Queens Freed

Today we released the two new queens that we hived on Sunday. The weather was a beautiful 65 degrees F. One Queen was in the standard Queen cage and the workers freed her. The second Queen, from Karl, was in a standard Queen cage but did not have the candy plug so I pulled the mesh off the small cage and manually freed her.

New Queen Arrives

We purchased a Queen from Karl in Radford for $15.00 and installed her into the newly split hive that we separated from the main hive yesterday. There appeared to be lots more bees in the new split than yesterday. Graham said that this was a good thing. We now have three hives!!!

The weather today is overcast with a very light mist. Temperature in mid 60's.

Busy Day!

Today, we had our bee expert friend Graham visit to check the hive to make sure things were in place correctly. He said everything was in pretty good shape. We had opened up a drone cell and had seen a small mite; this is not a really bad thing because it is natural, and at the same time, the queen crawled by and was huge and full of eggs ready to lay. Graham had also split the hive for extra activity, and today at the same time our package of bees had come, so we now have the beginnings of three new hives!!!

Frame Switch

On Sunday we switched four frames. We took four from the bottom chamber, full of brood, etc, and put them in the top chamber. Then four from the top chamber, 65% full of uncapped honey and no brood, were placed into the bottom chamber. We did this to force the bees up into the upper chamber. An inspection of the hive showed no swarm cells and a very good brood pattern.

When I checked the hive today, there were many, many bees in the top chamber! I am now a bit concerned with swarming so I placed a super with some drawn comb on top. I am now going to try and leave the hive alone until Saturday when Graham comes to inspect.

Bees for the second hive arrive this Saturday. Weather forcast is not good for installing packages. :-(

April Bee Check

Today we went to do our normal weakly bee check and when we had opened our brood box, we had seen something startling. We could clearly see that there was a large bump on the lower left corner of one of the frame, this could be a queen cell but we are still not sure yet. If it gets any bigger then we will not take our chances and kill it.

Note: This could be a sign of swarming.