A replacement queen was sourced from Dakota Bees on 07/25/2020. The original queen has failed as she had not laid any signs of brood. That would indicate that the queen had not laid any eggs in over 3 weeks. We removed the original queen which looked healthy but for the lack of any egg laying and we introduced the new queen in the cage.
Hive Inspections and Havest
GG Blue hive is showing signs of a failed queen. A 8 frames are back filled with pollen and nectar. No signs of any brood at any stage of development can be seen. A replacement queen will be found.
Also we decided to harvest 2 medium 8 frame supers from each of the Corona street hives. This leaves one partially filled medium deep for each hive which will remain.
Additionally, we removed 1 medium deep worth of bees from each of the Corona Street hives and merged them with 2 very weak hives at GG. This partially worked. For some reason all of the bees from one of the attempted merge, left the medium super and gathered onto the other attempted merge. So, very strange behavior and not sure why the bees would not stay put and leave and merge with the other attempted hive merge.
Mite Treatments
Treatment of Campus hives, Corona Street hives and GG Hives.
Hive Inspections at GG
Performed a quick hive inspection at GG before the upcoming weekend honey harvest. Honestly, the rooftop hives do not look that great. The numbers of bees are not overwhelmingly positive. But rather marginal.
All hives were inspected in some fashion. The Green hive is the strongest and given more space to grow. The blue hive has a failed queen and is suspect. We need to replace this queen. Going down the line, the pine hive is looking healthy with a decent brood pattern. However, the orange and the yellow hives are not looking great. We should reinforce their numbers with bees from the Corona street hives.
