I posted this in the general beekeeping forum this afternoon but I'm now convinced - I went down to the bee yard this evening and now 5 of the hives are bearding heavily and I can smell the Thymol from about 20 feet away.
Anyone else having a similar response?
What a weekend!
So we pulled all of the honey supers Saturday and Sunday. Then we went through and put on Apiguard trays with spacers. (closed up the screen bottom boards).Put the wet supers back on top above inner cover and still when I went to remove the "clean" supers Sunday morning they were filling them again. So we knocked the bees off and put the wet supers outside. Holy robbing of the supers! Note: Pity the Fool that put wet supers near the house! We moved them in the afternoon and they're still working them like crazy today - hopefully they'll be pretty cleaned out by tonight and we can bring them in to store for winter.
So last evening it looked like the colonies had started a bearding contest. Wow. The entire landing board and the lower box front are covered with bees including wrapping around to the sides about 4" on 3 of the hives. The others are bearding a little also which they don't usually do. So in the evening I put a medium with small cell starter strip on each of the three that were just crazy bearding thinking they could use the space. This has not really helped at all. I doubt they'll be able to draw out the supers before winter but I thought it might give them something to work on plus I can pull the partially drawn frames when we settle them down for winter and store the frames until spring - give me some material to work with for increase next year. If they do manage to draw and fill them, then they'll winter in 2 deeps plus medium.
We're having a hot spell up here (for us) with daytime temps in the mid 70's to low 80's. Good for the Apiguard says the label.
I'm thinking the Apiguard might be contributing to the bearding? It sure does have quite a smell. Quite a knockdown on the mites as well! I checked the bottom inserts this morning after about 24 hours and there were literally hundreds of mites - so many I didn't even bother to count. These hives have been doing 20 - 40 mites on a regular 24 hour count even the 24 hrs after fogging with FGMO.
Looks like the mite problem was worse than I thought. Also looks like the Thymol works pretty darn good.
So I put about 1/5 a tray of thymol on each of the overwintering nucs and the new Observation Hive. It will be interesting to see how the OB hive reacts.
Now it is time for bottling and labeling - more work than you think but tasty!