As you readers already know, I had to get a new queen for my Hive #2. The first one disappeared and the hive had stopped thriving. Two weeks ago, I added the queen to the hive. After 3 or 4 days, I checked on her, to see if she'd eaten her way out (eating the candy plug) yet. I also worried that I placed her between frames but didn't expose the screened side to the colony...and worried I might have suffocated my queen.
So when moving the queen cage, trying to fix her to expose the screen to the colony, it fell to the bottom of the hive. By then, bees were attacking me, trying to get through my beekeeper's suit (thankfully I bought that protection!). When I saw that the cage landed with the screen up, and the queen was still moving around, I left well enough alone and closed up the hive.
Yesterday, now 10 days later, I decided to see if I still had a queen or if she got out of her cage.
I opened the hive and saw a mound of bees around the cage at the bottom of the hive. This time, I reached down to get the cage in hand. And there was my queen, feisty and seemingly in good health! But she didn't seem to want to come out of the cage, even though the candy was gone and she could. So I removed the screen from the cage, giving her more space to exit, and then shook it over the hive and then I removed the cage from the hive.
I then closed up the hive.
However today I need to help her out and take some brood from Hive #1 and add a few frames of bees and brood from #1 to #2. If I don't do that, she won't have enough workers in the hive because the ones I bought in April are now dying away. Hive #1 is packed with bees so they could lose a few to Hive #2 and, so I read, this will strengthen #2 and give them time build their numbers before cold weather comes. They need each other to make it through the winter.
While I'm in Hive #2 today, I will move the full super to the top of the hive so that, when I'm ready to extract, it'll be easier to put on the triangle board. This hive is very aggressive right now with all that honey in there. I should extract soon...I may decide to put the triangle board on so that tomorrow I could get that super inside and extract the honey. It's pretty heavy for me. I took two frames out a few weeks ago just to lighten it up.
I find lifting these hives can be difficult for a woman...at least for this woman! Over time, I hope to migrate from the deeps to mediums so that each section of the hive is lighter. Either that or I build more muscle.
All this activity reminds me that I'm no expert here. I am learning new things every step of the way. This procedure of building one hive using the brood of another makes sense to me. We'll see how it goes.
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