May 25, 2017 - added queen to one hive

One of the Nucs I bought a month ago has not florished at all.  It has no eggs.  I thought about letting them build a queen cell, currently in production, but decided to get a new queen so that I don't lose any more valuable time this spring.  I bought my queen for $35 from Charles Andros up in Alstead, NH, making an early morning trip there.

I took out the frame that has the queen cell on it and added that to a Nuc along with another frame that has a lot of capped brood and honey.  I am hoping they'll finish making the queen and let nature take care of itself.

Meanwhile, I added the new queen to the small hive that has only one deep after seeing how the bees were with the new queen.  They seemed ok and not trying to kill her. Hopefully she will survive and I'll take a look sometime this weekend to see if she's out and alive.. This hive has a lot of uncapped honey in it so I also added an empty frame that she can use to lay eggs...but I believe it also needs comb built.  We'll see how things go.

On the larger hive, I saw a lot of burr comb down below so thought they may be thinking of swarming.  I'm told that doesn't usually happen the first year, but I'm keeping vigil so I don't lose these bees to that!

I also did a bit of checkerboarding in the lower deep, adding a few empty frames and move some of the loaded frames to the top deep.  And one of these loaded frames went in to support the new Nuc I started today.