June 15, 2012

Well it’s been a while since we’ve had a chance to update you on the bees.  There were a few factors, first we ourselves have been as busy as bees, and secondly our computer died, so we lost all of this seasons bee photos. Luckily we still have the hives and the cameras so I’m sure there will be lots more.
Let me give you some general descriptions of what has been going on.

The ‘squares’ hive has been the slowest to start.  Even into June it is still on the bottom box.  We had seen some swarm cells in it- but they don’t seem to have swarmed. It’s possible that the queen that came on the box from Georgia was superceeded – they were flying ok today but not a lot.

The ‘X’ hive is doing well. They have drawn out just about everything in the top box and we gave them a super about a week ago.  I am on the couch sick today so have not checked on their progress in the super, but they are flying a lot.

The ‘original’ hive is still going really strong.  We saw signs of swarm cells in them, and have tried to proactively give them space, but they may still swarm.  I heard the quacking of a queen in there last week, so either it’s time for a new queen or they wanted to swarm.  They have filled 4 fames with honey in the super and are quickly backfilling the bottom box with honey as well. They have also drawn out all but the edge frames of the super and thus they now have two supers – the tallest our hives have ever been! We are running shallow depth supers, because that’s what we have although I am thinking we will clearly need more supers this summer and might go with medium ones, although it is nice to keep the weight down as honey is heavy!