I installed 3 NUCs last week, and after only 8 days got raided by a bear. He devastated one hive, and did some superficial damage to another one. Looks like the long hive was too heavy for him to budge; an unexpected benefit.
Electric fencing was on my summer to do list; I thought I’d get at least a couple months, not 8 days! That forced me to take the afternoon off and get the fencing up ASAP.
Hopefully there are enough bees left, and with a new queen coming on Friday they will be able to reestablish themselves before winter.
ah man!! Sorry to hear this. Good job on getting that fence up quickly though. Sometimes it takes negative motivation to get us in gear. At least I know it does for me. I hope all goes well with the re-queening
Update on the bear damaged hive; it is finally queenright, but it has taken a long time.
After installing the new queen a week after the bear killed the original one, I checked after 3 days to see if she had been released and she hadn’t so I manually released her. A bit more than a week later I find some larvae and a capped supercedure cell but can’t spot the queen. I left the cell in case the queen didn’t take, only to find 2 weeks later no queen, no eggs and no larvae again!
At this point I had purchased 2 complete double deep hives, so I started moving in a frame of brood, eggs, larvae each week for a couple of weeks, until one weekend about 3 weeks ago I opened one of the double deeps to find capped swarm cells. I took one of these frames and added to the bear damaged hive as they still hadn’t raised their own, and this weekend was pleasantly surprised to come across a huge golden queen that has completely filled every last empty cell with eggs and larvae! She is a gorgeous color, and dwarfs all my other queens, tremendously easy to spot. Next weekend I’ll try and get a picture to update this thread with.
