SR Hive Check 6/11/17

I finally made it back out to Sunflower River on Sunday evening, June 11. I met up with Tristan around 6pm and we went out back to look at the hive. The sky was clear and the wind calm, thankfully, and the temperature was somewhere in the 80's.

Tristan checking out the bees!

Our smoker went out after the first couple of puffs, but the bees were all relatively docile and we continued without it. It was Tristan's first time actually getting into the hive, so he did a lot of the work, the both of us alternating looking at the frames.

We found that the second box that we added a few weeks back was still mostly empty. A skeleton crew of bees were working on building some comb in a couple of the center frames, but mostly it was empty of anything. This is probably because for so long the boxes had a large gap and they had a dry feeder for about a week, which probably stressed them out.

Look at that beautiful frame!

However, the bottom box was more or less full. The middle 8 frames were absolutely full, with two full frames of mostly nectar/honey, and the rest full of mostly capped brood.

And that was the problem. We were unable to find the queen, but we saw lots of capped brood...and not a lot of larvae. It makes me think that maybe they have lost their queen. What I am going to do is see where they are in two weeks, look for the queen again, and then decide what we'll do. I'd much prefer to find her, but if there's significant evidence that she is dead, we'll either get another one or encourage them to make some. There were no supercedure cells on any of the frames, so they don't seem to be too concerned about it just yet, so I feel comfortable waiting to see.

We decided to keep feeding them through the summer, as the hive is still small and they have been stressed. So Tristan is upping the number of times he will go out and check the feeder.

Mostly they were busy bees, happy and docile bees, so I'm glad to see the corrections to their hive have (hopefully) calmed them and they are under less stress.