Today when I went to check on the nucs, it was obvious that a massive robbing event was underway at the purple and orange nucs (primarily the purple one). There were bees everywhere in the air in front of the nuc. Way more bees than is appropriate for the number that […]
June 30 When I opened the center compartment of my queen castle, I fashioned a robbing screen from 8 count screen. It was based on a simple screen I had seen online that was designed for a traditional entrance along the bottom board. Because the entrance on this compartment is […]
The first nuc I went into was the purple one. This is a cell that I grafted from George. Meet George’s offspring: The next nuc is the orange one. This is one that Andrew grafted from George. […]
Early on the morning of June 29th, we met at Kristien’s yard to assess the queen cells. First we checked the deep nurse colony: The bee density was not as strong as we had hoped for. A possible solution to this is to gather the bees for the nurse colony […]
It appears that rearing queens triggers the expectant mom renovation urge in me! This time I have modified some medium boxes into nucs! First I took a screen bottom board and added a center divider so that the bees in each nuc can’t reach the other. I also made up […]
On June 18, Kristien and I installed a queen excluder and moved the deep frames of brood above the excluder so that the comb will be cleared by mid july and I can return it to it’s rightful owner. (Whoever that may be! Thanks!) This week I was checking on […]
On Sunday, June 22, we met at Kristien’s house to graft the cells for Round 3 of the queen rearing project. We first checked on the nurse nucs we had made up on Saturday. The deep nuc still seemed strong; however, it did seem that some of the bees had flown back […]
So at about 8:30 on the morning of June 18th we checked to see how many nucs we needed to prepare for the soon-to-be emerging queens. We counted 7 capped cells. They seemed a little short and we detected movement of the queens within the cells. Off we went to prepare […]
In preparation for determining how many queen cells might be viable, I built a queen castle from medium equipment. I put it together using old equipment and excess lumber and coroplast laying around the house. I was lucky enough to find a piece of molding exactly the width I needed […]
