Three weeks after install is when a new package colony crosses a line. The queen has been laying long enough that you have real capped brood — which means mites have places to hide and reproduce. It is the first moment when a mite count actually tells you something useful.

We ran an alcohol wash on both hives today. Half a cup of bees, a jar of isopropyl, sixty seconds of agitation, and you pour the wash through a mesh lid to count what falls out. It is not complicated, but it matters — this number is your baseline, the thing everything else gets measured against.

Sawyer's hive: 3 mites per 300 bees — 1%. Josh's hive: 2 mites per 300 bees — under 1%. Both hives well below the 2% treatment threshold. No Apivar needed today.
Sawyer's hive frame with drawn comb and bees working
Sawyer's hive — good comb coverage and a healthy population building steadily.
Josh's hive showing dense bee population on brood frame
Josh's hive — noticeably more bees at the same age. That colony is moving fast.

The two hives are running different speeds. Josh's colony has more bees, more capped brood, and is drawing comb faster than Sawyer's at the same point. That is not unusual — two queens from the same supplier can still lay at different rates, and a ten-day difference in tempo is nothing to worry about this early. What matters is that both colonies are healthy, both queens are productive, and both mite counts came back clean.

A clean baseline is not a reason to stop watching. More capped brood means more mite reproduction cycles ahead. These colonies will be rechecked in late May, right before the tulip poplar flow winds down — that is when the number that matters most will show itself.
Josh's hive brood frame showing capped brood and open cells

Josh's hive brood frame — capped cells in a solid crescent, open cells staged and ready. That queen is not wasting space.

We have got Apivar strips on hand if the late-May count crosses the line. For now, both hives stay on the same schedule — keep feeding until they do not need it, watch for the point where each colony is covering seven or eight frames, and add a second box before they run out of room. With tulip poplar coming in the next few weeks, that decision may come sooner than expected for at least one of them.

The mite wash is one of those things that sounds tedious until the first time you do it and realize you just got a real answer about something that could have quietly gone wrong without it. Two hives, two clean counts. We will take it.

Custom top feeder box installed on hive

The new custom top feeder box — screened floor hole, jar access, deep box enclosure. A clean step up from the quart jar inner cover.

Update — same day: Opened both entrance reducers to the full slot. Swapped two frames in each hive for plastic foundation to give them more drawing room. Installed new custom top feeder boxes — a deep box with a screened floor hole and jar access, built to replace the quart jar inner cover setup. Cleaner, more protected, and a lot more capacity.