Q7 queens were installed in several hives amongst the group. Liz’ nuc that received a Pauw was abandoned after all. Last Sunday, Mel set up another nuc. Mel and I went to the farm to see if any of the reserve queens had emerged. We found one Pauw and one […]
Q7 was started on Sunday, July 26th, 2015. I used the same nurse hive as for Q4 and Q6 at the farm: bottom deep with open brood, queen and foragers. On that a queen excluder and the cloak board. On that the second deep with capped brood (about 4 frames […]
I set up the same nurse hive that was at the farm and was used for Q4 with the cloak board. I had learned at the MSBA meeting this summer to be sure to put only capped brood in the box above the queen excluder and to shake all the […]
This tuesday, while I was away, Liz and Todd removed the cloak board slider from Q4, effectively reunited the upper box of bees with the pheromones of the queen. They also took this picture of the queen cells: The artificial royal jelly was completely rejected by the bees, but […]
Q4 started a few days ago on the Garst Farm with the installation of the cloak board and the move of open brood to the topbox. Today, Liz and I rotated the hive 180 degrees so that the original opening is in the back (but still open). The queen is […]
One of the queens that I really liked was George, originally caught as a swarm in my yard, than moved to a friend in Uniontown, and a split taken back to my yard. That line lived with me for 4 years without treatment and put up good winter stores. This […]
I have started preparations for our first round of queen rearing, although I do not know who wants to be involved this year. For this round, I decided to try a different method, as it seemed that in the end, everyone last year was reluctant to sacrifice hives. This year, […]
Today was a relatively warm day after a few weeks of cold. Temp here in LIbertytown was 50, so I checked to see which hives were still buzzing. This is the score: my yard: 1.Allen’s nuc: died (I think this queen was not very suited for this area, there was […]
This friday (7.25.2014), I located the 3 queens that I have from Q3 and marked them with an orange dot. There was brood in every nuc, but clearly, the one with the most bees (from the most brood given when the nuc was set up), had the largest amount of […]
I started with 4 real nuc boxes for Q3 and one improvised queen castle (two compartment). All hives had a queen emerge, but today I checked for queens/bees/brood. This is my tally (July 20th, 2014): Nuc with white dots: nice queen, one of the ones that Andrew grafted from George. […]
