Summer is winding down. My options for what I can do for my hives are quickly becoming limited. Here in the mid Atlantic region fall blooming is at the peak. Pollen and some amount of nectar is still being brought in although the volume is low.

I built summer 10 nucs in July and have been feeding them to boost the production of comb and get winter stores up to a level I hope will be sufficient. So far all but two of these ten are doing very well. Both the failed ones developed queen issues and were combined. They had drawn comb on the foundation I had to use as I was short of drawn comb.

I have been hosting a training yard again this year and have been spending a good bit of my free time working with newer beekeepers. The long range goal is to encourage nuc production for hive loss replacement and\or sales to offset packages that are becoming less reliable each year.

One of the training yard hives lost the queen. There might have been a swarm with the replacement queen not returning or she was smashed during inspection.There were a few swarm cells and lots of capped brood for most of the summer then it just stopped. No eggs, no larva. A weak nuc and a weaker hive were combined into this hive and out of this conglomeration of failure arose what might work. As a training venture, it is working to demonstrate how to recover from a normal queen issue. It is also a good demonstration of why having summer nucs available can fix a lot of issues. The salvaged hive is one of the two that started this training yard so getting it through to the spring of 2020 will be especially rewarding for me.