Author: The Moderator

A quick hive inspection was performed on all roof top hives. Hives, yellow, pine, blue and green all were queen right with eggs and larva.

Orange was still in the process of making a new queen. We took a virgin queen from the queen fenced hive (030), which had just emerged and moved her into the orange hive. We left the queen cells intact and we will let the bees decide which queen to go with.

The queen less Pine hive accepted the transplanted mated queen from Niagara (002). Eggs found, No larva.

The brood pattern and queen look great on the yellow hive. The queen on the blue hive certainly takes after the mother colony; very large abdomen and lays eggs to the corners.

A quick check on each of the 3 hives with new introduced queens shows a successful introduction. All three queens 3 had 3 days exposure before being released.

3 Queens were receive from Barnyard bees on May 1. These bees were kept in the cages and put into the queen-less hives. The hives were accepting of the new queen (003) except for hive, (002). We will see if anything changes in the next 48 hours.

The pine hive at Grow Gather was determined to be queen less for an unknown reason. I took a queen from the active colony (002) and introduced this queen to the pine hive. Hive (002) is now queen less and ready for the queens from Barnyard bees.

A group of interested future bee keepers was introduced to the 5 hives up on the roof of GG. The experience was treated as a teaching moment and maybe we will have some long term volunteers. However we learned that the Orange hive is indeed missing its queen. The queen must have not come back from a mating flight. I assumed that while the NUC did not have eggs, that the queen was mated. That assumption was incorrect. Next time we will wait until there are eggs before moving.

The Pine hive which was the swarm catch from Officer Ed’s property also had bad news. The Queen was missing along with several worker bees. On one of the frames were a few queen cells being drawn out. So the assumption is that the queen laid a few eggs then swarmed out of the hive with half the workers. The queen may need to be anchored in place a few more days before releasing. However, this queen was in the hive laying for approximately 5 days before absconding.

Corona property hives were opened and inspected. Hive (028 – 029) continues to be a huge producer and still showing no signs of swarming. We do need to perform a more through inspection of the lower box to make sure no swarm cells are being built. A split was made with 3 frames of resources and brood, split (003). The honey super was added to give the bees something to do as nectar is now coming into the hive at a good rate and I would like to keep the brood cells open.

Note: one frame of about half eggs were moved over to GG roof into the Orange hive. We will check this hive to see if they are making queen cells (I could not find the queen in Orange Hive and was tired of looking).

Split (001) was opened and inspected. No eggs were sen yet however the queen looks good and should be laying any day now.

Campus hives were inspected. Hive (018) was opened. The colony is queenright and has good numbers. This queen was a direct queen split from Officer Ed’s colony. This queen is an established and high producing queen. I opened up the honey super for this colony, early.

Bad news on the Woody’s pond hive. This hive immediately shows lower numbers of bees than I would expect. And the queen is missing. I can see one emergency queen cell on a frame. The possibility of this colony swarming is extremely low. The most likely possibility is that the queen died in the last major frost that we had. This is extremely unfortunate as this colony was a first generation Wild CA colony. This colony was my best and high production Wild CA colony to date. Maybe the replacement queen will be as good?

Officer Ed’s hives were inspected once again. The last inspection produced 2 splits with queens. Leaving behind 2 shallow boxes full of bees and a couple of unhatched capped queen cells. It looks like a new queen has emerged and a earlier queen may have smarmed since our last inspection.

While there are still a considerable number of bees, the activity is much lesser and the Queen is clearly unmated. No other unemerged queen cells were seen. This may be the last of the swarming for now. The upper 3rd shallow brood chamber was opened to the bees. This hive does not have a queen excluder.