Pollen is one of two different resources which bees require for survival. The pollen is the raw protein source which bees need to build new baby bees. In early spring pollen begins to come into the hive at an astonishing rate. The bees spent the entire winter surviving inside the hive living off of the nectar stores. Now that spring has arrived the bees despretly need more nectar and pollen to start the colony baby bee production back up.
Hive Relocation
Queen-right Colony Split (009), sourced from Officer Ed’s hive box was moved over to the campus berm. The 5 frame NUC was emptied out into a full size 10 Frame deep with super (018). The super access was blocked. The queen looked good. The 5 frames were full of resources and eggs/larva.
Mated Queens
Once a new queen has emerged in the colony she is not yet ready to lay eggs. The queen must take a mating flight and mate with several drones. The queen will then return to the hive and begin to ley eggs. The process of mating flights and subsequent ovary development can take approximately 13 days. Several things like weather can interfere with the mating flights. Also a queen may take several test flights before the actual mating flight.
Once a queen is mated and her ovaries are developed, she begins to produce pheromones. The other worker bees are extremely keyed into this pheromone. You can see a huge difference in the attention that the worker bees are giving to these two different queens. One queen has been mated and her ovaries are developed while the other is not.
Split Inspections
Corona St. Splits were opened and inspected for queens. Queen-less Split (001), started on March 14, mother colony (28-29) was inspected. The split still has good resources and queen is present. No eggs.
Queen-less Split (003), started on March 23, mother colony (28-29) has emerged. The queen appeared to be in excellent condition and the split has excellent resouces and unhatched brood. No Eggs. Several of the queen cells were destroyed by the queen. However one un-molested queen cell was found. This frame was moved to a new box, (009). Two frames of bees were moved from this split (003) into the new NUC (009). There were more than enough bees in split (003) for this split of a split.
Queen-less Split (030), started on March 7, mother colony (28-29) was examined. The colony has good resources but no Eggs yet.
Queen-less Split (026), started on March 14, mother colony (28-29) was inspected. The queen looks much improved since the day she emerged. The color of the queen has filled in and she is much larger in size. The box has good resources and numbers of bees. No Eggs seen.
Queen-less split (027), started on March 31, mother colony “Officer Ed” was not inspected. These smaller 3 frame NUC boxes are so tight in their construction that damaging the queen cells would be inevitable. We will check back next week for an emerged queen.
Hive Inspections
Corona St. hives were top inspected. The 2 mother colonies (028-029) and (025) looked in good health from the exterior. Good numbers of bees and resources still coming in a t a regular pace.
Colony (028-029) was briefly opened and only 2 frames were pulled. Two frames which were added last week after a split were now full of eggs and larva.
Colony (025) was only examined from the top and the number of bees while weak is a bit stronger compared to the last inspection. We will perform a more thorough inspection next week to make sure the queen is still laying and the colony is still viable.
Hive Setup
None of the campus hives survived the winter location on the Berm. It was decided to relocated the hives to a bit lower elevation perhaps more sheltered from the wind. The hives are located about 50 yards due west.
Hive Split
Went back to officer Ed’s property and made another more complete split (009). I took the queen with this second split and a huge number of bees. I started the colony with 2 frames of old honey frames and 3 frames of empty polished brood frame. The the original colony was checked to make sure there are plenty of frames with eggs and larva of the correct age. This should stop the original colony from swarming any time soon. The queen was caged and will be released tomorrow.
Hive Splits – New Queen
Queen-less Split (026) started on March 14, mother colony (28-29) has emerged. We will check back in 2 week for eggs. This split made 2 adjoining queen cells which could not be separated. The unhatched queen appears to be intact and not killed yet. The unhatched second queen emerged.
New Queens
A couple of weeks have passed and the new queen has emerged. She is not yet mated but is out and about inside the hive. She will remove any other unhatched queens and will soon be mated. Once she is mated the queen will then be able to lay eggs and the colony will continue.