Tuesday, September 11, 2018

March 3-4th Hive Check 2018


March 3rd. Went into this hive to see how it was building out. Things look good there was capped brood. But it still has a couple of outer frames to build out and its population to build up before I put another brood box on top. I did not see any Queen cells.
March 4th. Went into all of the upper frames until I found capped brood. It looks like the queen is building out nicely, but slowly. Going to leave this one alone until I return from spring break. I'll go in there on the 17th of March. We should be through with all Frost by then.


March 3rd. The Hive was very active with many bees taking orientation flights. The nature was calm. I opened up the top box to see that they were beginning to build wax on six sides of frames and a few quite a few bees in the upper brood box. Searched and found 3 no found to Queen cells, and heard the pipping of a Virgin Queen. I could not find her I did not see signs of the old Queen. There was very little capped brood. I was concerned that the horn Hive might swarm. I came back out on Sunday, the 4th. Determined after lots of consideration to split the hive. I took some of the built out frames with new wax from the upper brood box. I took the upper brood box off totally from the big Hive moved the two queen cells, one looked good, one look gnarly, along with frames of food and pollen. Any frames that had nectar in it I put in the field to be rubbed out. Again the nature of all three hives right now is very calm. Shook a lot of bees into the Nook and placed it where the previous Hive had been. As I was moving the larger North Hive on the rack the entire rack tipped over backwards opening all boxes and causing confusion. I moved the rack to the ground set everything back up all of this without a single bite. It wasn't until about 2 hours later that I realized that the frame was directly on the ground. We came out and by the Light of the cars headlamps we set the rack back up. I came out the morning of the 5th both large hives are flying, but the cook has had only one be going in and out of it. Not sure it's status.

This is the comment from my friend Michelle regarding splitting or not.

The nice big hive I'm referring to is the one that's next to the hive I gave you, not Tracie's. If that Hive is jam-packed full of bees, you could make a split into a nuc box and put the queen cells in there. If that big Hive has a Virgin Queen in there she's going to mate and you will have a laying Queen soon. If for some reason that Hive doesn't have a queen, and the so-called Virgin Queen doesn't exist, then you could recombine the nuc when it has a laying Queen.

The temperature this morning at 10 a.m. is just 60°. That may be why the other Hive has no flying bees.

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