I poked around in the outyard hives this morning. In the hive on the old stand, I was checking to see if the requeening attempt from 5/13 had worked. On the frame where the queen cells had been, I found a queen cell that had been opened from the bottom as well as one that was in the process of being torn down by the workers.
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| The Royal Nursery |
A few frames later, I caught sight of Her Majesty. She's walking around and laying eggs. I'm a bit concerned because the capped brood I'm seeing seems to be heavily weighted towards drones. I'm hoping that is just a fluke and she did get well-mated. If she didn't then it's really getting too late in the season and their population is too low to try to let them raise a new queen on their own. I'll have to bring in a new queen. Which it wouldn't be the most terrible thing in the world to expand the genetics of the yard a little.
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| Yes, I need a new camera |
The other hive is doing much better. They were given a super of mostly uncapped nectar from last year and they are finishing it out. I have six frames of beautiful, fully capped honey, two frames that are 1/2 to 2/3 capped, and two frames that were drawn out, but not filled (they were on the far end). I moved the partially capped and empty frames to the center and moved the fully capped frames to the outside edges to encourage the bees to finish out those frames. Hopefully that will work. This hive has a second super of foundation and starter strips, but they have only barely started to draw it out.
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| Yum! |
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