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 […]
This friday (7.25.2014), I located the 3 queens that I have from Q3 and marked them with an orange dot. There was brood in every nuc, but clearly, the one with the most bees (from the most brood given when the nuc was set up), had the largest amount of […]
I started with 4 real nuc boxes for Q3 and one improvised queen castle (two compartment). All hives had a queen emerge, but today I checked for queens/bees/brood. This is my tally (July 20th, 2014): Nuc with white dots: nice queen, one of the ones that Andrew grafted from George. […]
On July 6th, 2014, I also moved Cleopatra (a black queen from a split made with Mel’s stock) to the Garst Farm. She is in a single deep. She is marked yellow, but Liz and I did not see here when we looked last night (July 18). There was a […]
To recap Q2, we missed the emerging of the q2 queens by about 1 day and they all emerged and were killing each other or all loose in the hive, or something. By the time we came to pick up the queen cells to put them in the nucs, they […]
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 got up bright and early this morning, closed off the queen castle, packed up the nucs and castle and took off for the out yard. I got to the yard to find that Kristien had done an excellent job at leveling and making secure the two pallets I had dropped […]
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 […]
