Sunday, June 11, 2017

Inspection today sees evidence of a queen!

Last week I did an inspection of the hives and  Hive 1 appears to be thriving.  Today I inspected again and Hive 1 is still just bursting with activity.  I see a lot of uncapped honey and other frames pretty full so I went ahead and added a super onto Hive 1.  They seem to be doing fine with the entrance opening.  In a week or two, I will probably fully open the entrance.  They had a good amount of comb coming off from the bottom of the frame. I took it off.  I also took one of the frames that appeared to have some queens in development.  I moved that and another few frames to the nuc.

Let's talk about the Nuc

Two weeks ago, I moved a few frames into that same Nuc with the queen cell. but I didn't move the Nuc to another yard so when I checked on them, I saw that the bees were gone.  So I left the frames in there, including the frame that had the large queen cell and still closed up.

My intent today was to split Hive #1 and load up the Nuc and take it to another yard this time. I put a frame in there with one frame I found that had a bunch of queen cells in the making and a few other frames of honey and syrup.  I'm hoping they finish making queen cells and maybe I can get a new queen that way.  My intent was to raise a queen for Hive #2 that had no eggs in last week's inspection.
The one I purchased and added apparently didn't make it.  But today, there were eggs!  I was so excited.  There must be a queen in there now.it's more likely the queen I bought laid the eggs but I don't know why it would take her so long.  She came out of the cage on 5/31 and only started laying eggs sometime this week.  

I first thought it might have come from the Nuc since that queen cell now had a hole at the end.  She had hatched and she was gone...perhaps to Hive #2 This queen would need to take its maiden flights, etc. so think it's too soon for her to begin laying eggs.

Very positive inspection today.


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