My Warre hives have solid bottom boards. I considered making screened bottom boards for them, but our extreme winter temps and a desire to help the bees retain their nest scent tipped the scales on that.
There are a few benefits to a screened bottom board. Maybe least importantly is the ability to look inside the hive with a cell phone, from underneath. This is helpful when trying to determine whether or not a Warre style hive needs a new box.
For this simple task, dismantling a beehive to take a look is not something I want to do. Since I’m somewhat short and weigh just over a hundred pounds, yes, the hive would need to be taken apart box by box. It would defeat the purpose of my Warre hive setup.
A cheap snake camera has worked perfectly for this. The camera is tiny, so it doesn’t block much of an already small (and further reduced, for the smaller colony) entrance. The bees come and go fairly normally even with the camera there. The wire that the camera is on is rigid enough to keep the right angle while allowing me to stand back and also not block the entrance.
The picture quality isn’t great, but I can see clearly enough what the girls are up to. Which, in this case, is finally building comb in their second box.
This is the colony I had to requeen. They are lagging behind the other hive by half. I’m still feeding them sugar syrup, and it’s probably going to be a whole season of that, in order to get them ready for next winter. They may surprise me, as the strong hive did.
These Saskatraz bees seem to start slowly in the spring, and then have an extremely sudden population boom. With the Carniolans, it was a fast build-up, but not a sudden one.
The three water sources in the yard are busy on most days.
They’re happy to share with wild bees, and with birds.
