Hi all,
Tommy and Anne Samuels here. We attended joined the beekeeping classes after they had already gotten started, but decided to jump in no matter what.
Picked up our Nuc on Friday from Beez Needz and installed the girls Friday afternoon.
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They went into our 10 frame deep along with a 1 1/2 gallon feeder and 3 empty frames.
We also sat a Blink camera on the front porch so we can get a look at them whenever , wherever we happen to bee.
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Girls seem to be settled in nicely and have started bringing pollen back to the hive.
So how long do we wait until the first inspection?
Welcome to the forum and to beekeeping. If I am reading your post correctly, you put an in-hive feeder where 2 frames would otherwise go. If that is the case, you will need to open the hive every few days to see if you need to refill the feeder. Make sure that your frames are all pushed together and that any extra space is to the outsides of the frames in your deep. Remember the approximate 3/8ths inch bee space. If your frames are too far apart, bees are likely to build out 1 side of an undrawn frame and then build a second round of comb off of that frame rather than fully draw the next foundation over. This leaves you with a section of comb that cannot be moved and cannot be inspected. If the bees have started doing this, gently remove the extra comb, being careful to avoid harming your queen, and then push the frames together. You do not want to wait until they have done a lot of comb building to do this if it is necessary.
We have everything pushed together nice at tight. There's a little bit of "extra space" outside of the outermost frame. I thought that would be better than space outside of the feeder. I didn't want to tempt them into drawing comb on the outside of the feeder.
I'll quickly crack it open tomorrow to check food level, but not mess with them doing work for now. It will give me a chance to see if they've started drawing out the new frames.
We took a very quick peek in there last night.
Lots of bees have emerged in the past 4 days.
They consumed about 1/2 gallon of 1:1 syrup.
They are packing in the pollen and putting up fresh nectar, maybe the 1:1 syrup
They've started drawing comb on one of the 3 frames I put in the box on Friday evening. The other 2 have a small number of bees on them, but no signs of drawing comb yet.
Do you have frames ready to go back in that nuc if you need to make a split? Have plenty of frames and boxes on hand. If you get to where you need to split, you may be happy to have the nuc or a second hive. Sooner or later you will want a resource hive. Keeping that nuc box with bees in it will come in handy.
We haven't posted an update on the girls in quite a while here.
Sad to say we lost the hive Christmas Eve. There were some cleansing flights during the day and the girls were cleaning out a few dead bees while it was warmish.
Then the super cold night and we had to go out of town to help a dear friend in SC.
Yesterday I was expecting to see activity and there was none, so I opened up to find all the girls dead in three small clusters in the hive instead of one large cluster.
Each small group died in contact with open honey stores and they left behind a full deep of honey.
Looking closely at the frames the queen had started laying again and was laying up until the day before they died. There were eggs and very small larvae under the small clusters.
That sounds like the work of varroa mites. They need to be knocked down well before winter begins. You want a good population of healthy winter bees. These are the bees that live through this period and tend to brood as the queen ramps up. If mites are not controlled, bees tend to die off early and the cluster size dwindles. Once the queen produces any brood, the remaining bees will normally stay with it and try to maintain mid-90's temperature. They won't travel an inch from the brood to get food and will starve in place. If the cluster is large enough to cover brood AND cover food, they can distribute the food even as they remain clustered. If not, they may not break cluster to retrieve food if it leaves brood uncovered and subject to chilling. I have seen this happen anytime between late December and late February. It can happen even later if the cluster is small and an extended cold snap keeps the bees at the brood. I hate when this happens.