December 11, 2015 On November 7th, we had the candy party (details and pictures to come in a post from someone else — hint, hint Todd). I used about 100 lbs of sugar to make candy for 4 full colonies, 1 2-medium-box colony and 1 nuc. I filled 1/2 of […]
8/9 what’s difference a week makes! The queen castle is robbed out and the observation hive is well provisioned! 8/11 made a nuc from the orange hive to mate queen from Q7. To Mel’s to pick up queen — she’s dead. 8/13 Observation hive – Small hive beetle! Argh! […]
On August 11, I was expecting to house a queen from the Q7 round of queen rearing. I made up a 4 frame medium nuc from my orange colony (the primary swarm from the observation hive). When I went to pick up the queen, she was dead. Darn. The nuc […]
Q7 queens were installed in several hives amongst the group. Liz’ nuc that received a Pauw was abandoned after all. Last Sunday, Mel set up another nuc. Mel and I went to the farm to see if any of the reserve queens had emerged. We found one Pauw and one […]
7/17 Pink – 5 frames drawn; 3 frames brood; queen with red mark seen Green – 7 frames drawn; 5 frames brood; queen with red mark seen Orange – 27 frames drawn; top box empty – removed; middle box 3 frames stores 5 frames brood and eggs; bottom box mostly […]
Q7 was started on Sunday, July 26th, 2015. I used the same nurse hive as for Q4 and Q6 at the farm: bottom deep with open brood, queen and foragers. On that a queen excluder and the cloak board. On that the second deep with capped brood (about 4 frames […]
Yeah, again! After the swarm there are at least 3 virgin queens roaming the colony: A solid gold one that is pretty much chill. She moves slowly and has very few bees in her retinue. The bees seem to pretty much ignore her. […]
I set up the same nurse hive that was at the farm and was used for Q4 with the cloak board. I had learned at the MSBA meeting this summer to be sure to put only capped brood in the box above the queen excluder and to shake all the […]
Well I’m bummed. I decided to pull my supers today. The process went fine. The fume board worked like a charm even though the juice is about three years old. I removed the third super which I put on about a month ago to be sure the hive wouldn’t swarm. […]
These posts are getting boring! Particularly as I can’t seem to load the pictures I’d like to! Anyway, it swarmed. Probably a really nice size swarm based on the density of bees remaining. I’d guess 5-6 lbs of bees left. Don’t know where they went. I’ve walked the neighborhood several […]
