We decided not to fuss too much over the bees the past 2 weeks simply because everything seemed to be in order. This past weekend we quickly opened each hive and made some observations. Hive C was extremely busy with tons of beautifully laid brood. There was much activity outside of the hive which indicated to us that these were newborn honeybees. They do this incredible impersonation of a vacuum cleaner, moving forward and backwards with their mouths cleaning the surface. I believe it's helping with their orientation. It was so busy that we removed the entrance reducer to give them more ventilation and ease of entry/exit. We put a queen excluder on and put on a honey super. We don't know how much honey will be accumulated but it's worth a try.
The nasty hive has been slow.... granted it was the last hive to get another queen. We also noticed that much of their building of comb tends to be on one side of the hive for some reason. I'm wondering if it has to do with the hive being made of styrofoam or possible how the hive is ventilated. Regardless, the new queen is laying nice brood around and we're hoping there's a population explosion shortly.
Alpha hive was busy with newly born honeybees too. They were all out and about the front of the hive getting their bearing. We opened the honey super and there were a number of frames full of honey again. We decided to only pull out the capped ones, which amounted to 2 frames and we'll get the rest this coming weekend when the kids are up. Everything else looked in order and we closed her up.
One other thing worth mentioning is that we made our first colonial style beeswax candles this weekend. Here is a picture of them:
No comments:
Post a Comment