Category: Bee Keeping Journal

All campus hives were inspected. All campus hives were queenright with good resources and entrance activity.

Carniolan19 has decent numbers but is behind the normal expected population curve for an Italian queened hive. Not concerned yet.

Both of the ApisCA19A and ApisCA19B are doing just fine. Three frames in the honey supers are being filled out.

One frame of brood and nurse bees was taken from the Wild17 swarm colony and moved to the recent Bee Bearding split which was taken on Thursday. Inspection of the Woody’s pond hive showed excellent numbers and the bees are moving into the super with huge numbers. However the wax foundation frame repairs which were performed did not work. The bees are still rejecting two of the frames.

All feeders were removed from the hive brood chambers and backfilled with undrawn wax frames.

Officer Ed’s colony while still small seems to be increasing in numbers. The hive was only partially opened due to time constraints. A quick peek inside showed more bees than we started with. The colony is still operating out of only one small frame brood chamber.

Two colonies will be moved out to new locations. The first colony will be relocated in the neighborhood and the second will be located to the Barrett house. The colonies which will be moved are the WildCA19B colony and the beard starter colony with a WildCA18A queen. The colonies are established in Nuc hives and have their own stands.

The colonies were shut this morning and will be stored in a cool ventilated location until 3 days from now on Wednesday.

The two queen colonies are rapidly running out of space in their small frame Nucs/mating boxes. I decided to re-cage the 2 remaining queens into one box for banking. Hopefully the quenless colonies will begin to create new queens.

I was called out to the campus to inspect the Wild17 swarm colony. The colony has been bearding on the front entrance for days. The weather has been warmer, but nothing above 85F. The crowding and the temperatures inside must be intolerable for so many bees to be bearding on the front. I decided to simply drop the bee beard into a Nuc box with one frame of resources and one frame of nurse bees with brood and give them a banked queen. The queen was from the WildCA18A queen mother.

New swarm colony, WildCA19B was opened and inspected 12 days after install. The colony is extremely calm and focused. No smoke or bee suit was used. Not a single bee was flying during the inspection. Queen was found and is laying. Capped brood was found. Capped honey was found. Almost all 5 frames have been built out with newly drawn comb. Extremely well behaved colony.

All hives on campus berm have normal entrance activity. Wild17 swarm which was re-queened on June 2nd was opened. The queen cage was empty and removed. No further inspection performed. Next inspection we will look for a laying queen.

Bee swarm caught on May 30 was opened. The queen was still caged and ready to be released. The queen was released this morning after 4 days of being sequestered. The colony has drawn out comb and should now be anchored.

Woody’s pond hive was opened and is queen right. Three frames which have poorly drawn comb were fixed. Several frames have excellent brood patterns. The colony looks in excellent health.

The final remaining swarm catcher located at the Smith building on campus was seen with bees circling and entrance activity. Upon further inspection, there is only a handful of bees in the catcher and no queen. Not certain if these are bees stranded from a swarm or if these are scout bees.

Queens which were raised from the WildCA18A colony genetics were banked and one was removed to be placed into the Wild17 colony split. The Wild17 colony has been re-queened and the queen should be released from the queen cage in next 36 hours. The mother of Wild17 was kept with the other banked queens.

One of the starter colonies is still not yet laying eggs. That colony was left alone until signs of mated queen are found. The laying queen from another colony was banked and left queen-less. This colony will be used to raise more queens.