There seems to have been a skunk attack. On Monday morning there were a few dead bees on the landing board and digging marks in the dirt in front of the two bottom corners. So, I put up a fence with sharp pokey parts on the top and some blackberry vines for barbed wire, and i thought it was unlikely a skunk could climb over. the next morning there was a bit of digging around the bottom of the fence, and the next morning a hole that almost went under, but there was a sharp pokey wire sticking down into the hole so i hope the skunk got discouraged and didnt actually make it under. Last night Danna shoved a paving stone into/over the hole and i put a nail board to guard the ground beside it. this morning there was a little disturbance in the dirt in front of the stone/nailboard but it looks like not much effort was made. i hope the skunk (im assuming it was the skunk) is discouraged enough to give up.
I opened the hive today and everything looked ok to my inexperienced eye.I looked at all the open brood for any sign of mites and didnt see any. I did a sugar shake test but i dont know if i had a large enough sample of bees. I sprinkled the sugar onto a piece of white paper and looked for mites but i could not find any.
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I wasnt sure what to look for in the sugar, because i didnt have a clear idea of what size the mites are. I thought they were tiny tiny little things, and when a saw more than twenty little specks in the sugar i began to despair. When I began to look more closely with a magnifying glass, and then with a microscope at the little dark specks in the sugar, my hope returned, because I could not find anything that looked like a mite at all.
Danna found this pic http://picsdigger.com/keyword/varroa%20mite/ to give a better idea of the size we were looking for and there was certainly nothing that big in the sugar. So to make a long story short, i could not find any mites. If theres no mites, then theres no reason to treat for them.
1 more thing: there is one frame in the top box on the outside wall that doesnt have anything in it. it has only a little comb drawn out but nothing stored in it. im thinking that one could be taken out and a feeder put in, if it is a good time to start feeding.
