Exploring the World of Bees…
I got a call from Officer Ed that some bees may have moved back into his empty hive body. My first suspicion was that the hive was being robbed out. Hive robing is common during late summer. I noticed that the heat and dryness has caused a dearth. The bees are confirming this as a significant amount of robing has been observed. This hive was being robbed out.
I opened this hive to perform a split. We have significant bee bearding in the front and huge afternoon orientation flights. Upon inspection we see most of the space completely filled with brood and only small areas at the edges for resource storage. Very early signs of swarm cells were found but none which had eggs.
6 frames were moved over to the new hive location. I was unable to find a queen so I made sure that the splits both had good numbers of bees, eggs, brood and resources. We will open both hive in late July to look for signs of queens.
