Added honey supers to two hives. One at vineyard and Sparrow's Nest. Swarm hive from yard was moved to SN and queen is laying well! Other hive there seems well and that was where I added on honey super. 72 degrees and very breezy.
Vineyard had yard split. Bees seem well, however did not see any queen cells, maybe one small one. Ferrel hive doing well. Took eggs and added to split. Also took eggs/brood and added to last years Italians that seemed queen less.
Came home and checked yard hive. Still not happy to see me, but they seem like they wanted queen out of cage. Took cork out and they had already eaten much much of the sugar block within cage. I'm sure she was out within the hour after. Crossing my fingers that she will do well and calm that hive down. Busy 90 minutes.
Sunday, April 23, 2017
Thursday, April 20, 2017
April Update
Much has happened this month. At the beginning of the month I had four hives left out of nine. The yard hive blew up with numbers and I knew I had to split.
To the day and the hour that I was going to split the hive this last Saturday they began to swarm. Very long story but to make it short I was able to capture them in a vacant hive in my own yard after they had been in our Pondarosa pine for several hours.
I did another split on that hive and the original hive still has a tremendous amount of numbers. I destroyed all the queen cells and introduced a queen box which while I will allow to accommodate with each other. Hopefully there won't be any trouble. This morning I moved that split and the swarm hive to two other locations in my other bee yards. It was 50° this morning so I lucked out and was able to move them both by myself. While destroying the queen cells in the original hive I maxed out my clothing and suit so as not to be stung by 10,000 bees. I feel it worked out pretty well considering I only got one sting on my neck below my chin. It was the first time I genuinely smelled the sting pheromone which smells like banana.
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