Coming Together

About half of my equipment came in.  I love it when I come home to find a big box from Mann Lake before the shipping notice has even made it to my email inbox!  I have three deep boxes, plus frames and foundation to go in them.  I'll admit here that putting together frames is probably my very least favorite part of beekeeping.  I can't wait until my kiddo is old enough that I can pay him to do it.  I'm still waiting on the resource hive from Brushy Mt., but I've got what I need for right now.

The queen that was in the queenless half of the green hive has been released.  I didn't find her, but I found 5 sealed queen cells.  I'm not sure if they are trying to supercede her or if they thought they had gone queenless.  I cut them out and I'll check them in a week to see if there is uncapped brood.  If there is then we're all good.  Otherwise I'll give them a frame with eggs on it.  I gave them a second deep of foundation to work with.

The other new queen was uncaged and walking around.  For the record, marked queens are freaking awesome!  I much prefer raising my own queens, but I may have to learn how to mark my queens.  Their population is a little lower than I'd like, so I think the plan of transferring them into the nuc hive when it gets here is the right thing to do.  I'm sure that they will not be pleased about being moved twice in two weeks, but it is what it is.  

I think I'll end up shuffling some of this equipment around when everything gets here.  The colony with the marked queen is going to go into the resource hive when it gets here and the orange box that they are in now will be used as the second deep for the other orange box.

The two hives on the left have new queens and the white hive is raising a queen.

Release the Queens

The new queens have been in their respective hives for two days.  I initially left the cork in to buy her an extra day or so of protection.  I went in and pulled the cork today.  I left the candy and will let the workers release them on their own.  Hopefully that will give them enough time to be accepted.

Well, that changes things....Part 2

Sometimes the beehaving gods smile down on you.  Today was one of those days.  The outyard hive has finally gained enough population that I don't feel like complete crap for splitting them.  The queen and half the resources were placed on a new stand right next to the old stand.  One thing I did try to do was give the queenright half some empty comb so she has somewhere to lay and give the queenless half most of the eggs and young larvae.  At very least, the queenright half will need another deep when it comes in, but I've ordered enough for all of them to have double deeps.

So, the tally is as follows:  There are now two outyard hives, both in a single deep box.  The backyard has one nuc, one single deep that will be a nuc, two single deep hives, and a double deep hive.  Once all of the new equipment comes in and gets painted, I'll figure out how to name them to keep them straight.

Well, that changes things...Part 1

So, Thursday night my city council passed a new package of animal ordinances.  In between outlawing tethering dogs and requiring registration of your cat they passed an ordinance that says that beehives must be kept 300' from the property line.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you need more room to have bees than to have horses (only 100' required).  They basically looked at a nearby city and copied their asinine ban verbatim.  This was passed without discussion or input from any beekeepers in the city.  Luckily, hives that are already established when the ordinance goes into effect will be grandfathered in and won't be subject to the setbacks.  Even more luckily, the ordinance doesn't go into effect for another week.  So, I took the logical approach of splitting everything I could to get my hive numbers up before the ordinance goes into effect.

Fortunately, in the case of emergency equipment needs, there is a shop about an hour from my house.  Today, I ran over and grabbed enough equipment to cobble together two more hives.  I also lucked out and he had a couple of spare queens.  I took a couple of frames of brood from the white hive and gave them one of the queens.  They are in a full sized hive, but will be moved into half of a resource hive when the order I placed last night comes in.

I decided to split the green hive evenly.  One deep for each half.  This was partly due to their strength and partly due to the fact that I really needed boxes on stands.  This was the bottleneck today because the queen decided that today was the best day ever to play hide-n-seek.  It took close to an hour to find her.  Once I did, she remained on the old stand and the other half of the bees and resources were moved to a new stand and given the other queen.

In other happenings, I'm starting to see foragers coming from the nuc that was split off of the white hive, so that's encouraging.  The holly bush is buzzing with bees and the clover is just barely starting to bloom here and there.  The spiderwort is blooming, but the bees either haven't found it or prefer the holly.

Queen cells!

I went back in and checked the now-queenless white hive in the backyard.  You guys, I cut out at least 30 queen cells.  They weren't playing around.  I left them two to raise a new queen with and will check on them in a couple of weeks.

Make Like a Banana and Split

Despite my best attempts at preventing a swarm, I don't think I'm going to be able to do it without splitting.  I took the queen from the white hive and moved her and one other frame of brood into half of the resource hive (have I mentioned that I love that thing?) and added two frames of foundation.  I've heard some debate about my method from other beekeepers, but my theory behind doing it this way was that by removing the queen, the rest of the bees would think that the swarm had already left.  In a couple of days, I'll come back and cull out all but 2 or 3 queen cells to prevent them from swarming with a virgin queen.

For those of you keeping track at home, that makes three hives and a nuc.

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?