Month: May 2019

Campus hives were inspected. Apis19A and Apis19B were opened and a quick inspection performed. Eggs and larva were seen. New comb being drawn very quickly. Both colonies are extremely calm and easy to manage at this point. No smoke needed.

WildCA18B split hive opened and inspected. Queen cell was indeed dead and not viable. Bees had chewed the cap partially off of the queen cell and inside was a dead queen. Currently this hive has been split across 2 nuc boxes with a queen excluder between. The queen excluder was removed making this 1 colony again across 2 stacked nuc boxes. No smoke needed. This colony has never grown very large. I suspect these 2 nuc boxes will be adequate for their long term needs.

Splits were left alone and not bothered. The queen should have had their mating flights across the last few nice warm days. I would have expected the mating flights to occur between May 2nd – May 6th. If not, they will not have another chance.

Swarm traps were inspected and baited with Swam commander.

WildCA18A (left) colony opened. This is by far my best wild colony. Every queen graft and split made this year has been from this colony. The genetics are extremely calm, very hygienic and good producers. Today was no different. Four out of the five boxes were filled with bees and brood, nectar and pollen. Almost no honey stores yet. I did not find any established queen cells. However, I did find some false queen cups. I would say they are not likely to swarm. I swapped one frame of eggs and larva with a capped brood frame from the starter colony. I hope the starter colony begins making some more queens.

Wild17 (right) as true to all previous inspections for the last two years have shown is plain mean and should be re-queened. I have given this hive ample chances to just blame the behavior on a “bad day” or “no resources”. I did not open this hive. My hope is to either re-queen or force them to swarm. They down right suck. I would like to re-queen with genetics from WildCA18A.

Checking on the WildCA18B double NUC split. The top box has an unhatched queen cell removed from the WildCA18A mother colony boxes. The queen cells is still unhatched and looks intact. I am concerned that the cell is unhatched this far along in the schedule. I will check on Sunday.

Baited the 3 swarm catchers located on the south side of campus with only lemon grass oil. I will bait with swarm lure this weekend. I have noticed scout activity over the past few weeks. I have also seen an increased activity from the wild hive trees.

Opened the two new package colonies, ApisCA19A and ApisCA19B. Both colonies had newly laid eggs and new comb is being drawn out. ApisCA19A is a much larger group of bees. ApisCA19B is a significantly smaller colony. I was able to find the queen in ApisCA19B. Filled sugar feeder.

ApisCA19A

ApisCA19B

The unhatched queen cell sourced from the WildCA18A mother and installed into a mating colony on April 28 was checked. The mating colony looks in excellent health and good condition. Worked with the mating colony without any smoke and no aggression seen. The queen cells was empty. Unfortunately the queen was found dead on the bottom of the mating colony box. This new queen failed so I will be returning the brood frames, nectar frames and bees back to the WildCA18A mother colony.