Note to self:
I need to check Hive 2, They don't seen to be as robust as they should be. All the other hives are busy with lots of bees coming and going. Hive 2 were going through the motions but didn't seem as active as I thought they should be. I had noticed some very dark old dead bees outside the entrance so I decided tomorrow I would check it out.
May 20
So once my chores were done, I geared up and went out to do an inspection. I looked in the top box and found lots of pollen and a fair amount of nectar...that's good. However I found no brood in the top box but that was not unusual for this time of year. Once that box was done, I moved into the lower box. I found no brood.....I was sick. No brood = No queen.
I removed the bottom box and found lots of dead bees, some had been there for quite some time and the others were fairly new. Queen Anna must of been in there with the other dead. I suddenly went in to rescue mode. I threw aside the bottom board and grabbed a fresh on, then placed the frames into a new brood box, then I opened the hive next to it and searched it until I found some capped and uncapped brood and robbed that and placed it in the lower box. I closed it up and hoped for the best.
May 21
I had decided to go in search of at least one more frame of brood, so I went into Hive 1 and robbed one from there. In about a week I should be able to see a queen cell starting so would check back then
June 1
Barb came over and we decided to check in the hive to see if we could see a queen cell. As we were looking through the hive we noticed most all the brood had hatched. But we found no queen cell. Once again we took a few more frames of brood from Hive 1 and hoped for the best. We noticed though, that hive 1 is doing awesome...they are a crazy hive, tons of bees, tons of brood and tons of attitude! Love that hive.
June 5
Checked in and found no sign at all of the bees in Hive 2 making a new queen. So after some discussion it was decided we were going to combine the bees with our little swarm hive (Hive 4) So before dark we went out there while most of the bees were inside, we removed the inside cover of Hive 4 and laid down 2 layers of newspaper then placed on top of that, the 2 boxes from the hive who lost their queen. We put the lids on and that was it. In a couple days the bees will have chewed through the newspaper and they will become one hive. I am told doing it this way, it gives the bees with no queen time to accept their new queen.
June 8
I can only assume the bees are all together now, today I noticed way more action than there had been. Next week we will go in and remove some of the boxes and frames and get them moved down into 2 brood boxes. At that point we will decide if we will do a split later. I'm thinking it can wait til next year but we will see. I'm just glad we could save this hive.
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| Notice the newspaper still in place, this will be removed once we condense the bees into a couple boxes. The top 2 boxes was the hive who lost Queen Anna |
