Queen cells!

I went back in and checked the now-queenless white hive in the backyard.  You guys, I cut out at least 30 queen cells.  They weren't playing around.  I left them two to raise a new queen with and will check on them in a couple of weeks.

Make Like a Banana and Split

Despite my best attempts at preventing a swarm, I don't think I'm going to be able to do it without splitting.  I took the queen from the white hive and moved her and one other frame of brood into half of the resource hive (have I mentioned that I love that thing?) and added two frames of foundation.  I've heard some debate about my method from other beekeepers, but my theory behind doing it this way was that by removing the queen, the rest of the bees would think that the swarm had already left.  In a couple of days, I'll come back and cull out all but 2 or 3 queen cells to prevent them from swarming with a virgin queen.

For those of you keeping track at home, that makes three hives and a nuc.

It's been awhile

Is it just me, or does bee season progress kind of like starting an old Volkswagen?  It takes awhile to really get started with a few sputters along the way, but once it gets going it really gets going.  All that was to say that it feels like it's been forever since I got to play with the girls (and a few guys now too).  Because I now have three hives I think I need a better way to differentiate between them.  For now, we'll just use color.  The hives in the backyard are white and green.  I know a lot of people just use white, but I tend to use whatever color I can find in the old paint section of my husband's tool room.  The white hive in the backyard is the one that came through winter as a full hive and the green hive is the one that started out the season as a nuc.

The white hive is absolutely bursting with bees.  I found 7-8 frames of brood with enough bees to cover them.  They've moved up into the honey super, but haven't started drawing it out.  Disconcertingly, I found several dry queen cups and a few suspicious looking cells in the ladder comb between the two boxes.  I'm not sure if it was a true queen cell or just an awkwardly shaped cell due to being ladder comb.  I was hoping to avoid having to split this hive this year, as I planned for it to be my main production colony.

The green hive is still moving a little slowly.  I saw a few of the ladies doing the waggle dance, so something they like is blooming somewhere.  They had 5 good frames of brood and have started to draw out a few frames in the top box.  

I'm a bit concerned about the outyard hive.  They only have 4 frames of brood and they are small patches.  There doesn't seem to be enough brood to cover much more, so hopefully once there is a hatch out of nurse bees the population will pick up.  If I have to, I can get a new queen in about 2 weeks.  

One thing I did notice is that the SHB seems much lower today then it did just a few weeks ago.  We had a recent cold snap, so maybe that killed some of them off.  One can only dream, right?