It's been wet this week

Colorado usually sports well over 300 days of sunshine every year, making us one of the sunniest states in the nation, if not the sunniest (if you're reading this from another state and are thinking about moving here - do realize that it snows even when it's sunny...really! I wouldn't lie to you to keep you out of my birth state. And when they say Denver is a cow town, it's true: traffic can be held up for hours during a cattle drive, really!) However, this week seems to be putting a damper on those numbers. It rained for nearly 48 straight hours earlier in the week, nearly 1" of precipitation, and has rained or drizzled off and on most of the weekend - snow was even predicted for last night but didn't fall here in Aurora.

Weather like this is good and bad for the bees. Good in that they'll get an opportunity to feast on bunches and bunches of flowers that will spring up when the sun gets back to its work. However, imagine getting stuck in the house with your 20,000 to 30,000 sisters for two days - TWICE in one week. Not only would it likely make you a bit surly, but now you have to eat all the honey that you've been working to store away for the season. If weather like this continued for some reason, a decent chance of starvation rears its head - 15 years ago or so we had 40 straight days of drizzle and rain in April and May, which makes me think of how the bees did then.

Weather like this is also messing with this beekeeper's plans. The bees should be ready for getting split from two into four hives. I did a brief inspection last week and both hives were boasting strong populations and lots of new eggs and brood. And the Sicilians were, how shall I say, spunky as always: even after I had bottled them back up a couple of guard bees followed me back to the car some 50' away and harassed a buddy that wanted to see what the bees were like but was more than 20' off on the other side of the Italians. The Italians were mild-mannered as always, so I have to rule out the possible lack of forage making the Sicilians more defensive over their stores. That all said, I do welcome the timing of the rain. The new blooms will help to keep the split hives well-fed so they can get their population ramped back up.

Our concern with splitting the hives is this: two of the four hives will initially have no queens and will have to create their own.  The new blooms we're hoping for should assist in keeping their spirits up, so to speak, and help push them into creating new queens. Worst case scenario, if one or both don't requeen themselves, we'll just recombine them with their "mother" hive and try again next year. If it works like we expect it to, we'll have lots more honey at the end of the season and be ready to grow evenmore next season!

Posted by Bob Nelson