Happy Father's Day

Today's theme in the apiary is "Well, that could have been worse."

I think I need to break out the weedeater.

Today's weather has been hit or miss.  I took advantage of a small break in the clouds to get a little bee work in, but the bees were not in a very good mood.  First on the agenda was to release the queen that's been in queen jail for the last 18 days.  They'll get an OAV treatment on Saturday night and then I'll take mite samples for the next couple of weeks to get an idea of how effective the queen jail technique really is.  The queen release went a lot better this time than the last.  Slightly twisting the cage before pulling it out seems to be the right technique.  The queen walked out and seemed to immediately start looking for cells to lay in.  I then said the beekeeper's queen prayer and closed up the hive.  You know the one.  "Please don't let me crush the queen closing the hive up."  

Anecdotally, I had to cut out a queen cell found in the middle of the frame where the queen jail was located.  I believe that traditional wisdom holds that an egg only exists where the queen lays it.  But recently, there's been rumblings in certain corners of the bee world that bees can actually move eggs around if needed.  I'm beginning to believe that there may be something to that theory.

This was my husband's "artsy fartsy" shot

While I was out there, I went ahead and checked on the half of the Auburn hive that was split off on 5/21.  They weren't too happy to see me (and let me know LOUDLY) when I opened the hive, so I thought that maybe they hadn't been successful in requeening.  I never did find the queen, but I did find some pretty compelling evidence that she is there.  There's not much capped brood, but there is quite a bit of uncapped brood and eggs, so she's been laying for a couple of days.  I think I'll try to get an OAV treatment in this evening since they are in a good configuration for it.  Again, said the queen prayer and closed up the hive.  

I also poked around the dark green hive.  The older half is doing well and has a pretty good brood pattern going on.  The newer half is doing better than expected.  The younger queen cell was torn open from the side so it looks like she was dispatched by a rival queen.  I think I saw that rival queen walking around a frame in the first box.  She was kind of walking around poking her back end into cells, but I'm not sure that she was actually laying eggs.  I didn't see any, but the light wasn't great for egg spotting.  She was born from a queen cell that came out of a nuc that I believe swarmed on June the first.  It's not outside the realm of bee math that she could be mated and laying already.  I think I've got time to wait on the last bit of capped brood to emerge before an OAV treatment.  I think that I'll do it Saturday when I do the light green hive.  I did crush what appeared to be a small hive beetle larva that was between the inner cover and the top box.  I didn't see anything inside the box itself and really didn't see any adults in the hive either, so that's something I'll have to keep an eye on.

In the outyard, the hive sitting on the old stand has a queen and she's laying.  I even saw her.  The brood pattern isn't fantastic.  It's kind of spotty so far and there's more drone brood than I'd like to see, but the bees don't seem to be trying to replace her so maybe they know something that I don't.  I did notice a drone walking around with DWV.  That kind of surprised me.  They've had two separate brood breaks this season, so their mite numbers should be fairly low in theory.  This is something that I'll have to consider soon.  I like to have the last mite treatments done by August 15th.  It also didn't look like they had even started taking the 1:1 syrup that I gave them on Monday, so I removed it.  I don't like leaving syrup on for too long because it will ferment.  I'll try again in a few days.  Some hives will only take supplemental feed if there is nothing going on naturally.  It looks like this might be one of those hives.