June was a busy month for us in Argyle.  The last major rainfall event was on June 3 and other than a couple sprinkles after that, we have been, and continue to be very dry.  As a result, the country flowering population has dwindled considerably.  I know from speaking with some other members that their bees are doing quite well and socking away the honey, but I suspect most of those folks are benefiting most from nicely watered lawn and garden situations.  The club's honey extractor is being utilized.

While we enjoy the honey, we have our bee hives for the purpose of a tax exemption and so maintaining hives is more important than harvesting honey.  With the current dearth situation, we may not be getting much in the way of honey this year.   Most of the wildflowers on our property are not blooming and the vitex (6 plants) that  we planted and that bloomed so nicely early on has gone to seed and isn't being much help either, despite having blooms until late in the summer last year.

We had a lot go on with the hives.  We had 3 weak hives that we were trying to get established.  All three were overrun with hive moths in short order.  That was sad and depressing as nobody wants to lose a hive. We took too more hives down to nucs as we were afraid that they might eventually succumb as well and we started feeding syrup to the nucs.  As of our last check 10 days ago, both of the nucs seem to be doing well and we may be able to expand back to full hive status as long as we continue with the supplemental feeding.

Two of our larger hives were also in trouble.  The queens were laying and the population looked good, but they were not able to create much in the way of stored food.  We put them on supplemental feeding as well.

Four of our hives seem to be doing well as of last check and are putting away extra resources.  These all have honey supers on them but whether we get the honey or they use it is still yet to be determined. 

Of the hives doing well, one hive is a beautiful example of hive management, and a lot of good luck, maybe more on the good luck.  It was started from a split early in the year and started with brood including queen cells, but no queen.  Over the next few weeks, we added to it two hives that were weak and queenless.  A queen was successful in emerging, mating, and returning and is generating a lot of brood.  This is something of a Frankenstein hive, but is also quite the survivor with good honey stores.

Two of the hives we lost were splits that we queened with Saskatraz queens.  However, the third, established hive we put a Saskatraz queen into is doing absolutely great.  She is producing a lot of brood and well patterned.  This hive is one of the ones with a surplus of honey as well.

At the end of June, we also inherited a beautiful top bar style hive.  This is our first experience with this type of hive, but it came to us healthy and with a strong queen.  So we come into July with seven full hives and two nucs and hopefully will finish July with nine full hives...