Wanted to post an update on my two hives at the one month mark. The one hive is doing awesome. Queen is laying like crazy and the bee’s have all the frames almost completely full. Both of my hives started from 5 frame NUC’s. The second hive on the other hand appeared to be doing well. Not as good as the other hive but still making good progress. This past Thursday my son calls me and says that there weren’t many bees coming in and out of the hive during the day when there were quite a few in the other hive. Later that evening I had him pull the top off the hive and look down into the frames. He reported that the hive had about 50% less bees than what we saw during our inspection on the previous Sunday. So we ended up doing a thorough inspection this past Sunday and found two queen cells. One capped and the other almost capped. So know I have my fingers crossed that one of these two queens will make it and be successfully mated. There were uncapped larvae in the swarmed hive as well.
Should I continue to do weekly inspections? The capped queen cell has to be around at least day nine or greater and the uncapped one maybe day 8. Any advice/recommendations would be greatly appreciated!
Hi John, with the hive that swarmed, just make sure you have enough bees there to protect the brood, that’s if SHB are in your area. Keep an eye on it to make sure your new queen is successful.
You could open the brood up on the other hive & place a few frames in a second super & replace those frames with frames with fresh foundation in a checkerboard fashion to hopefully prevent it from swarming.
Update on the hive that swarmed. The two queen cells that I saw on the inspection almost two weeks ago are gone. Did not see a new queen. All of the capped brood has emerged and there is a lot of nectar and pollen on all of the frames. I am curious how much longer I should wait before I should look at getting a new queen.
A would also mention that the second brood box I put on the other hive is doing awesome. All of the frames are 90% full with brood, pollen, nectar, and honey. Hive is packed with bees. I decided to go ahead and put the flow frames on. If I could get the other hive back on its feet I would feel much better.
Hi John, what I would do at this point is add a frame of brood from the strong hive into the weak hive & take a look in 3 days time to see if the colony is making a new queen or not. You have nothing to lose by doing that. Make sure the brood you add has some young larvae &/or fertile eggs in it.
