Honeybees & Salt Water, First Summer Hive Inspection

mchrisrogers
Jul 5, 2017
3 min read

HONEY BEES LOVE SALT WATER?:

It has been almost two months now that I have have been a beekeeper. The honeybees all seem to be doing well; plenty of activity in and out of hive, sugar water seems to immediately disappear when re-freshed, bees sighted out and about foraging.

Then I get a call from my neighbor... They have had quite a few honeybees at their lovely brand new saltwater pool. I was surprised since I have water sources close to the hive as well as a large pond. Upon researching, I found that honeybees love salt water pools more than anything, even sugar water. We decided to make our own salt water source for them. We added a scant amount of salt to one of our bird baths right near the hive. Immediately the bees were drawn to it and seemed quite pleased. Within a week our neighbors no longer had honeybees visiting their pool. Previously, I had read that bees are attracted to chlorine pools, but also read that with proper water sources near the hive they will not be drawn to pools. It is a whole different situation with salt water. There seems to be a big debate online about salt water and bees. Some say it shortens their lifespan (when in too high a quantity), and others say they need salt as part of their metabolic process. A scant amount of salt in their nearby birdbath certainly can not hurt. It is either that or they will go to the neighbors pool and be a nuisance.

Bee considerate of your neighbors with salt water pools and supply your bees with their own salt water source.

FIRST SUMMER HIVE INSPECTION:

It has been a few weeks since I have gone into my hive to do an inspection. I have read that it is not good for the bees to open up their hive too often. I check on them daily; refresh their water and sugar syrup and look at them to see how they appear from the outside.

I picked a warm (over 80 degrees F) sunny day at about 3pm for the hive inspection. Many of the bees most likely were still out foraging. I lightly smoked the entrance to the hive and inside the hive once I removed the top cover.

During the last inspection I added another super to make room for more comb and honey. I did not want them to run out of room. There was some activity in the top layer, but not much. Looks like they started to build some comb on one of the middle frames.

I set this super aside and removed the queen excluder to look at the brood box. The queen excluder was stuck on with a great deal of propolis. Very sticky on the hands.

Once the queen excluder was removed I could see plenty of activity on each frame in the brood box.

I examined one of the frames and saw capped comb and bee larvae. It seems like Empress Josephine is doing a good job and there is plentiful brood.

Since the hive looks like it is doing well, I decided to put the frame back in very gently and close the hive. I did not look for the queen and did not see if there was honey on the outside frames. I will leave that for next time in a few weeks. I am hoping they move up into the top super and start building that up with comb and honey. We will see what happens.

Next my husband examined the bottom board for varoa mites. We did not see any, but did see small little worms. I found out that these were wax moth larvae and occur if one does not clean the wax residue from the bottom board. I will need to do this more often. Since there was so much wax residue it was also harder to check for mites. Lesson learned.

Another part of bee inspection includes taking note of all the flowers in bloom on the property.

Right now there are berries in bloom and fruiting, day lilies, lavender, thyme, calendula, dill, bee balm, echinacea, garden catch fly, cat mint, elderberries, clover, tomatoes, and pepper plants all in bloom. I mostly see the honeybees on the white clover in our field.