April 8 Bee Visit

This week, Mark and I reached out to Bee Weaver in Navasota to as for a special favor, with hope we would get lucky and score a much needed queen for hive 04.  It is typical that at this time of year, most beekeepers are sold out of queens, and we were stuck waiting for our new queen to ship on April 28 from Kelley Bees in Kentucky.  Bee Weaver was somehow able to get a new queen for us, and we can now breathe a sigh of relief. 

 

Before we could place the new caged queen into hive 04, we had to remove the queen cell that the hive had created, which housed a queen pupae.  It seems counter-intuitive to kill your own queen bee, but it has to be done so that the new caged queen can get busy laying eggs and not have to compete with another queen.  Click on photos to enlarge.

 

Queen cell removed.  You can see the queen pupae inside.

The queen cage is installed in hive 04.  The bees noticed her immediately.
It will take a few days for them to eat the fondant that blocks the exit.
Once she is out, she will begin laying eggs right away.

We added sugar water again, as we do during all of our visits, to each hive.  The bees rush to drink it.  It takes one week for each of our hives to drink two gallons of sugar water!  This sugar water gives the bees energy to draw out comb on the frames.  We can see that this is working well in all of our hives.

Bees head to the sugar water and drink up quickly.

Mark found a new and unusual flower in front of our hives. 

Antelope horn (milkweed)

Hives 01 through 05 with Indian paintbrush out front.

We now have two deeps on hives 05, 06, and 08.
The rest of the hives are doing so well that next week,
we will add deep hives to each of them as well.

 We are on our way to producing honey this year!