June 2011

Rest of June: The smaller hive at Al which had a mite of the queen was found to be queenless a week or so later. No eggs or larvae, just a little capped brood. Immediately combined this hive with the neighboring hive to make a new monster hive. The newspaper was eaten through a day or so later and all was well. This is the way to deal with queenlessness!

6/18 Inspected the Langstroth hives in the backyard. The monster combined hive is doing very well with lots of brood and honey. Nectar and honey production seems high at the moment. The bees still refuse to cap a very large frame of honey, which is over three normal frames of honey wide. It causing considerable problems in the hive with adjacent combs. Decided to remove one frame of mostly capped honey to free up some space. The new package also seems to have accelerated in honey production and have mostly filled the top box of the 3 mediums that constitute the hive. Need to add additional boxes to both hives soon.

6/12 Inspected the smaller hive at AL to see if the new queen and hive now had capped brood. It does but bee numbers are very low. When comparing the combined hive in the backyard and this hive at AL which had eggs introduced to make a new queen, it is obvious that combining hives is the way to solve a queenless hive problem. The shock of the inspection was seeing a mite on the new queen!!!! This also happened in the tbh a few weeks ago. We were extremely puzzled as the hive should have an extremely low mite count as several brood cycles have been skipped due to queenlessness. Didn't see any other mites of signs of deformed wing virus.

6/10 Inspected the two Langstoth hives in the backyard: the new package and the combined hive. Both hives are thriving. The combined hive is a monster with two deeps full of brood and two mediums with several frames of honey nectar. Big problems with over sized combs that the bees refuse to cap which then leads to problems with the shape of adjacent frames. Several frames today had three lobes of comb that were all angled of the centerline but all parallel to each other. Tried to cut and rotate them all into line. Did work like this throughout the mediums. At least three frames are perfect and almost all capped honey. Will hopefully remove these soon. Didn't see the queen but saw lots of brood.

The package of bees also had lots of brood but not much nectar or honey. Not sure if this is a slow build up for a new hive or if it's normal. Bees refused to move up into the third medium (the hive is all medium boxes - 3 in total) since the last inspection, so moved up three pretty straight frames of mixed brood and honey to give them the idea. Again missed the queen.