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 […]
Both nurse hive had finished eating the syrup, so I gave each another pint. I decided to start feeding at twilight, as I worry a lot about robbing. I also closed Liz’s queen castle a bit more with a piece of wood so that the opening is not as big. […]
Lisa was a beautiful big orange queen that arrived in my yard in early spring of 2012 with a good size swarm. Jan was picking gooseberries and saw it go into my dark green topbarhive. I moved the comb into a deep. Hoping for success, I opened the hive 2 […]
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 […]
We installed our Q3 nurse hives today: In Liz’s medium queen castle: 1 frame of 50% capped brood, 1 frame of 20% open brood, some pollen, nectar and one frame with nectar honey. Shook in extra bees from Liz’s california queen hive and at Krz’s place from the […]
From Michael Bush website http://www.bushfarms.com/beesqueenrearing.htm He states that emergency queen cells may be inferior if they are made from cells on old comb: Emergency queens: “It has been stated by a number of beekeepers who should know better (including myself) that the bees are in such a hurry to […]
Day two (june 21, 2014): preparing the two nurse nucs 0830 at Liz’s house (Krz need to pick up eyeglasses at 0800 first): putting medium frames and nurse bees in one nuc. Waiting closing nuc off. Going over to Krz yard. Meeting Mel and Todd, preparing another nuc with deep […]
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 […]
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 […]
Here is a paper from a research group that tested if different shapes and colors help bees recognize their own hive in a grouping of hives. I know this is a unique shape that they can see: My nucs are ready with these shapes/colors to help our bees:
