I haven’t inspected my hives in about six weeks. Primarily I have been looking forward to solving the mystery of the blue marked queens. The mystery may not be entirely solved, but I do have a few answers. It turns out that the queen that KZ and I marked with […]
I may be losing my mind – that would be a much easier explanation – or I just observed a very odd thing. I was looking into the two nucs with some bees, hives 5 and 6. Hive 5 is the cardboard box which is supposed to have my ‘banked’ […]
This past Saturday we gathered at Mel and Dawn’s house to do some honey extracting. Mel had the most to extract. I had a little bit. Kristien chose not to take any honey away from her bees this year, and Liz didn’t have any as all of her hives were […]
I was inspecting to see how much honey I might have to harvest this year, and when I looked into hive 4 and pulled the second frame in the top of three medium boxes this is what I found. This is Sally 2 from the Q1 rearing. There was so […]
I checked my two NUCs again today which should have been day 18. In hive 6 the queen cell was open on the tip which seemed promising, but upon closer inspection, I realized that the queen was still in the cell. There were no bees in or on the open […]
It’s late so I’ll be brief. I checked my two NUCs today at around 3 pm and neither queen (George 2) had yet emerged. Hive 6 only had a handful of bees with another handful of capped brood cells available. I opened the cage and I expect that she will […]
I decided to name my Q1 Queen Mother, Sally. All of the grafted queen larvae produced Sally 2 queens. I’m about 80% sure Sally swarmed shortly thereafter, so hive 1 now also has a Sally 2a. I am still quite happy with Sally 2a in hive 1. I also have […]
This morning we inspected the nurse hive and found seven queen cells that were capped. It appeared to all of us that they were rather small/short and not obviously filled with royal jelly as we saw with some of the cells in Q1. We decided to prepare places for all […]
Two days ago when I looked at my hives my main focus was on see how the two swapped queens were doing. Today I wanted to take another look at hive 3 and swap wood for cardboard in hive 5. The swap was no problem but I was reminded that […]
Today was the first day with some sun in about three days. I have been concerned about one of my new queens and I wanted to take a look. Just to review, hive 1 was the only hive to overwinter. I lost two others. We took bees from this hive […]
