so today i went outside it's april the 8th and we had a heat wave yeah you're looking at things in
slow motion here on this landing board but i wanted to talk about a couple of things
so that you might be getting ready if you're in the northern united states look at all your
landing boards and see what kind of activity is going on and we see what's going on here
the landing board looks fresh and clean doesn't it that's because yesterday i pulled it apart
and took away the old landing board and replace it with the cedar solid landing board and a new
entrance reducer here and of course a new slatted rack which is right above the landing board that
just gives us some extra space and but what i really wanted to talk about was this is a deep
10 frame supe a deep 10 frame brood box and i had a medium 10 frame super on it that they
went through winter what kind of bees are these well these are the bee weaver bees
that are doing pretty well for me here in the state of pennsylvania
and notice all the pollen coming in and look in the background there those are willow trees and
you can see that the catkins have opened up and now they're providing lots of pollen i planted
those there because i get an early indicator of what's going on in the wetlands nearby
so this dark orange pollen that they're bringing in on their pollen baskets
is probably from the willow trees there's also some dark olive pollen coming in
but what you get a chance to look at when you're scanning your landing boards is the
rate of pollen coming in so if we have more than 10 per minute i've said that many times over
you can pretty well guess that there's some brood production going on in there and that your queen
very good chance you made it through winter and these are bringing in
20 or 30 per minute so this colony got my attention and that's why i needed to get
inside the other thing is we don't see any drones yet male bees on the landing board good sign
but i want to make sure to get ahead of things because this colony is building up
close up here you can see a guard be there on the right she keeps opening her mandibles and checking
everybody out on the way in and when i pulled the medium super off so between the medium and
the deep brood box i disrupted a bunch of cells that were drone larvae so they had drones that
were already capped so that's coming pretty soon we want to be ready now for my area this is early
i wouldn't normally be worried about expanding colonies now but uh there's buildup happening and
i wanted to share that with you if you're in the northern united states it's time to pay attention
if you don't want them to swarm out we have to give them extra space this time of year
i did not see any queen cells started that's good news they do have a queen and so i added
that extra box i want to give myself some time here so the other thing is some people want to
know do you paint those landing boards why or why not well this one the landing board i did not
paint because it's also part of the bottom board and it is made out of cedar so cedar's naturally
weather resistant lasts a long time and i got these from better b so this is a 10 frame and
of course the slatted rack is just regular pine and i did not paint that although i do recommend
that you do if you wanted to last a long time i kind of did a last minute swap out here when i
saw how they were building up the other thing is this landing board was too close to the ground
it was about 12 or 13 inches off the ground which meant that the skunks who have come out of torpor
come out of hibernation they were coming and inspecting landing boards so this was one of
my colonies in the apiary that was too low and the skunks could reach it skunks will stand
up on their tiptoes scratch the landing board and then when the guards fly out at night they
get disoriented laying in the grass and the skunks go over roll them with their feet and eat them
so now this one is at 18 and a half inches from the ground which is out of reach of skunks
so that's one of my goals this year is to make sure all my landing boards are out of reach of the
skunks in a few moments here i'm going to show you what the live action natural speed is for these
beasts you can get a feel for what the activity is on the landing board and then after that we're
going to go right back into a longer slow motion sequence you can just watch them but i just wanted
to give you a heads up it's time to keep an eye on them expand them ahead of their preps for swarming
and maybe you can head off a swarm and instead as is my goal here today when they build up enough i
want to do a split don't want to wait for them to swarm i wanted to expand the colonies expand
the boxes give them room and i did use foundation no drawn comb so i hope you enjoy this thanks for
watching thanks for visiting check out your own landing boards and make sure you're ready to go
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