Documenting 12 Flow Hive 2's in Bluebonnet, North Texas

Gorgeous colors, Marty :heart_eyes: they look fabulous!!

You can paint water based over oil based but not the other way around :+1:

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It all looks awesome @Martydallas. I’m looking forward to seeing the final outcome!

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WOW that was a lot of work! That’s also a lot of equipment too. Did the dark wet boxes cool off like the lighter ones?

The darker box in the photos were always dark to begin with. They may have darkened up a little bit after waxing but not much. The grain of the wood gets enhanced a bit after wax dipping but essentially remains the same colors. In this photo. It does look quite a bit darker. I need to go back and look again but I believe it’s the same. Planning on moving all the equipment out to the campground Friday afternoon. My mentor and I are doing about 20 or 30 splits on Saturday. I’ll be taking 12 of them in about a week to the campground, putting everything in place.

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I hope you have the most successful apiary for the campers. It’s beautiful too!

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20 splits. My mentor and I worked his hives and got 20 splits yesterday. So we are on track to taking 12 of those out to the campground before the end of the month. So looking forward to it. It was my first time doing splits. I know it will take a few more times for me to really get the hang of it, but I learned a lot.

Got to see a lot of stuff, never seen a laying worker or is my mentor calls it a possibly new queen. They were laying two eggs in some cells. Never more than two. Most of the sales only had one egg. But it was remarkable to see 2.

Additionally, we dropped the queen on the ground. At the time we thought she dropped onto another frame because we could not find her on the ground. After we got through working all the other hives. He went back and took a look at that hive again and found a cluster of bees surrounding her. He gently picked up the entire cluster and set it back in the box.

We marked at least two queens that weren’t previously marked or the markings wore off. Used the one-handed queen catcher, very remarkable nice little tool. I will get a few more.

It was not quite 60°F outside and little windy, for the most part the bees were good, a few times they got a little nasty with us.

Just keeping everyone updated. Thank you for any feedback

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Split at my home. Personally, I have not done any splits on the hives at my home. Last Friday, just before running out of town on Saturday morning I decided to do a hive inspection with the likelihood of adding another brood box or potentially doing a split. Had everything set up for both. I only had one hive at my home because the other one I lost sometime before December. That’s another story altogether.

Having everything set up and ready to go. I gave a couple puffs of smoke in the entrance and went into the hive. Pulled off one frame of almost solid honey on the outside and pollen and brood on the inside. The next frame I pulled out was almost solid eggs. And guess what. There she was the queen. I immediately tried to grab my queen catcher so I could mark her. But I lost her on that frame so I decided at that point there’s no need marking her, I’m going to do a split. So I put her in the new box set up, grabbed the other frame that had mostly honey on it as well as some brood/eggs and pollen. I went through the existing box and pulled out a number of frames that had good Brood as well as pollen and honey stores.

The existing box where I was pulling everything out of I staggered in some new frames. I found in the process 2 capped queen cells. I guess it was my lucky day. I made sure they were protected and surrounded by two other frames on either side of good brood so they would keep everything warm.

Moving to yesterday. I.e. Wednesday, five days later the old queen and the new box apparently is doing fantastic, have not gone into the box yet was in a save that until likely Sunday. Watching the entrance. There are a lot of bees going in and out and the bees coming in are full of pollen. The existing box with 2 capped queen cells still has a massive amount of bees. They are bringing in a little bit of pollen but not as much as the old queen in the new box.

I’ll know more soon.

So in doing the split, the two boxes are about 2 feet apart. My mentor had me obstruct the entrance so that the bees would have to crawl out around something therefore making a new orientation flight. Not sure if that did it, or the fact that there was a lot of brood, and the queen in the new box. But they maintained their new location. Very pleased . I’ll keep everyone posted on my inspection and hopefully marking my old queen on Sunday. I won’t go into the old brood box or the new Queen for another week or so.

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Nice work, Marty :raised_hands: and Presto, you’ve got two hives at home!

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Well I got all 12 Nuc’s installed on Saturday. Picked them up in the rain, drove 2.5 hours to where the setup is set the boxes on top of the stands, opened the boxes up so they could start taking flight. It was still slightly drizzling in around 50°. That was about 9 AM. I then waited until 2 PM when it was about 62° to move the girls into their wooden boxes. Here is a couple of photos and I will try to put a link to a video in here as well.

IMG_4923

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