New Queen Cells in Formation

Had to open up the new hive today, and lo and behold, at least 3 peanut shapes well into formation, they're growing their new queen! No longer is it the 'Sunshine' Hive, since unfortunately, the yellow box & base was part of a mix-up and needed to be returned to the Surrey Beekeeping Assoc.... so we moved them into yet another new box, with a spiffy side sliding base. Hopefully didn't disturb too much, I moved veeerrrrry slowly and used the new frame grabber tool to just ease them up and down. Hope also they're not confused by the color change. So far good traffic in sunshine reported, and on observation, not too many lost drifting back to the old hive. They completely finished off the first batch of syrup we gave them, so we fed another couple of cups of sugar water today. Counting the feeder as frame one, the queens are lined up along the 'front' bottom of frame 3. They've cleaned out most of the mess in the old (dark) comb of frames 7 & 8, while they're not touching the white plastic crap base in frames 9 & 10. I picked up some wire wax bases from the Bee Supply the other day, and would like to swap out that plastic in both the hives. May feed them one more time next week, but don't want to disturb them much now for about 3 weeks while we wait for the virgin queen to be born! New hive needs a name... any suggestions?

Making Increase

So, we attempted a split, hopefully this will make increase, and not threaten both hives. Took 3 frames of mixed capped/uncapped brood (w/honey on the outside edges) and LOTS of bees (incl. LOTS of drones :( also added into the new hive two frames of capped honey.

There were only a couple more frames of fully drawn out capped honey in the brood chambers of the orig. and none of the single super's frames are filled and capped yet, they're still working on drawing out most of those wireframed bases. (Not sure what happened to the emptied, drawn out supers from last summer... did the wee beasties get into those?) Anyway, left the bottom brood box as is (looked thru every frame and *still* couldn't find the queen, but I triple checked the 5 frames that went to the new hive and didn't see her there.) On the upper brood box, I swapped in 5 new frames, at locations 1, 4, 5, 6, & 7 (one or two plastic un-drawn (1&4, i believe), one nicely drawn out, fairly new comb(5 i think), and two were ugly dark older drawnout comb that needed cleaning -- all these new dadant frames were part of the package of 6 boxes, 3 lids & base I picked up from a Langley beekeeper last week.)

The new hive (thanks Buzz for the quick construction of a bottom board!) was installed in the backyard of Heather & Ian over by the school. There was a lot of angry buzzing, but they settled down fairly quickly and most all marched in. Fed them a 1:1 sugar syrup in the inside feeder (w/a couple of twigs tossed in for them to climb on to drink so hopefully no drownings.)

In the initial hunt for the queen, I didn't want to smoke them, and I got tagged twice on the hand. I should have taken out the first stinger much quicker, but waited 'till I got out and found scissors and scrapped it. Now a day later, am still severely swollen in the hand and have next to no muscle strength in my right hand. I see from the interwebs that quick is more important than neat in getting out the stinger, so we shall know for next time... don't drop the hive tool, use it to scrape out the stinger RIGHT AWAY. extreme pain! Hope Buzz' swelling has gone down, I think we sufficiently pissed them off, that he got tagged a couple of times too!

Now we shall wait and see what happens... hopefully the new yellow 'sunshine' hive will start to grow it's own queen this week... and the weather'll be great right into the late fall!

best,
-=pj=-

A Late Summer Split?!

Last week when we went in to check the hive was overflowing with bees! The weather has finally really warmed up and the blackberry flowers have been going full tilt for weeks, and now almost all turned to little green berries. Only one super has been on (for about 3 or 4 weeks now) and it is filling up, but not full by any means. It was a late spring, and all the berries were a few weeks later than last year, but still not nearly as much honey as last year. Could have been because of the preponderance of drones we noted last month. That situation seems to have stabilized, and the drone population, tho still high, seems to again be (happily) far outnumbered by the workin' girls.

Now, it might prove to be too late in the season to attempt a split but we are concerned about a swarm from an egg-bound queen, so we are going to attempt a "takeaway split" tomorrow, and hopefully we will find a nice queen cell already begun being drawn out for the new hive.

More notes (and pictures) to follow after the move!

-=pj=-