Our timing is actually mainly a logistics matter. I would think it PERFECT if we could have all our bees home and fed for early October but it would cost me a kings ransom and we would get into a very serious bottleneck at home base with the yard all backed up with pallets waiting to go through the extracting room. we have over 60 pallets waiting as it is.....
We are also using invert all the time, only variant is fondant in times when they will not take the syrup, which mostly means December to early March. Nothing wrong with your timings if you do not have other pressures and you are using normal sugar syrup. They can take and store invert safely as sound stores a good bit later than needs to be the case with less concentrated feed.
The old saying that if you are up for the grouse shooting you are up in time held good this year, in fact some people went a lot later than that this year and did fine. On a smaller scale you can afford to wait till you see the whites of its eyes before you go. It takes us 2 to 3 weeks to move everything. The old saying sometimes holds true, but of course it discounts the bell heather. Even though, in 12 of the last 20 years the best flow was past if you waited till the 12th August. Some years there is little ling and the bell is the bulk of what comes in. We start to move in the first week of July, to have everything up in time, bell dominant sites first like Dinnet, and higher ling sites last. Earliest season we had in Deeside had the main ling flow starting in the last days of July, and we cannot afford to miss it, so we get our skates on fairly sharpish knowing we are missing little of commercial value down here. Like you, in late August it was looking catastrophic, maybe 20% of normal overall, but it picked up to merely being a failure (in commercial terms that is).
If we had to treat for varroa now we would wait until the week before Christmas and do an oxalic trickle. Works fine though a bit hard on the small ones which we would probably prefer to leave to take their chance (but never do for fear of them reinfesting their neighbours). We never sublimate as we just cannot deal with the logistics of going round everything for the succession of treatments required, and no chemist/beekeeper I know does it, and was advised very strongly by one of them not to. I have staff welfare and possible litigation to consider if any of them were harmed by it. One of my guys used to do it in Germany and Austria and did not greatly rate the effects and also that it made them feel pretty off colour after doing very large numbers of hives every few days.
You are local, and I have no problem if you were to pop in some time and see what we do and have a chatter. Any who do find out we are not the big bad bogey man, but actually just the same in so many ways, just the numbers are bigger.
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