I checked my hives yesterday. It was the first nice day in three or four weeks. The sun was out and it was in the mid forties – maybe warmer. I was walking the dogs and noticed that there were lots of bees flying around the front of hive 4. […]
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’ […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
