On Friday Oct. 13th 2017 we had a beautiful day to prepare the hives for winter. John Krueger showed up to help me wrap the hives and get the entrance reduced on the strong hive. When I first arrived, I noticed immediately that the combined hive had less activity on the bottom entrance and a LOT of activity in the top, where the sugar water feeder is. When we looked inside, the sugar water feeder was completely empty! It had over two gallons in it ten days ago! We removed the top two boxes and confirmed what I had suspected - the hives did indeed finally combine. I have no idea if the queens fought it out and one died, or not. I also have no idea if all that sugar water ended up in th
In the picture above you can see the newspaper between the two hives. As of yesterday, Oct. 3, 2017, they still had not combined and were acting as two separate hives. I did two things to this two story hive. First of all, I observed that the bottom hive was fighting off robbers and they had some wax cappings at the entrance. I had suspected all season that perhaps the strong hive was robbing these weaker hives, which may have been part of their problem. So, to help them I needed to reduce their entrance - the bottom entrance. I had one wooden entrance reducer with me, but it was a bit too long. I didn't have any proper tools with me to cut the end off, so I crudely shortened it with
