This has been a challenging beekeeping season. The weather since March has been off balance just enough that my and maybe your bees too, have done too much swarming and too little successful queen rearing. I have one hive that has 5 supers and hasn’t missed a beat, but the other 9 have not performed to expectations. I have had new queens begin laying in great patterns and then 2 weeks later be missing and the bees are raising an emergency queen. This has repeated enough times that I am sure there is a queen killer on the loose. But they all get better and though close to the edge of not enough bees they manage to build up again. We’ll see how many have allowed for the dearth that’s coming. I have a feeling I’ll be picking up a big bag of sugar. If you need to feed remember pure sugar is all the same. Don’t worry if it is cane or beet and don’t look for an organic label. Get just plane sugar, nothing raw or brown, or powdered. Only exception is drivert which is sugar (sucrose) that has been partially converted to simple sugars, but I don’t believe the extra expense buys you much.

The blackberries are going longer this year most likely because of the wet June. I’m still adding supers mostly because I like to encourage the girls. I’ve been watching for mites, mostly by using the 24 hour drop onto a corrugated plastic sheet sprayed with Pam. So far, they are under control. But we need to be careful they can explode in July and August. I also have not seen many yellow jackets this year. I have deployed fipronil bait stations the past 2 years and I have not had a bad fall attack in that time. I will put the recipe in next months newsletter if you would like to try it. The best time to bait them is in August.

Every year the swallows would be a delight to watch as they swoop, dive and speed in their insect search. And every year I don’t enjoy it much as they do it within 100 feet of my hives. I do have 9 hives set up in one place so there is probably 250,000 bees on field duty making that area a buzzing cafeteria for the swallows so I am partly to blame. I noticed for the first time this June something interesting. Bees chasing swallows. Exactly! There would be 1 or up to 5 honey bees right on their tail. Swallows are fast and gifted direction changing artists, but the bees matched them turn for turn, up and down. The swallow would retreat. But there are not enough bees interested in chasing those graceful birds so the swallows continue to swallow and the queen continues to make more bees and it’ll all work out.

The other pest we are concerned with Is the Asian Giant Hornet. The last proven detection was on June 6. A resident in Bellingham found an AGH wiggling on their front porch and they stepped on it, then reported it. This is 15 miles south of the previous sighting in Custer. Official citizen trapping began on July 1. The Washington State Dept of Agriculture has plans for making traps, deploying them, and reporting results. They aren’t looking to set up traps this far south and it is not likely we have been colonized at this time. If you would like to follow this more closely then join the Asian Giant Hornet Watch group on facebook. I read an interesting report on beekeepers and the coronavirus. In Hubei province, the epicenter of COVID-19 in China, the local beekeepers association conducted a survey of beekeepers. A total of 5115 beekeepers were surveyed from February 23 to March 8, including 723 in Wuhan. None of these beekeepers developed symptoms associated with COVID-19, and their health was totally normal. After that, they interviewed five apitherapists in Wuhan and followed 121 patients of their apitherapy clinic. These patients had received apitherapy from October 2019 to December 2019, and all the five bee apitherapists treat themselves for their own health care. Without any protective measures, two of the five apitherapists were exposed to suspected COVID-19 cases and others were exposed to confirmed COVID-19 cases, but none of them were infected. None of the 121 patients were infected by SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes covid-19), and three of them had close contact with immediate family members who were confirmed SARS-CoV-2 Infection cases. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/grows-virus-cell-culture.html I don’t know if anything further is being done to test whether this study is on to something, but it did catch my attention. Bill