Friday March 8th the Bee Inspector for North Arkansas came to inspect my Hives.
Since I'm going to raise queens to offer other bee keepers I have to have health certificates on each hive.
We went into the brood box and pulled frames of brood, capped cells and bees.
He was looking for anything out of the ordinary such as varroa mites in capped drone cells, wing deformity, eggs, larva and capped cells.
He checked every hive in this beeyard and they all passed with flying colors.
I'll have my certificates by late this comming week.
We noticed Drones, larva and capped drone cells.
I use beetle blasters and didn't have one small hive beetle.
Might be it's a tad early for them.
Most of the brood clusters was high in the hive, in the upper box.
The hives are strong and are bringing in pollen from somewhere, most of it was an off white color.
Some was yellow and some red in color.
We did the sugar roll and so far no mites.
I did treat with Formic Acid in Late August of 2012 for 5 days.
I looks like another week of warm weather and the hive population is going to explode.
I'm in Searcy, Arkansas north central.
About next week I'm going to do some grafting, just hope I'm not too early.
I'm going to be using the cloake board method.