Checking in, hummmm

Today is April's Fool's Day, and I hope it's not really. I checked in on the two hives.

The west hive with one brood box was quiet, had capped brood, uncapped larvae, good stocks, no real pests. Felt pretty good about it and about its queen.

The east box, with a full honey super on, has a good number of bees (see photo), but I saw no new white wax indicating young bees. I saw no capped brood, and I couldn't identify eggs. There was one small hive beetle that I saw when I open the box up. Their attitude was quiet but active. 

To balance the two boxes, I took one frame from the West box, of partially capped brood that had eggs and larvae on the other side and put it into this brood box. 

I did not see any queen cells in the west box. I saw only open queen cells, which I had expected in the east box. 

I'm thinking that even if the queen has emerged and has been successfully mated, she not started laying yet -- lots of bees, but no brood or eggs. None of the additional frames had been built out.  Remember, I had been testing the mid-bar style frame with dowels through the center,

I do like the nature of these two boxes -- very quiet not aggressive.

We'll see what happens. I'll leave it alone for another two weeks. They've got plenty of supplies and should be stable.

Three weeks later

Both boxes are flying, both are bringing in pollen, the one on the right looks a lot stronger. There are plenty of drones around. The new box on the left is heavier. Don't have time to go in them today, need some time to spend an hour to with them. Still feeding a light syrup.
However, who says bees don't work red crimson clover?
Hope to spend a couple of hours with them next Saturday afternoon.
May even do an additional split.

Equalizing the population

It was a bit too cloudy to go into the hives today. I was short of time. However,  I wanted to balance the populations. 

I moved both the white hive and the light blue hive about two feet to the right so that the returning foragers would go back to the white box.

The light blue box seemed to have the larger population. It also has the honey super on top so that even if it lost population, the bees still had food.

To add to the bee confusion I put the empty nuc box (it has drawn foundation in it) all the way down to almost exactly the place that the white box occupied.

Now, the returning bees have a choice, not that they need a choice. Rather, it might help stabilize the population of the newer white hive box.

I will be gone for 10 days at the end of the week. Right before I leave I will swap the boxes, putting then back to their original positions.

Swapping shifts the populations, but it does lead to confusion. Here's what the confusion looks like.

Splitting, maybe

So today I took my double deep and split it into two 10 frame boxes. I took the upper brood box with the honey super on it and set it to the side on a new stand. I took the lower brood box and very carefully went through every single frame to try and find either queen cells or the queen. There was some capped brood. There was some larvae, food and pollen. Seven, almost eight frames, some new  foundation had been pulled out or was previously pulled out. I closed that box up.
I then went over to the upper brood box which only had a few frames of drawn out foundation and a couple of empty frames. This is also the brood box in which I have the two mid bar test frames.
I set that up as a new hive on a different base and again went through all of the frames.
I took one frame of food from the lower box and then I took the frame with brood and the start of a queen cell from the upper box and swapped them.
What am I thinking?
Since I didn't see the queen, but I know that she's active because there's larvae and brood in the upper chamber. I'm going to make the guess that that's where she is.
So, I took the queen cell frame which was only partially drawn-out out of that box, the light-blue box, and put it into the lower, whit brood box.
Now, they're both on individual stands. There is a completely capped honey super on the light blue brood box with low population.
Both hives are being fed 1:1 sugar water solution to encourage foundation being drawn out. I put the low population, light blue brood box, in the location of the old hive. I moved the white hive, the queenless one, with the queen cell, two feet to the right of it.
All the foragers are coming back to the new, light blue box. Look at the picture and you'll see that they are piling up out front, I think they're trying to decide if this is their home. The old hive has bees, many milling around on the landing board or creeping out through an air hole in the back, exploring. A few bees are coming back to it. Some of the bees on the landing board are taking orientation flights.

Check out the photos and you'll see what I mean.

The nuc you see in the foreground on the right has drawn comb but nothing else in it. I left it there in case some curious bees decide that that's where they will go if they swarm.
There is still a danger of a swarm because I could not locate the old queen to put her in the new box. I can only hope for the best.
There were quite a few drones around today so I am not concerned about a virgin queen getting mated. The season seems to be right.

