Campus hives were inspected. Hive (018) was opened. The colony is queenright and has good numbers. This queen was a direct queen split from Officer Ed’s colony. This queen is an established and high producing queen. I opened up the honey super for this colony, early.
Bad news on the Woody’s pond hive. This hive immediately shows lower numbers of bees than I would expect. And the queen is missing. I can see one emergency queen cell on a frame. The possibility of this colony swarming is extremely low. The most likely possibility is that the queen died in the last major frost that we had. This is extremely unfortunate as this colony was a first generation Wild CA colony. This colony was my best and high production Wild CA colony to date. Maybe the replacement queen will be as good?
