2011-09-02: Meds

The plan for the day was to remove the honey supers from Artemis and then add the apistan anti-mite medication to that have (since you don't want to have medication (in this case thyme oil fumes) permeating the honey that you want to eat). Also in the works was to put the wedges/spacers that I built myself on top of the double nucs to provide enough space on top to allow me to place the medication on top of them as well (since I have been seeing mites on them even though). In this photo you can see that they got through the tropical storm fine and you can see the bare wood of the one way bee escape halfway up Artemis.

 

Things did not go as planned. Last time I had placed an one way exit under the honey supers so that the bees could vacate the supers as they retreat from them at night but can't get back. I had taken the top board and reversed it so that they could not enter the supers via the top entrance groove. I had overlooked the fact that the bees still could work there way under the outer cover and get int through the hole i the top of the inner cover, and indeed many bees did just that and the supers had plenty of bees in them. I covered the inner cover hole with a piece of wood and resigned myself to removing them in a future visit. This also delayed any plans of adding medication to Artemis. This is a picture of that inner cover showing the cut groove that acted as a top entrance and the hole in the middle.

 

The double nucs went smoother. I removed the pollen pattie remnants from last time as well as adding more sugar water to the inner feeders I had placed in then (they were empty). I probably should have been using the feeders from the first day of building the double nucs so that they could draw out the comb and fill them with honey. Well, there is always next year. I placed the spacer in and added one half of a apistan container to each.