Joining the 21st Century

Note:
As one who has produced digital video since 1990, it's time we add video to this blog. To see larger windows of the video go to our new website, www.MorningDewApiary.com and look at the Media section. The video will not only be larger, it will look better than this software allows.

Friday was upper 70's and gorgeous so I decided it was time to put Hive 1 in the right super order and see how Hive 2 was building out the new wooden medium frames with small cell wax foundation I added 2 weeks ago.

The Buckfast girls of Hive 1 (pic 1) were quite a calm group as I put the supers in the correct order of 2 deeps on the bottom and 2 mediums on top.While happy to observe the queen is doing her thing, I also noticed the colony is building vertically and only using the leftmost 5 frames (when viewed from the rear of the hive). The queen has laid 2 full frames of brood in both deeps and even some in the medium with the workers packing pollen and honey around them but the 5 frames on the right have not been touched since winter. In fact, there are still dead bees in a few of the cells from winter. So much for good housekeeping habits... After consulting with my fellow beeks on BeeSource, I will start to put 1 or 2 of the empty frames into the middle of the brood to get the queen to start laying more of the frames. You can see the queen being cared for by her attendants in the first video clip.




Hive 2 was quite loud the other night when I walked by. Usually you need to be next to
the hives to hear the melodious buzz of the bees working. On that night, it sounded like a saw mill was in the hive. As they have been extremely busy (and they are Russian bees) I was afraid they may be getting ready to swarm so I added another medium of undrawn Pierco frames to keep them occupied (we don't have wireless out there so their computers don't work). They hadn't started on the new medium but they had already drawn out the wood/wax medium (pic 2)and the queen already had brood going (see video 2 for the nurse
bees feeding the larvae).



Once I took off the mediums, the farther into the hive I went, the more aggressive they became. I found a lot of drone cells on the edge of every frame in the deeps, regardless of whether any other brood was on the frame. The aggressiveness (3 stings from lifting out frames), the amount of drone cells and the loudness from the other night kept me looking at every frame until I finally found what I thought I might. Six frames into the bottom deep were 2 supercedure cells, one was capped, the other open with a future queen floating in royal jelly. Looks like we're about to have a new royal highness. Maybe I'll do a split and use both new queens...