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Wild apple and crab apple trees are opening up here. Dandelion hit peak bloom, another week or so of that. Should have lilac in a week. We are finally into shorts weather. Forecast looks to be 70's and 80's until Friday. Moving queen cells into mating nucs tomorrow. I'll have to be aggressively...

Must be southern IL. Locust blooms in June here.

Northeast Kingdom at 1200 ft blossom report- Tuesdays sun brought forth the first few Dandelion and started blossoms on cherry trees. Willow is ongoing with weeping starting today. Crab apple is swelling to pop and apple still two weeks away when Dandelion have already peaked.

I hear you about overwintered Nucs getting very crowded. The ones that didn't run low on stores are booming! That's where I got the brood to boost things. Only took a frame from each and added a box for expansion. Those nuc stacks will be the back bone of queen rearing and started colonies in...

Warmer weather has taken its time to arrive. Unwrapped hives and completed full inspections last week then reversed boxes. Was pleasantly surprised to see capped drone brood meaning I could start queen rearing. That has to get pushed back a week because I had unsold package bees that need to be...

Hatchery stock are not very dual purpose. They are smaller and thinner than their breed implies. They lay more eggs than breeder stock birds and that's what the hatchery market is for- egg layers. The other hatchery market is meat birds. They don't deal with dual purpose even though they sell...

To specifically get hatchery stock that do not flesh out like breeder stock and are prone to aggression for the sake of sex links seems problematic. If your intent is to hatch chicks then soon enough you'll learn to identify sex by leg and stance when they are chicks. Just start with good...

They really don't care about the light. As chicks they eat and sleep. Middle of the the day they'll just flop and be sleeping in an awkward position that looks like death itself. Just like two year old humans. By the time they are three or four weeks old they don't need the heat lamp in that 70...

If you happen to have cod liver oil it's a great Vitamin D supplement to pour on feed. Little boost for spring laying.

It's a personal preference. I will say that if a person only wanted hens and eggs there is no need to specifically obtain a bird prone to brood. As replacement birds are easily obtained each spring from the feed store in an assortment of varieties. If you really wanted to hatch chicks then...

They won't push it though. Animals will try to chew it and can't then move to another spot then finally give up. I'm not sure why you'd have water getting in the high hats of metal to rust the steel wool. Regardless, whatever cheap metal material you can source. Even if it rusted some what's the...

No. You could stuff them with steel wool.

Passive ventilation is not the same as convection. "Rule of thumbs" are for passive ventilation. Open sided coops are a southern thing. Woods style coops for the North rely on a lot of depth, more than 10 ft from the "vent" wall to the roosts. It boggles the mind why the 1 square foot of...

Don't make a candy board. You are warm enough to be feeding 1:1 syrup. Hot tap water and sugar, shake well and let sit for 5 minutes. Voila! Syrup. Old milk jugs and a funnel. Pour in 4 lbs bag of sugar and add the hot tap water. Fill 3/4 way to shake well then top it off.

Troy still has 6 breeder lines that survived that hard year he had to treat for mites. He requeened anything that had to be brought in to get him back up to full production that year.

My Carni are hygienic. Low mite treatment is working. The queens I brought in after Sue Colby went to Slovenia had a slight propensity toward paralysis in fall of second year. A friend of mine brought in 30 of those queens from Strachen and found the same thing, about one third showed paralysis...

@Apis mellifera I run Carnica and like the moderate brood nest pre pollen then rapid growth. How are the Russian with spring buildup? Being they are Caucasian lineage (mitochondrial) I'm under the assumption they are a little slow to start spring.

@WannaBeHillBilly Sissonville, WV post office opens today at 8:30 am. Get down there!

They should be fine arriving tomorrow morning. Saturday morning might be pushing it for the syrup provided. I've kept bees in packages for almost two weeks by misting one side of the screen with sugar water once or twice a day. You should call the post office to ensure they don't have bees...

Unless they banked queens over winter they likely won't be local queens. This year's color is green, red is last year. If a green queen then it's not local. MI won't have a new crop of queens until sometime in June.