Two weeks ago I put a tray of Apiguard in the hive. The tray was close to empty today, so I’m leaving it in for a couple more days. The usual Spring treatment is two trays for a maximum of 6 weeks (altogether). But I was late starting the treatment as my bees took a long time building up their population. I don’t want to do the second treatment because it’s time for the honey supers to go on, and it’s not desirable to have all that thymol in the honey.
The colony has obviously grown and I’m happy with their size now. They’ve been building all these comb “towers” to fill up the extra space created by the rim board. I took all those off with my hive tool, because once I put on the supers the rim board needs to go. What a wonderful haul of clean wax. The bees were very mellow, didn’t mind me scraping off all that hard work or even shaking them off before I threw the comb into a jar.
I’ll go back in a few days to take out the Apiguard and put on the first honey super, with the queen excluder in between (don’t want bee grubs int he honey either).