Naming the Hives to Make Management Easier: The Girls are Working Hard Bringing in the Gold!

Our five hives from left: Wheeling, Morgantown, Elkridge, Cleveland, Bethesda --
All of those cities are significant places from our family history.

I decided to name the bee hives after some of our favorite places to make it easier to record what's happening in each hive and keep it straight. I use the blog as my bee diary. I'll give the hives ABC names in an order that helps me identify them individually. For now they are Bethesda, Cleveland, Elkridge, Morgantown, and Wheeling.

• Bethesda is the recent split closest to the road (far right). No point checking it today because they are still a month away from having a laying queen. Bees are going in and out which is a good sign. 

• Cleveland had an ant problem so Larry washed off the inner cover and we killed any ants we saw running around. That hive is huge and getting ready to swarm. We will try to stop it by splitting, but didn't have time today. We added an extra box to give them more room and took out a frame with several queen cells to give to Morgantown (second from left) which should have a queen but doesn't seem to. She may be in there and just not laying yet, but just in case, they now have a several queen cells close to hatching that will give them another chance to get queen right relatively quickly. I'm sorry we didn't take one of the queen cells and put it in Bethesda to hasten their queening. If we see another queen cell when we do the split we'll give it to Bethesda.

I keep a close watch on the girls with my spotting scope.
I got it for bird watching, but use it more for bee watching.

• Elkridge is going great guns in honey production, but had a serious ant problem. They were all over the inside of the outer cover (confusing?) and inner cover so Larry took them to wash off. Lots of ant eggs too. We'll need to check on that again in a few days to make sure we get ahead of the ant problem. That can definitely encourage a hive to abscond. They don't like pests. Other than that, Elkridge looks great with plenty of brood and they are already capping honey.

• Morgantown is busy bringing in nectar. We saw a little brood but think it may have been from before we split and may be dead. We'll see what happens now that we've given them queen cells. 

• I put a new box on Wheeling two days ago. Nothing's happening there yet, but hopefully they will draw it out and start using it. 

Things look good for a very fruitful honey harvest.  We'll be asking the beekeeping patrons to intercede and look forward to taking a lot of honey to the Poor Clares later in the summer. They give our little apiary lots of prayer support. Come visit us at Camp Kreitzer and we'll have tea with toast and honey!