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 […]
On Sunday June 28, Kristien set up the colony at the farm with the cloak board. Special attention was paid to have only capped brood in the cell finishing box and make sure all the open brood was in the bottom box. On June 30th, we met a Kristien’s and […]
On May 31st we met at Allen’s outyard, selected our queen rearing colony and set it up with the cloak board. On June 3rd, we grafted from the tailgate of Allen’s truck. Allen practiced on 5 cups and grafted 5 cups, Kristien grafted 15 and Liz grafted 10 […]
Q4 started a few days ago on the Garst Farm with the installation of the cloak board and the move of open brood to the topbox. Today, Liz and I rotated the hive 180 degrees so that the original opening is in the back (but still open). The queen is […]
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 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 checked my two NUCs again today which should have been day 18. In hive 6 the queen cell was open on the tip which seemed promising, but upon closer inspection, I realized that the queen was still in the cell. There were no bees in or on the open […]
It’s late so I’ll be brief. I checked my two NUCs today at around 3 pm and neither queen (George 2) had yet emerged. Hive 6 only had a handful of bees with another handful of capped brood cells available. I opened the cage and I expect that she will […]