Next steps:

Check next week, March 4 or 5, check to see if light blue box is queen right. Are there any queen cells anywhere?

Has white box pulled out the queen cell? Is it queen right?

Have either boxes swarmed?

Does either box have larvae?

Should I extract the super since the hives are being fed?

Check tomorrow and consider swapping location of boxes to ensure balance in number of bees. Today the high temperature was 79 and partly cloudy. The fog lingered to mid-morning. By night fall high pressure had settled in.Tonight will go down to 39. Tomorrow's high is expected to be 75 and sunny.

Hive check today

Took the hive--one medium honey super, and two brood boxes , the top brood box only partially built out --all the way down today.

The honey super was full of bees and had about a dozen hive beetles hiding under the traps. I added more traps (4) and refilled them with a mixture of vegetable oil and apple cider vinegar when I closed up the hive at the end of the check. 

It was a mild day, mostly sunny about 75 degrees, there was a light breeze, occasionally. The bees were very calm.

The center brood box had brood on two frames. They were working on building out more foundation. I have three new midbar frames in as a test. The bees have not yet started building wax out on them. That might be because they are in outer positions.

Before I opened the hive, I had considered reversing the positions of the brood boxes, if the top box was full and the bottom box had no larvae or capped brood in it.

The frames in top brood box had both, and food stores.There were also three very tiny, early queen cells.Two on the bottom of one frame, and one on another frame.

If each one of them has an egg in it, then they will each be capped by February 27th. Seven days later, on or about the 5th or 6th of March, a new queen will emerge. 

Next weekend, 2/26 or 27, I will need to check on those queen cells and make sure they are still good and safe as I do the split. I will also need to be sure the old queen is moved into the new split box. 

If I wait longer than next week the hive could swarm. On the other hand, the drones should begin in merging by next weekend. Below is the life cycle poster I'm working from to calculate this. Drones are sexually mature when they emerge, but need 7 to 10 days for orientation flight.

I checked the drone cells which begin appearing in the last two weeks. I did not see any purple-eyes, yet, it's too early. It takes 24 days from egg to emergence for a drone.

Next weekend will be the time to split. The upper box since it does not have all 10 frames built out,  could very well be put in a separate nuc box. There us good amounts of  food and brood in both boxes. And a lot of bees. 

The bottom box had brood, larvae and food stores in it. I did not check each frame for queen cells as I had seen the three small ones in the upper chamber.

If the weather remains warm, next weekend I will do this first split and see if I can't get them to build up.

They're bringing in a lot of pollen.

And, we start again

It's late January, and I'm down to one hive. I put a second brood box on so that the queen will have more room to lay. There are only two frames of comb drawn out. I'm feeding a light syrup to encourage wax production. There have been some signs of wax moth or hive beetle larvae .
The days are still cold, only getting up to sixties. As soon as the next warm days come in, I will have to get into the hive. I need to do a mite check as well, but this year I will try the dribble method to control the varroa mites. This will use oxalic acid in solution.
It has not been a very cold winter so I would expect an early bloom and rapid buildup. I hope to make a couple of splits.

Let's try this again

Thought things were going very well earlier in the spring. Two separate hives seem to be doing quite well. Then one started to decline, so I thought perhaps, in advance of the spring flow, I would combine the two of them with a newspaper in between. I checked for Queen cells. I check for eggs. I found no Queen, but saw swarm cells. A week later I found a swarm and a cavity in the side of a structure nearby. Guess I didn't get to them before they flew. But the double-decker hive seemed to be doing fine. I waited till a queen a merged. On the advice of a friend, I just left them alone to do what they needed to do. However, two weeks later, I opened them and there was no brood no eggs no Queen, no pollen, lots of nectar, but nothing else. Today I got a new Queen and squashed all the bees that I could down in to a 5 frame nuc. I hope they'll have enough resources plus what I'm feeding them to untrap the Caged Queen who's already mated, ready to lay and get busy. There's always a lesson.
As they're scouting the front of their new home you'll see they've been visited by a spider. Very interesting markings, no? Could be a black widow.
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