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?