Two queenless hives.

As of last Saturday, Meg and Jo were both queenless.  I think Meg may have made a new queen who just hasn't started laying yet, but just to be sure, I moved three of the seven queen cells I found in Meg over to Jo.  Above is a picture of a frame with some queen cells.  I plan to do a close inspection again in 3 weeks as by then both hives should have egg-laying queens again, if not, I'll have to move a couple frames of eggs and brood from other hives to give them another chance to make queens, or just buy queens for the hives.  My dad will have a look under the covers to see if they need more room for honey storage (I suspect so!) and my whole family is helping with hive construction to keep up with the bees' productivity!

At the Lair, I'm planning to add a 5th box to each hive this week and put in queen excluders at the same time to keep the honey supers clean.  The weather has been too rainy for a serious nectar flow, but I expect it could take off at any moment.

More Supers and Supercedure

Last week at the Lair, I found that the hives were around 50-60% done drawing out their third medium box, so on Thursday, I went out and added another box to each hive.  I didn't check below the third box this time, but all three had great brood patterns with partially capped frames toward the outside.  I saw one of the bees eat their way out of their cocoon while I was inspecting some of the frames.  As it happens a couple thousand times a day on average, it's not a particularly rare occurrence, but since I wasn't going through the lower boxes, I had time to sit and stare until she made it out.

I moved up a couple of the frames into the third boxes to get them started and when I left, the bees were still zipping in and out of the hive.  They've built up their populations well, so if we get a strong nectar flow, I think we'll get 30-60 lbs of honey from each hive!  I also knocked down the grass around the hives to keep them from overheating too badly in this warmer weather.

After this 4th box is fully drawn out, I will consider adding a queen excluder to keep her from laying eggs in the honey areas.  Some beekeepers think this slows down honey production as well, but it's awfully inconvenient to have to sort brood and honey frames, and as I'm unlikely to turn a profit either way (and I'm not sure what I'd do with 300 lbs of honey) it might be a good idea.

At the Acreage, Meg is doing very well, and Jo seems just as strong, but I found some capped queen cells.  This either means that Jo already swarmed (as they usually swarm just as the cells get capped) or that the queen died and they're working on replacing her.  It could also mean that they're superseding the queen, but as I didn't see eggs or larvae in the hive, either she's dead or stopped laying.

Jo looks stronger than I would expect if the hive had swarmed, but it's certainly possible.  The loss of a month of laying will badly slow down production in this hive, but I'm curious to see how it turns out if I don't immediately requeen.  Tomorrow I will check again for larvae (after two weeks from the last check) and if there are none, I'll add some eggs and larvae from Meg and see if they turn some of those into queens -- as they should if there's no queen in the hive.  As it takes a queen 8 days from capping to emergence, and about another week to start laying eggs, we should see the start of a new brood nest by now.

I'll also be looking to make sure that the brood nest hasn't become totally filled with honey while the hive waited for more egg-laying.  If it has, I'll have to rearrange some of the frames to provide plenty of room in the brood area.

My dad also bought a 6 frame radial extractor (or 3 frame tangential -- we'll see which orientation we prefer)!  It's a hand-cranked model so with any luck, we'll be spending a sore and straining weekend turning the crank, but it should be upgradable with a motor for a few hundred dollars, and I think neither of us has real plans for expansion in the next year or two.  The boys are at least a year too young to think that turning a crank for 10 minutes to get really tasty honey is a good use of their time (especially when they can just be silly and get honey for free) but next year we'll put them to work as much as they'll tolerate.