Another Nuc to Hive

This morning I transferred one of my strong nucs to bigger accommodations (a 10 frame hive) in Beelandia. The transfer went without incident. This is the last hive I can fit into Beelandia. The other nucs will probably either go to my friends, Chris and Jenny, or be used to requeen any of the other hives. Now I'll need another name for a hive, of course. As usual, I am open to suggestions.

And speaking of new names, last post, I asked for naming suggestions for the hive I started last week. Only David from the LA Garden blog entered but I really liked his suggestion: "Atta Bee!" So "Atta Bee!" it is!

And Now For the Top Bars

I inspected my two top bar hives this afternoon.

I am still concerned about Metpropolis and am tempted to simply requeen it. The queen is alive and laying but the brood pattern is really spotty, possibly indicating an inbred queen. I will give it a week or two more.

Plan Bee... is booming with bees, larvae and eggs. I was unable to spot the queen but I did find one supersedure cell. I am not that concerned about this hive. It looks healthy and active. I might split it in the near future.

Metpropolis Queenless?

I did some work in the beeyard today. I took off the honey supers (nothing really there) on both Lib-BEE-taria and Bee Glad... and dusted them with powdered sugar. I also switched out a drone brood frame in Lib-BEE-taria. I fed the Nuc To Be Named Later which seems to be doing well. Plan Bee... looks excellent as well, though I'll probably have to feed it a bit to get it ready for winter.

But Metpropolis... well... I am a bit concerned with this top bar hive. I kept pulling bars looking for either brood or a queen and saw neither. The workers didn't behave like they were queenless, but I saw no evidence of a laying queen otherwise. One hypothesis I have is that the hive swarmed recently and I missed that, though there are plenty of workers inside. I plan to watch this hive closely. Luckily, I do have that queen in the nuc, so it will not be hard to requeen the hive.

Report from Rushford

I spent this afternoon helping my friend Chris with his bees on his farm in Rushford, Minnesota. Chris had a slight and embarrassing accident with the new queens he purchased yesterday at B and B Honey Farm in Houston, Minnesota. He went back to purchase some new ones today and place them in the splits he made from two of his hives. He did have to take a little teasing from the staff at B and B. Chris successfully placed queens in two of his eight.

We went on to inspect the other six hives. Two of those contained the queens from last year's package. They were active and seemed healthy, though Chris took the advice of a local beekeeper and treated them both with formic acid. They had not been treated before.

The other 4 hives contained newly hived packages purchased two weeks ago. We saw the marked queens in each, and the drawing of comb on at least 4 frames in each hive. The really interesting thing was to see the color of this drawn comb. Chris' bees have been foraging on wild mustard all throughout his farm, and the comb reflects this foraging; it is bright yellow in color.

One concern was the appearance of a good number of dead bees in front of the entrance to one hive. These dead bees had their probosces extended, possibly indicating poisoning. This is a mystery. Where does the poison come from?