Thursday, May 18, 2017

Goddess Save the Queen! (Hive Check 5/18/17)

It was a little over two weeks since my hive checks. The weather has been strange here in Albuquerque for May. Lots of rain, and lots of cold. Blustery is normal, but the rain and thundershowers were not!

Today around noon I went out to check on my top-bar hive at The Source, mostly looking for that elusive queen. It's nice out, not too hot, but a little windy. I needed to do it, since it'd been 16 days since my last check, so I just dove in.

Things are going great! The bees have expanded to make nine combs total! The one on the end is half-complete, but they've already started putting pollen in it. All except for the one on the end, which is almost all nectar, they have a strange pattern of a little honey at the top (some of it capped) and smatterings of worker brood and drone brood and pollen. Not a great pattern, but it's not super alarming. There's no cross combing, and they are all making perfectly straight comb, so I haven't had to do any repairs or turning around of the bar. I see a lot of black pollen, which is awesome, but I have seen no sign of disease or mites. They're so kind to me!

Most importantly, I found the queen! Finally! She was on the next-to-last bar, so I put her back immediately. Before I closed up, I saw her wandering toward the front again, probably to get away from me. She's nice and fat with eggs, so that really makes me happy.

I placed two empty bars between two of the most productive brood comb, to make them feel like they had room. I'll check them next week and see how they're doing with them. There were no supercedure cells, so I am not fearing them swarming. A good hive check all around!

I replaced the empty feeder, which probably won't last the two weeks, so I'll check on how their honey is doing next time I'm in there and put more in.

No comments:

Post a Comment