The weather has been very uncooperative from a beekeeping point of view. We have wanted to examine the hives for the past week, but between rain, wind, and commitments, sunshine and opportunity have not met.
Today, despite the rain we had a window of dry, so we added boxes to Queen Bianca and Queen Anya's kingdoms. That only takes about a minute: take off the top, take off the inner cover, add the new box and replace the inner and outer covers.
I spent about an hour cleaning up boxes and frames for the addition and we now have three hives with four boxes on Bianca's hive (which was not split), four on Queen Anya's and two on the new hive. We still need to get in there to look for evidence of a laying queen. No need to add another box there until we have new brood hatching which takes about .With all the rain we fear the queen, even if present, may not have been able to get our for a mating flight. It will be a month since we made the split on May 14th and hopefully we'll have good weather by then to check things out.
We also need to see if Queen Bianca is thinking of swarming. She wasn't two weeks ago, but things can change rapidly in the Spring. So that's our status as of today. Now we just need better weather so the girls can go to work collecting nectar to make honey.
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