Whew! Finally, we walked away from the bee yard yesterday with a big sigh of relief. Everything went very well and we have good news to report.
Click on photos to enlarge.
Our swarm bees that we collected last week and installed into hive 02 love their new home. When Mark and I lifted the top cover, we noticed right away that the bees had virtually disintegrated the newspaper. There was no paper at all inside the hive and the two deep hives were working together as one.
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Hive 02 one week after adding swarm bees to top deep hive.
The Russian-hybrid queen was in the bottom deep hive with her bees.
There is no newspaper left between the boxes, except for what you see
in this photo, hanging on outside of the hive. |
Since adding the top deep hive only one week ago, it is amazing how quickly the swarm bees and the hive 02 bees together have drawn out comb.
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| One week's worth of work - amazing! |
We also saw our Russian queen, and that made us feel great. Truthfully, we weren't sure if there was a queen within the swarm of bees when we collected them and we were worried about what would happen if two queens were in the hive. We were able to watch the Russian queen move about on the frames and she continued to lay eggs while we watched. Hive 02 is finally catching up with the other hives.
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| Russian-hybrid queen laying an egg. |
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| The Russian-hybrid queen is a pretty apricot color and easy to identify. |
The swarm bees in hive 02 went to work on creating a new queen. We found this interesting pattern of three queen cells and removed them. They will soon get used to the Russian queen and hopefully stop producing queen cells.
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| Hive 02 queen cells created by the new swarm bees. |
Hive 01 is also catching up on their work and had made it far enough along for us to add a honey super above the deep hive (brood) boxes. Hives 03, 05, 06, and 07 were all progressing with building out comb in their honey supers. Each had new eggs in their brood boxes and we are happy with their work.
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| Hive 03 great comb and new eggs. |
Remember, hive 04 houses our new bees that we added a little over eight days ago. This hive has the Buckfast queen with Buckfast bees. They seem at home in their new hive box. We had a little scare this week with the Buckfast queen; an event that turned out fine in the end, yet a good reminder of how careful beekeepers must be when inspecting hives.
Our first action when inspecting the hive was to remove the top feeder. Bees typically cling to the top feeder, even when it is empty, and this can include the queen, even though we try our best to smoke the bees away from the top feeder before removing it. We must remove the top feeder to gain access down into the frames in the deep hive boxes. When we removed the top feeder, we didn't realize that our queen was hanging on to the bottom of it. We placed the feeder against the hive box, directly on the ground, along with our queen.
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The top feeder (white box) is on the ground, leaning against the right side of the deep hive.
My foot is just behind the top feeder. |
We were searching for her throughout the frames in the hive for a very long time and our hearts sank when we could not locate her. We saw new eggs, so we new she had been in the hive within the last couple of days. We had almost given up looking for her when we decided to look on the ground as a last hopeful resort. That is where we found her. Honestly, we were very lucky. Not only were we lucky enough to find her, but she was unharmed, even though my foot could have easily stepped on her several times.
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Hive 04 Buckfast queen becoming reacquainted with her bees,
after being separated for at least an hour. We have read that bees
know immediately when their queen is missing, because
time is of the essence in creating a replacement. |
We knew that hive 08 would be exciting for us this visit. We just weren't sure how. Last week, we did not find a queen in our hive and we removed 15-20 queen cells along the frames. And, the hive was over populated. Lucky for us (or maybe it was that we have learned to be prepared for the worst) we had ordered a "just in case we need one" queen from Kelley Bees and she arrived late last week. Before we even opened hive 08, many bees had already gathered outside near the landing board.
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Hive 08 before inspection. I was nervous to open the top lid for
fear of what we might have to deal with inside. |
We opened the hive and smoked the bees down to try and find a queen, but did not find one. We found many queen cells again, and removed all of them. The bee population was still very high.
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The deep hive on the table behind the hive has many bees inside.
The honey super on the left side of table also has many bees inside.
The hive box beneath the frame I am holding has a lot of bees, too. |
There is a good amount of brood and uncapped larvae in this hive, so the population will likely remain high. This is good because they can work to continue building out the honey super on top. However, we added our new Italian queen to this hive during our visit and I am nervous that she might feel too crowded and prefer to swarm. We will keep a close eye on her.
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Hive 08 new Italian queen installed, received from Kelley Bees.
It will take a few days for her to exit the little wooden box.
This will allow time for the hive to become acquainted with
her and "accept" her as their new queen. |
After we closed up hive 08, the bees had made their way outside the box and began bearding, just like they did last week.
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| Hive 08 bees bearding after inspection and installation of new queen. |
The honey flow continues with new additions to the flowering flora on Doug and Linda's property.
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Prickly Pear cactus is blooming throughout southeast Texas.
It is by far my favorite flowering plant in Texas. |
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| Prickly Pear blooms with primrose. |
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