Frances and the Bee

It was a beautiful day here today...AND we have a laying queen again in our North Hive! We know this because we saw plenty of eggs and larvae...and we saw her ! She's the queen we purchased at the County Fair and she's marked with red. Can you find her?    She moved over a little in his one, but Mr. Bee will help you this time. Here's a frame with capped honey from our South Hive. They're doing great.     Today we put another honey super on that South Hive, so we're thinking they have a good chance to make it through the winter.     Driving out in the country lets us see just how quickly the season is about to change.  There are hints of yellow and deep autumn red appearing everywhere. While Mr. Bee was adding the honey super, the kiddos and I found this neat plant.  I'm not sure what it's called - let me know if you do - but it looks like a bunch of tiny windows.  It was a beautifu...

After erroneously destroying some queen cells that our North Hive needed, we'd been brainstorming how to help them pick up their numbers again with a new, fertile queen.  The choice of many beekeepers, and a handy option for us this time is to purchase a new one. We are part of the Tri-County Beekeepers Association, who happened to have a display case at our county fair the beginning of the month.  We visited their booth to talk with some experienced beekeepers about what we should do, and a man there offered to sell us the frame - with a marked, fertile queen - to try and place it in our hive. Mr. Bee learned from this fellow beekeeper that we should place one layer of newspaper over our North Hive's highest box and then place another box on top of that to hold the frame with the new queen and bees. If we were to put the frame in our hive as-is, the bees would most likely work to destroy all of the new bees and likely the queen since they wouldn't reco...

Last inspection, we cut off some cells that looked like queen or swarm cells, and this inspection we've learned a hard lesson...     This photo is from the South Hive.  The "underdog" of our hives, it now has some frames packed with honey, and heavy even for Mr. Bee to hold.  The photo hardly shows how this frame was gleaming in the sun with all that sweet honey. Heavy with Honey In the North Hive, we realized there are no eggs and no larvae remaining.  Our conclusion is that the queen cells we destroyed were not just extras or swarm cells, but necessary work for the bees to replace a queen.  With no eggs or larvae, we can see that there hasn't been a laying queen for weeks.  The photo below shows a queen cell, though, and it appears that the bee growing inside has already emerged. We are hoping that the bees started right at it again after the setback and have a new queen in the works.  The older bees will be dying off each day...