Friday, June 21, 2013

Hive check

Haven't checked all the hives for a while, so with the good weather today, we decided it would be a good time for it.  On a brief side note, I put two supers on hive D a week ago and I did a quick check in the deeps and didn't see any eggs or brood.

Today I started at hive A and went through all of them.  I didn't do a frame by frame check on everything and didn't find spot any queens today.  It's also hot enough that I completely pulled out the entrance reducers.  I didn't see any eggs, larva or brood in hive A, but I did see a beautiful capped swarm cell at the bottom of a frame.  Lots of pollen and honey in the deeps, but it looks like they're holding a good cell pattern open for new eggs.  For the time being, I'm going to assume a new queen will emerge from that swarm cell, but I also transferred one frame with eggs and larva from hive B to hive A to help them stay calm.

Hive B was doing great.  Lots of eggs, brood and larva, so it looks like they've got a healthy queen.  I didn't see any swarm cells.

Hive C is also doing great.  Lots of eggs, brood and larva, so it looks like a good queen here too.

Hive D is pretty honey bound in the upper deep, but the bottom deep has quite a lot of open cells.  Good news, I saw eggs and larva on multiple frames in the bottom deep.  Not a whole lot, so I did swap a frame from hive C with eggs and larva in to give them a boost.

On the honey front, just about all the supers were getting very full and I figured we'd be ready to harvest the summer honey in about another week.  Right now we've got two supers per hive.  The top super on hive D still had a lot of foundation, so I swapped a few of those with full honey frames from supers on hives B and C.

Overall, I think things are going well.  I'm still not sure if it was hive A or D that swarmed, but I'm thinking it was A now.  Anyway, I'll keep an eye on hive A and make sure there's some new eggs in the next two weeks.


No comments:

Post a Comment