New Matriarchs!

The queens from Michael Palmer arrived just as he promised on Friday. Many thanks to Theresa, our mail carrier, for delivering them to me!

I added one queen to the new split and was scratching my head about what to do about the other. I had planned on putting her in Hive 2–the hive I had recently split. Hive 2 has had an abnormal amount of drone cells and I was afraid I had a laying worker. Instead, when I opened up the hive to inspect it before adding the new queen, out walks a long, slender, dark colored queen! The overall brood pattern was much better and no drone cells north of the excluder in the the honey supers. Hooray! They had enough and made their own! I sort of expected to find a new queen when I opened the hive. Last Tuesday, the bees quit bearding and everyone was back inside the hive. While not a sure sign, it made me suspect a mated queen was in residence.

As great a find as that was, it left me with a dilema as to what to
do with the 2nd queen from Mike. These are daughters of hybrid queens that have already survived northern Vermont winters and are treatment free. I'm thrilled to add these genetics to the bee yard! Combined with the Buckfast and Russians I already have, these queens will further expand the gene pool of my local drones when I try to start raising queens next year. Out of deeps, I finally took another couple of partial brood frames from Hive 2, added a frame of pollen and placed 2 frames of honey in a deep nuc. I placed the queen cage between the 2 frames of brood candy plug up with the screen perpendicular to the brood frames to allow the bees to feed her, sprayed the frames with HBH and added a boardman feeder with 1:1. To say that the bees in the hives were instantaneously drawn to the queen cages is an understatement. There were bees on the cages before I could even get close to installing them.

Today being day 3, I came home and looked in to see if the queens were released yet. Finding both queens still in the cages but surrounded by relaxed bees, I released the queens into their new homes. Both immediately dove into the middle of the hive and disappeared. I'll check them out in about a week and see if they've truly been accepted and are laying eggs.

The other good news is Hive 1 has exploded with honey and brood. They've started swarm cells, so I added a medium of undrawn Pierco frames to give them something to do until my new Beemax hive arrives from Betterbee. I'll split the hive this weekend and let them raise a daughter of the existing queen. She is a phenomenal producer and I want to keep her genes in the yard.

With so much to do during this hive inspection and queen installation I did not shoot many pics. Figure 1 is a bad shot of one of the marked queens. Green is the color for 2009. Figure 2 is one of the girls working the spirea this past weekend and Figure 3 is the new layout of the apiary. The tan box in the background is for storage so I do not have to cart everything out to the yard every time.