Thursday, August 11, 2011

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?

1 comment:

  1. YAY! Glad to hear they are doing well! Can't think of a name other than #3 or equally uncreative.
    edit: The Heatherite hive?

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