Just Keeping Up

The end of the school year is coming up fast. For me this is always a mad dash to the finish. I've got projects that students have started that need to be wrapped-up, and bookkeeping that needs to be entered...

I've got a picture of my new method of protecting my ankles with my bootlaces that works very well and makes me look a lot like the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. If I only had a brain...

Last weekend I was picking up a piano that was a Mother's Day gift when my "A" hive swarmed. My wife was out in the backyard when it happened and she told me it was amazing. By the time I went out to see where they were - it was too late. They had left the area to parts unknown.


Yesterday I went out to my $300 beekeeping shop (well-beaten travel trailer) got my tools ready and headed down the hill to see what had happened. Luckily for me Matt, a local beekeeper showed up just as I was struggling to light my smoker. After a lesson on how to make fire we walked the path back to the hives. We took a look at my "B" hive that used to bee the weaker of the two, but now is going strong. I had added four foundationless frames the week before to replace the four shallow frames I had mistakenly added at the end of last season. That had created a kind of mess because the bees had added a lot of bur comb in the large space I had created - steep learning curve for me at times. The foundationless frames were built up very well in just a week. I was amazed at how fast the bees were able to build the comb and fill it with honey. Matt was curious as to why I was adding foundationless frames, and I had a hard time articulating my reason. I would like to have the bees slowly regress back to natural cell size because of the information that has shown the ability for natural size bees to fight off varrroa better.
I'll have to wait and see if that makes sense for me. The newly drawn comb was filled with honey, but it was definitely large drone comb, not small worker cells. I'm not sure if the bees will reach a point were they have built enough drone comb to revert back to smaller cells or not. I was warned that this done cell building would happen by Joe Caton at BeeManDirect. Now I see that it most definitely happens. The bees in hive "B" looked great and all was well.

I took a look into hive "A" that had swarmed and found that I had no real build-up of comb in a medium super I had added just before the swarm. The two other mediums that had over-wintered on the hive were filled with capped honey. The brood box was empty of all brood and no queen cells were built. This was alarming. I thought I would find that they had started their new queen, but there was no indication this was happening and with no eggs, couldn't ever happen. Today I am going to order a queen, or put a frame of freshly laid eggs in the "A" hive from the strong "B" hive along with a saw-tooth cut foundation to let them begin the process of building a queen cells.
I'm going to have another cup of coffee and think about what I want to do.

This bottom picture was taken with my iPhone camera. I had to use a magnifying glass along with the camera to focus on the bee. Not really easy to do, but it turned out pretty good. A stationary object would be a piece of cake...