Lessons Learned

Urban (or suburban in my case) beekeeping comes with it's own set of considerations.  A lot of non-beeks take a NIMBY stance on bees.  And some have good reason to.  Those of us who live in a city need to keep our neighbors in mind when it comes to our bees or we may find that the city will start passing laws against keeping bees (boy, do I know about that one).  I try to do my best to mitigate the hazards that come when bees and people live in close proximity.  I supply them with a close water source.  I position the hives so that there are obstacles that force bees to fly upward before they cross into the neighbor's yards.  I do my best to prevent swarms, though I daresay that is as much for my benefit as theirs.  On that front, I seem to have failed.

I opened up the Auburn hive to peek in on them.  On the half that held the original colony, I found two frames with queen cells.  One of them was sealed.  My brand-new, marked queen was also nowhere in sight.  Based on the age of the youngest brood I was able to find I'd say that they took off about three days ago.  It's totally my fault for not paying enough attention.  I'd been doubting my decision to leave the old queen in place and move the swarm cells during the last split.  I know now that I was right to question that decision.  I won't do that again.

I have been planning to pull a couple of frames of brood off of the orange hive to start a nuc after honey season ends.  I want to go into winter with 5 full colonies and 4 4-over-4 nucs.  If you're interested in my reasoning for this configuration I encourage you to check out some of Michael Palmer's talks regarding his sustainable apiary.  It's good stuff.  So, to make light of a bad situation, I split the two frames from the Auburn hive with queen cells between two nucs and gave them each half of the resources.  I'll have to boost their numbers with frames from other hives (probably the orange hive), but this will give me a bit of a head start.  They are going to require a lot of TLC though.

In other news around the beeyard, the light green hive still has their queen caged.  I did have to cut a few queen cells out of the hive, but not as many as I had expected.  The orange hive got another honey super.  I don't expect them to do much with it this year, but it'll give them something to keep them busy.  In the outyard, the hive on the new stand hasn't done much with their second super, but they are at least starting to draw it out.  The hive on the old stand got a second story to work on.  I suspect that they will need some supplemental feeding once the summer death sets in.