Category: Bee Keeping Journal

A new hive has been established on the pond. This hive was given two deep frames to fill out. The bees were obtained from Dakota Bees.

Queen grafts were performed and the colony was moved to the Campus for a few days.

This hive died out in late fall 2021. The hive was prepared and is now ready for the bee package install which should occur on April 30.

I added a swarm trap to the usual location just south of the Smith building. The original tree that I always use every year has been removed. Luckily the cottonwood that holds the bee colony was left standing. This tree has held bee colonies every year that I have been on campus. This year is no different. A huge colony is very active in this tree.

Again these numbers were not ready for a split. And again, there are no signs of swarming yet. There are eggs and brood in both top and bottom boxes but not yet filled completely out. The queen was found and the hive looks healthy.

This is where is gets interesting. This hive was a queenless split about 28 days ago. The numbers in this hive are extremely high and way more than I would have expected. I think some other bees from different hives cam back into this hive on her mating flights. This might explain the drop in numbers for hive 020. No eggs were seen yet. I was going to put on a honey super, but the queen is too small still and will simply move through the queen excluder. I attempted to catch the queen but she flew off overhead. I was not able to confirm she was back in the hive box but I left the top off for a good 30 minutes.

The queen has a beautiful brown and black striped abdomen.

This hive was opened and I expected to perform a split. However, the numbers look only ok and the boxes are not filled out. No signs of pre-swarm behavior. The queen was not found but eggs were seen.

This hive was split approximately 28 days previously. The hive numbers look terrible. The queen is laying eggs and there is capped brood. The queen was found. A frame of egss and larva was added from a stronger hive.

The Niagara hives were inspected quickly again after the unexpected secondary split. The plastic hive was inspected, and a virgin queen was found again. The secondary split double NUC with unhatched queen cells was also inspected. I found a newly hatched virgin queen in that hive as well. The secondary split performed on Sunday, the day prior, was a success. We were able to catch the newly hatched queen before she killed off the unhatched cells. These cells were moved to a new box and those queens were able to hatch out.

In conclusion, our initial split of the plastic hive has now produced 3 colonies. One colony with a laying queen and two colonies with virgin queens.

The plastic hive split was inspected at Niagara Street. This hive was left queenless during the split and had a very large number of bees. The inspection was performed just in time as I saw and heard a newly hatched queen piping loudly. We found the newly hatched queen and quickly removed and remaining unhatched queen cells.

The unhatched queen cells were moved to a new double NUC box with half of the frames, seven frames. The hatched queen was kept in the plastic hive with the other seven frames. Equally splitting resource and brood frames. I swapped positions of the plastic hive and the new double NUC box. This was to bulk up the numbers of the new double NUC with any foraging bees.