Another Weekend, Another Inspection

I started in the backyard today.  The green hive looks good.  Open and capped brood, They've started drawing out the top foundation, but just barely.  I love it when they look like I expect them to.  The orange hive is also chugging along nicely.  They might even need a super in a couple of weeks.  I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I wasn't going to get any honey this year.  I've always heard that you can either make bees or make honey, but it's hard to do both.  And I definitely made bees this year.  

The white hive looks like it's going to be a problem.  It appears that the queen that they raised failed for whatever reason.  No brood, larvae, or eggs that I could see.  It also seemed that every available spot that could hold eggs has been filled with something.  The top box is packed with nectar and the bottom box has lots of nectar and pollen.  I treated with OAV on Wednesday.  I don't think it has anything to do with the queen failure because if there was a queen prior to the treatment then there should at least be some 4-5 day old larvae.  I also don't think they would be as honeybound.  I gave them a test frame from the green nuc.

Speaking of the green nuc, it had 4 frames of brood, but hadn't moved up into the top story yet.  I took one frame of eggs as a test frame for the white hive.  The Auburn nuc hasn't started in the top story yet either.  I saw their queen and lots of brood in different stages.  I've been noticing orientation flights, so the foraging force should be growing.

Next, is the outyard.  Both of these hives are blue and white, so I'll have to differentiate between them based on location.  There is the old stand and the new stand.  To make matters complicated, the old stand was the queenless half and the new stand has the old queen.  Confused yet?

I got an interesting call on my way home from work yesterday afternoon.  My husband works at an apartment complex and he said that they have bees in the wall.  I stopped by and sure enough, there are bees flying in and out, some of them carrying pollen.  It looks like we're going to be doing a cut-out next week.  I'm kind of nervous about it.  It seems easy enough, the maintenance guys will cut open the siding, I'll go in and get the bees, and they'll close up the hole.  Yeah, right.  It's so not going to be that simple.