foundation I would go as far as to say it requires one whole 25 pound bag. The other thing you need to remember when feeding to draw foundation is it has to be a huge influx of syrup. You can’t just fill the feeder once every week and expect them to draw it out. You gotta give it to him all at once and force them to do it by myself. Fill a one and a half gallon feeder plus a mann lake top feeder on top.
I hope this helps