#backyardbeekeping

Happy Father’s Day from our hives to yours!! Fun fact: male bees are called drones. Basically, their only purpose in the hive is to fertilize the Queen. If they’re successful in that endeavor, they’ll die during the mating flight. The other males will live fat and happy through the summer eating the honey that the ladies bring in, but come fall the ladies will kick them out to starve to death or freeze rather than waste resources through winter! We did a full inspection of both hives today because someone in our Bee association suspects they may have a case of European foulbrood. Our ladies look healthy and happy though! Ophelia had a beautiful brood pattern and we saw tons of eggs. Nefertiti’s pattern is occasionally a little spotty, but overall very nice. We’ll need to keep a close eye on her hive because we found some small signs we may have a laying worker. The Ashley’s are bringing in tons of honey in a beautiful array of colors hand over fist!

Got in Ophelia’s hive this morning to see how they’re doing. The hive is tiny but has stopped taking sugar syrup, so it seems like they’re bringing in all the nectar they need. Ophelia has started ramping up her laying as well. We’re hoping to see this hive really grow quickly now!

Quick inspection today! What looks like a spotty brood pattern is actually our poor ladies being honeybound! They’ve already brought in so much honey this season that they’re out of space to lay eggs. Luckily, we had a super with some comb already to go, so we tossed that on to give them space. They should be right as rain soon! We also spotted some empty queen cells during this inspection. We’ll have to keep a close eye on the hive to make sure our ladies don’t swarm or replace the queen!

Quick hive inspection today! Queen Nefertiti has begun laying and the Ashley’s are bringing in a ton of pollen! With the ladies officially building up for Spring, we’ll start supplementing their pollen intake and feeding them sugar water. We also cleaned up the dead hive and scraped clean a bunch of frames that had wax over two years old.

Thanks to Buck’s Bees we’re back up to two hives. He captured this lovely little swarm while out at White Rock Lake one night and was nice enough to send it over to our bee yard. Please welcome Queen Ophelia! We settled the hive in a deep that still had some honey and pollen from last year. We’ll continue to feed them until they get to be well established.

It's been a really tough week for the hive. The day after installing Ingrid our hive was under attack by robber bees. Robber bees steal honey, but worse is that they kill a lot of bees in the attack and have a tendency to go after the queen. We closed off the hive entrances and threw a wet sheet over the hive, but the robber bees were still at it. Finally, a helpful Reddit user told Cale how to make a robber screen. That did the trick. The last of thieves cleared off just in time for us to do our inspection this morning. Our bees were apparently busy fighting off the invasion because Ingrid was still in her queen cage. We released her (and had a scary moment where we thought Jenn smashed/lost her). The hive isn't out of the woods yet - we don't have a lot of bees left and they'll need to work really hard to build up their strength again. Fingers crossed we have enough bees to do it! We pulled the extra honey supers off the hive. The robber bees had mostly cleaned them out, so we were able to store them. We popped them into black trash bags a with some moth crystals so that wax moths won't ruin the comb while they're stored. We also started bottling our honey in one pound jars! Our spigot is a little tiny, so it takes about 15 minutes to fill each jar!

Queengrid was installed this evening, so hopefully the hive will release her from the queen cage in the next 3-4 days and she can start laying eggs. If they don’t accept her, they may be able to raise a queen from the open brood we placed in the hive.