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I've been keeping this blog for all of my beekeeping years and I am beginning my 19th year of beekeeping in April 2024. Now there are more than 1300 posts on this blog. Please use the search bar below to search the blog for other posts on a subject in which you are interested. You can also click on the "label" at the end of a post and all posts with that label will show up. At the very bottom of this page is a list of all the labels I've used.

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I began this blog to chronicle my beekeeping experiences. I have read lots of beekeeping books, but nothing takes the place of either hands-on experience with an experienced beekeeper or good pictures of the process. I want people to have a clearer picture of what to expect in their beekeeping so I post pictures and write about my beekeeping saga here.Master Beekeeper Enjoy with me as I learn and grow as a beekeeper.

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Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Much Activity in the Hives

Today the man who supplied my nucs called to say that my queen may arrive tomorrow afternoon. If she does, I'll need to pick her up and essentially take her straight to my hives and establish her presence there. He said she would be in a container with no attendants.

So on the way to work tomorrow, I will be stopping at the hardware store to purchase #8 hardware cloth to make a push-in queen cage. I've been to two lectures on how to do this - one at Young Harris last year and one at my bee club this year - but I've never done this myself.

Actually I've never introduced a queen. I've ordered nucs that already had a queen in them and I've given hives frames of eggs to make their own queen, but I've never ordered and then introduced the queen to the hive. So this will be yet another first in my life as a beekeeper.

In addition my hives are going really well right now. I checked Bermuda this morning and they are slow to work on the top box. I am thinking that they probably swarmed when I wasn't home. They are acting like a hive rebuilding rather than a hive that is moving into honey production. Mellona is doing great and today I added a honey super.

The small swarm from the Dunwoody yard has not been opened because I suspected that it has a virgin queen who had to be mated and return to the hive. I opened the top of that hive today to see how it's going in there and they seemed angry. I am wondering if they are in fact queenless. I did give them a frame of brood and eggs a week after they arrived, but I'm not sure they have made a queen. They had built out all of the frames in the boxes they had so I added a third box.

Tonight I built frames and waxed in starter strips of foundation. I expect that before the weekend at least two more hives will need more growing space and probably Bermuda will need a honey super (cross your fingers).

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous12:26 PM

    Good Luck Linda on the introduction of the new queen.

    Last year I totally lucked out when I introduced a queen to my queenless hive. They accepted her and she is still in there working away.

    This year the experience was different and they killed the queen in the cage although I thought they had accepted her.

    You never know with the bees.

    I have learned so much from all these challenges and you will continue to learn also.

    Take care and have fun.

    Annette from Placerville California

    ReplyDelete

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