Frances and the Bee

With the advice of a professional beekeeper, we grabbed our tools and went back to look into what was going on with the fourth hive. Literally, we needed to look inside that queen cup. Again, here is what it looked like from the outside (larger cell at the bottom of the frame) and now what we found it looks like inside: If there had been a larva inside, we would have had to take some action to prevent a swarm. There was nothing inside, so we don't need to do anything immediately. We will be watching this queen and her brood pattern, to see if she is healthy enough, though. I suspect we will need to replace her but will not jump to that conclusion just yet. We saw her again - can you find her in the photo below? Beekeeping keeps us on our toes and we really appreciate the community and support we find to help us do the best job we can. We will check this and the other hives soon and look forward to the next update.

We were able to go out for a lovely evening inspection of our hives last night. The sun was setting, the breeze was blowing, and there was green everywhere. My husband opened our four hives, one by one, so we could check on the progress of our colonies. At this point in the season, we are checking a bunch of items inside each hive. Three of these many items are the brood/queen, space for growing colony, and irregularities. During each inspection, we look for eggs and covered brood. Now that some time has gone by since our queens have started laying, we are also looking for characteristics of the brood pattern, emerging and working bees and the queens themselves, if possible. Here is an example of a nice brood pattern: This is from our second hive, which is the strongest out of all them at this point. This queen is doing an amazing job! We know this because there aren't very many open spaces here. Each cell holds a developing larva that will soon be hatching as a bran...