Guilfordbeekeepers.org

My original bee tree hive has built up again. I hived up one nuc from it and they are doing well. The split from it has what appears to be a poorly mated queen producing mixed drone and worker brood. I will probably get a replacement queen for that one. I made a 10 frame medium nuc tonight from the original hive. I gave it a few frames with eggs and larvae, several frames of capped brood and one of honey and one with some pollen. Because I was not running into much pollen, I gave them 1/3rd of a pollen patty to work on. My guess is they won't be doing much foraging for awhile unless a number of the nurse bees are about to age into foragers.

I gave the original hive about 10 frames of drawn, open comb. I was lucky enough to spot the queen early in the process and I put her in a clip while I made the nuc. That certainly sped up the process. She now has a lot of room in the brood areas and they are not bearding and washboarding as much as in the past several days.

I have an entrance reducer on the nuc to help them defend if robbing starts up, and with luck in about a month, I will have another well mated daughter of the best queen I have ever had.

The pollen watch begins. I verified the nuc had queen cells started after waiting 4 days to check. Tomorrow (June 17th) will be day 21. If a queen successfully mated, she should be laying by day 28, perhaps a little longer. My thoughts are to watch the other hives for pollen intake once plants are a little drier. When I see it coming in hives I know have brood, I hope to see the pollen foraging pick up for the nuc. There wouldn't be brood needing pollen at this point unless the new queen is creating the need. I will wait until day 28 to go in and check for eggs/queen, but want/hope to see the hopeful sign of pollen coming in before day 28.

I did requeen the hive with the poorly mated queen. I got a carni from Larry Tate. I removed the original queen on the morning of June 1st, and put the caged carni in the hive on the morning of June 2nd. By June 5th, she had been released and I removed the cage and replaced the frame I had taken out to create room for the cage. As of June 12th, I saw many new eggs. I will be checking the brood in a few days to see what kind of pattern she is laying.

I went into the nuc yesterday (28th day) and will look again in a few days to see what is developing. I did not see the queen but saw some eggs in a few frames. Some were double eggs, but most were singles. Most of the eggs were leaning, as if they were more than one day old. There were no larvae that I saw. There were several queen cups and one had 2 eggs in it, but no royal jelly.

I'm hoping that the queen is in there and mated and just starting to fire up, and I hope to see more evidence of that around Sunday afternoon.

I gave up on this nuc today and shook out the bees. It had gone laying worker and I tried a couple of rounds of brood from another hive in it to see if they would go from laying worker to creating a queen. They never did. I am seeing far fewer drones now, and did not feel it was likely that I would get a well mated queen at this point if they did make one. I saw quite a few small drones (created in worker cells) and just a few eggs in this nuc. There was no queen. I gave the drawn comb to a stronger hive that needed more brood area. With nectar as scarce as it is, I am seeing very little drawing out of undrawn frames put into hives, and I figured the stronger hive could make better use of the drawn comb.