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TIMOTHY MCGEE
Description:
| Bee Information | |
| Bees for sale? | |
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| What characteristics do you use to select your breeding stock? | |
| I'm focusing on raising bees that are suitable for winter survival, and the Buckfast line has been a good place to start. Gentle, extremely productive, and hardy. | |
| Where is the source of your bees and what strain(s) are they? | |
| I'm raising daughters from Ferguson queen stock, and allowing the queens to mate with local drones in several locations. | |
| Where do the bees overwinter? | |
| These bees are overwintered here in Farmington Hills, another location in western Oakland county, and in Fort Gratiot...which has some of the harshest lake effect weather I've seen. The weather there is probably the most similar to the location in Ontario they originated in. | |
| Do the bees spend the whole season in your home location? If not, where do they go and when, and for how long? | |
| Our bees stay at home...other than moving queens, drones, or nucs to encourage genetic diversity. | |
| Do you monitor for varroa mites? How and how often? | |
| I do random summer sugar rolls, even though I don't have a lot of faith in the method. Summertime sugar rolls can be all over the map as far as results go, yet at least they will reveal the presence of mites, pretty much guaranteed. The absolute best method for monitoring actual mite numbers, is to kill them first, then count them. In the summer you can get a general sense of the mite load after formic acid treatment, enough to know that you didn't waste your time or money. However in early winter you can get a much clearer picture by actually counting mites (over 7 days) on the inspection panels after treating with oxalic acid during a broodless period.
Full disclosure: I treat my honeybees with organic acids which effectively kill varroa. That's how I monitor for mites. I try to keep treatments to two per year, per colony. |
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| Have your hives been inspected by an inspector? | |
| Nope. | |
| Anything else? | |
| My winter survival rate has always been very good, unless I went outside reasonable parameters for mite treatment. I have made errors in the past, admittedly, however those errors only solidified the guidelines I was taught to use to stay ahead of varroa mites. | |