Weather: Sunny, mild wind, 60′s
On Tuesday we received the delivery from H&L Bee Farm (www.hlbeefarm.com) in Ocilla Georgia (229.468.7660) of 2 3lb Bee Packages and they looked in relatively good shape with not many dead bees. The bees we purchased from them are pure Minnesota Hygienic Italian Honeybees. The queen bees will lay wall to wall, winter well, are not bad to swarm, easy to work, and are the leaders in honey production. Jim and I decided to leave work early on Wednesday since not many of the bees would survive until Saturday cooped up in the wooden box. We arrived at Craryville Farm at 5:30pm and we had little time before the sun set to get the bees to their new home. As the minutes ticked by, the wind got stronger but we had no choice but to get the job done…and quickly.
We installed the first package in hive C and all went as smoothly as possible. Hive B, the stryofoam hive, was next and that too went well. We put a 3 gallon top feeder on each, sealed them up and decided to come up again over the weekend to make sure the queens emerged from their cages.
Today 11am we checked up on the hives and noticed very little activity from each hive. It had been a cooler evening and the coolness still lingered. Hive A probably had the most activity. My feeling is that since it’s the older hive, with many more bees, they’re already used to the cooler mornings and are a bit quicker to start coming out. Hive B and C had minimal activity but we did notice a few bees flying around.
After lunch we suited up and noticed a tenfold jump in activity from each of the hives with Hive A being the busiest. We first opened hive C to find that 1/3 of the sugar water from the feeder had been eaten. We removed the feeder and searched the frames for the cage. The cage was waxed to the come and we found that the queen had emerged from her cage. We examined the frames and the worker bees were drawing comb. Jim also spotted the queen quickly which told us that she was alive and she had been accepted into the colony.
Hive B was another story…again the sugar water on this hive was down by a 1/3 and when we searched for the cage, we again found it waxed onto the frame. Surprisingly the candy blocker was eaten away and worker bees had entered the cage but the queen still remained inside the cage. Jim and I decided to let the queen emerge on her own and we put the cage back into the hive and sealed it up.
When we checked Hive A, most of the frames on the top brood super looked fine however one frame in particular made me uneasy since it had odd looking brood cells. Jim assured me that this hive was fine since the other brood pattern was fine and the honey was capped perfectly. We quickly searched the top brood super for the queen but after causing a bit of destruction, we decided to leave it alone and check on it another time.
Here is a video clip Jim took this afternoon.
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