Time for a Serious Bee Check of All the Hives!

But it won't happen today. I added another box to the hive farthest from the road. They are the mama hive of all the others and really needed it. We can't do anything else until we get more foundation for the boxes. I have some coming today, enough for two more boxes and I have more ordered from Dadant, but I'm not sure when that will come. It's a little frustrating that the local bee store had no frames made up and he wasn't sure when he was going to get to it. So we are doing the best we can at present. Hopefully on Wednesday we'll have the supplies we need and can add boxes to some of the other hives and do a queen check on the split we made six weeks ago. They should have a laying queen.

June 7: Bee Check

Update: June 9th -- I added another box to Q. Anya's hive so it's no 5 supers high. The bees were bringing in only a little pollen at all three hives which made me wonder if they can carry pollen and nectar at the same time. Will have to do some research on that. Maybe if their nectar stomachs are full they can't carry the extra pollen weight.

Beautiful sunny day, light breeze and the bees were as calm as could "bee". All three hives:

• bringing in nectar and pollen -- some pumpkin colored pollen
• no ants in any hive
• did not see the queens but Q. Bianca and Q. Anya are both laying well

Bianca is making brood like crazy. In fact, so much brood that we took two frames and moved them to Rachel's hive because there is still no laying queen there. The bees there aren't doing as well bringing in nectar. It will be interesting to see if this is a low/no honey season like two years ago because of the bad Spring weather. The bottom box is pretty empty so we aren't adding anything there. There were a lot of drones in both Bianca and Anya's hive. So we need to keep a close watch on them to see signs of swarming, although there were no queen cells in Q. Bianca's hive.

Both the queen cells we saw in Rachel's hive hatched so we probably have a queen there who hasn't mated and started laying. But that hive is going gangbusters collecting nectar and capping it. So with the extra frames of brood, that hive should do well as long as its soon queen right. We found an uncapped queen cell in Anya's hive with a good sized larva so we moved that frame to Rachel's cell. If there's a queen in the hive they may not cap it.

We decided to put a new box on Anya's hive since we saw a queen cell there and not many empty frames. We didn't look in the very bottom box though so that may have been empty. Didn't see any signs of backfilling so, even with the queen cell, the hive doesn't look like it's getting to swarm imminently. We'll keep a close watch.

We only spent about 45 minutes checking and all looks good.