So, remember a couple posts back where I said we added a second brood box to hive 1? Well this past weekend during our inspection, we decided to backtrack and remove it. It had been in place for 4 days and there was absolutely no activity on it. Our strong hive (hive 2) already had 4 frames being drawn and eggs being laid in the same amount of time after adding the second brood box on it, so we knew
A week ago (3 weeks after installation), hive 2 had drawn out about 75% of the frames, which is the point at which most beekeepers add a second brood chamber. If you fail to give the queen enough room to lay eggs, the colony may decide to swarm and leave the hive. To avoid this, we added a second brood chamber above the first. To our surprise, after only 1 week with the second story, this past weekend’s inspection revealed 4
At happy hour on Friday, my co-workers and I came up with the perfect name for the Queen in hive 2. With apologies to the Bloggess (who I love!) for stealing the name of her giant metal chicken, we christened our second queen “Beeyoncé”! We did a hive inspection Sunday afternoon, and Beeyonce is an egg-laying machine! Almost 3 frames in the new 2nd brood chamber we added a week ago are absolutely filled with eggs and larva! Go Queen B!
Just over 2 weeks into our beekeeping adventures, and already each Hive has been developing its own personality. We had plans to name the hives something witty but so far are just calling them Hive 1 and 2. Anyway…during this weekends inspection, we observed that Hive 2 is about double the population of Hive 1. The bees had drawn out more than 6 of the eight frames with wax, 2 frames of which are now “sealed brood”. This means that
Early last week the entire southeastern US was hit with some pretty severe weather. We were woken up at 5:45 am on Tuesday by the University’s warning sirens, indicating a tornado warning was in effect. Not a nice way to be woken from a deep sleep! Fortunately, we didn’t get anything but some heavy rain, but further east in NC there were some tornadoes and golf ball size hail. The forecasted severe weather got us thinking about what we should do
Busy weekend, lots to talk about! Between running a 4 mile race, attending a friend’s baby shower (which had bee-themed favors btw 😉 ), a neighborhood picnic, and putting in more of the vegetable garden, we found time to do our first full hive inspections one week after the installation. Suffice to say that everything looked pretty ok, with the exception of a lot of unwanted “burr comb” in the now empty feeder. Those hungry bees went through almost a gallon
When I went out first thing this morning (ah, who am I kidding, it was 9:30), I was thrilled to see a lot of bees returning to Hive 1 loaded up with pollen! I take this to mean that they are satisfied with the home I’ve provided and are going to fill the pantry? I tried to take a short video…it’s hard to get a good close-up. This is the best I could do. You’ll notice a bee fly in
After spending the first night in their new home, there was plenty of action going on in the apiary the next day. At first I was a little concerned with it, were they still agitated from the hiving, were they robbing, or something else? Then I remembered reading about this. My guess is that they were doing their orientation flights! Makes sense, since they were shipped in a small box from god-knows-where, and unceremoniously dumped into a strange hive on
Whew! Yesterday was an exciting one, welcoming home some 60,000 or so new pets! Now that the girls are settled in, here’s a recap of the hive installation: The weather was not ideal, a little cool and rainy but the nice folk at Bailey Bee Supply assured us that it would be fine, and in fact maybe help, in that the bees would hunker down in their new hives and not fly so much during the install. After picking out
I opened my email yesterday afternoon to this: To say I’m excited would be an understatement! As my co-workers can confirm, I’ve been talking about bees, bees, and more bees. It’s interesting how I’m now noticing very detailed things about this spring season’s arrival. Knowing that I’m soon going to have bees who need to have trees and flowers to forage from has made me even more attuned to what tree buds have recently popped and even the sight of