Beekeeping In June
Excerpted from: What Should I Be Doing?
The month of June on the beekeeper’s calendar is a busy time for most colonies, so it’s
important to continue your hive checks on a weekly basis. Identify the queen, check the
overall health of the hive, and add honey supers as needed. Let those amazing little creatures
do what they do best!
June is all about building numbers and getting ready for the main honey flow. Wisconsin's
season is short so the bees that are adapted to this climate know this and get while the getting
is good!
There are 7,000 cells per frame and the queen is laying 1500-2000 eggs per day if she is a
good queen. If you are not ready for this kind of growth will experience swarming.
The bees are building up their populations with full force until June 21st. This is a turning point
in the hive. Your queen will start to take cues from the sun and slow down bee production.
This coincides with the anticipation of the main honey flow.
Late June is also when when you may see a lot of hives
start the process of supercedure if their queen is inadequate for whatever reason.
It makes sense for them to wait till there is an abundance of recourses to do this work but many
beekeepers who don’t see what is happening and they go into a hive with no eggs and a few
queen cells and panic.
They cut all the cells, the old queen is already gone or impossible to find and they add a new queen
only to lose that new queen to the bees because they already started the process of making a new
queen.
When in doubt when looking in a beehive, always wait. It takes up to 5 weeks for them to replace their
queen. On the bright side, this is a nice brood break for the colony and you will go into winter with a
young queen unless something bad happens to prevent them from making their own queen.
If have newer equipment it can make a huge difference on how fast the bees grow as they are also
building the wax for their nest. By now, if you are keeping bees in 2 deeps, you should have honey
supers on. If the frames are brand new, sometimes the bees are hesitant to draw out new wax.
Spray the foundations with sugar water to get them to move up. Also, add supers without the queen
excluder. Come back 7-10 days later and add the queen excluder.
Check that your queen is not in the supers. Adding 2 supers can help to curb swarm tendency.
You should do a mite check in June and will do another one in July. Typically, June and July the mites
should be low, really low.
Take this quick quiz and see how much you know about honey bee anatomy. Honey Bees play an
important role in pollination. Give the quiz a try!
Ever wondered where bees go in the winter? Take a look at the winter survival strategies
of native bumblebees, and native solitary bees.
This guide features regional native plants for the Great Lakes that are highly
attractive to native bees and honey bees.
Supersedure is the term used by beekeepers to describe the replacement of an old queen by
her daughter. This has been done without human intervention in order to ensure the long term
survival of the colony.
Supercedure Queen Cell
Natural supersedure usually occurs mid to late summer, presumably when the colony thinks
there is a danger of the old queen not being able to lay fertile eggs in the spring. Natural supersedure
is something that most beekeepers rarely see.
Beekeepers are usually encouraged to requeen after 1-2 years, so the queens don't live long enough
to supersede. Many beekeepers don't fully inspect their brood boxes at the end of the season, or clip
and mark their queens, so don't realise they are seeing a different queen than the one they saw last time.
With natural supersedure, eggs are laid in queen cups. There may be some doubt whether
the queen lays them or the workers move them from a worker cell. It's likely that the queen does it. The number
of cells is always small, between 1 and 3 cells. Any more than that and they are likely to be swarm cells that
look the same.
The problem with this small number is they can easily be missed, as there is often more than one on the
same frame.