Ike

It is the single most common reason new beekeepers think they are failing. Ask anyone at the club what their package did in year one and the tone changes.

Your job for the rest of the season is weight and mites, not honey. Get them to overwintering weight, do a mite count in August, and next spring they will explode out of the box in a way that makes this year look silly.

It is plastic foundation. So it might just be that they dislike it?

Neither matters as much as weight and mite load. A heavy, low-mite colony survives minus 20 unwrapped in an open field; a light one with mites dies in a wrapped hive at minus 5. Heft the back of that hive before you spend a weekend on carpentry.

Nine per 300 is three percent, and in August, going into the period when winter bees are being reared, that is treatment territory by any threshold I have seen. The bees that will carry the colony through winter are being raised right now, and mites feeding on those specific larvae is what kills hives in February, not the cold. Pull the supers if you want honey for yourself, then treat. With daytime highs of 28C a lot of the organic acid options are outside their temperature window, so read the label for the product you can actually get, because that window is not advice, it is the difference between a treated hive and a dead queen.

Yes, and be generous. Whatever your local overwintering weight is, hit it before you take a frame for yourself. A colony you treated but starved is the same dead hive with a different story.

Three weeks of leaving them alone is the hard part and it is where most people ruin it. A virgin needs about a week to mature, a few days of decent weather to mate, and then a few days to start laying. Every inspection in that window risks her getting balled or lost on a mating flight because you opened the box at the wrong hour. Mark the date on your calendar and do not touch it.