Saturday, June 25, 2011

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.

1 comment:

  1. You refer to the hives as individuals? Interesting.

    BTW, reminds me a lot of the Ender's Game series. Social insects are fascinating to me.

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