I promised you all a report on my latest attempt at queen rearing. The good news is that I got two queen cells out of my Cloake Board setup.  The bad news is that these cells were not from my grafts; instead they were emergency queen cells  drawn out from one of the frames of brood I used to make up my Cloake board. My lesson learned is that I need to check the entire Cloake Board setup for queen cells before I put in my grafts, and of course get rid of any I find. Once again I  have learned that successful queen raising is the result of doing many little things right. Still, the resulting queen cells looked really good – much better than typical emergency queen cells. The frame with the emergency queen cells has  been transferred to a mating colony, and I will look in on it later in the week to see if the new queen is off to a good start.
Queen rearing time is pretty much over for the year. I ’ll digest everything I learned from this year’s attempts, and try again next year.

On a more positive note, goldenrod has come into bloom locally, and the bees are working it pretty hard. I no longer  have to feed pollen patties. Also, the nectar flow from the goldenrod and other fall flowers has been good this year, so I don’t plan on feeding any sugar syrup at the moment. In other good news, my Varroa mite counts have been low –  almost suspiciously low.  As to my low Varroa counts, I went to the Alabama Beekeepers Association’s annual meeting this weekend, and learned two facts that seem to be in direct contradiction: N Varroa mites and their attendant virus
problems are the biggest cause of colony losses.  N More and more Alabama beekeepers are getting Varroa counts that are too low to warrant treating for the mites.

All of this might make sense if overall Alabama colony losses were significantly different than the losses folks in other  areas are having, but our losses are about the same as everywhere else. So, I ’m left with a mystery to solve.  And finally, something else came out of the meeting: 1 year survival rates for colonies started from packages were significantly lower
than survival rates for colonies started with nucs. As we don’t use many packages down here, I don’t have any data on the relative survival rates. So, I ’ll put that question to the Montgomery County beekeepers: What are your relative  survival rates for colonies started from packages vs. colonies started from nucs?

Let me know!