Exploring the World of Bees…
The single queen rearing incubator hive, created on May 20, was split into 3 small mating hives. Each mating hive contained 2 unhatched capped queen cells. The hives were located at the Corona street apiary. These queens will mate in this apiary.
We have a very late winter storm moving in with temperature in the upper 20s. This is for only a few days but with this is also coming snow and rain. Typically this would not bother a hive but most of the hives have been given these extremely breathable top covers. I am going to stuff some cloth in these to reduce the air flow.
The campus pond hive was also modified with a cloth barrier on the bottom screen and cloth barrier on the top screen. These will be removed after the storm has passed.
A quick inspection of the campus hives shows really good numbers and some very healthy looking activity. All hives now have full access to the expansion boxes. We are now officially out of room for our colonies. No more equipment is on standby.
We had another wonderful opportunity to work with the ECE group and begin teaching them about bees and their role in our environment. I brought several visual aides and also the visual teaching hive.
The hive was inspected and looks extremely good. The numbers are healthy and I added a new top cover which has an opening for ventilation.
All campus hives were inspected. All have good queen activity. A super was added to hive, (021).
Giving the new colony a double deep to move into was a mistake. I condensed the hive into the bottom deep. We will let them expand at a later date. The queen was found and is laying.
This hive is packed full of brood and several regions of drone comb. This hive will soon swarm. The top box was taken and used to graft new queens. The original bottom box (009) and a new top box (006) were used to continue this colony. This new top box (006) was populated with fully drawn comb and a resource frame.
Opps. I waited a bit too long and a queen hatched out and killed all the other grafts. There were approximately 7 grafts which looked viable. Went ahead and removed the grafting frame and setup this hive for mating flights.
All hives were inspected. Growth looks a bit slow but the nectar flow has only just begun. We will check soon.
