Good morning FLC friends,
The observation hive inside of the FLC has been very busy! They are causing a few problems with how large they are getting and giving Josh and I a lot to think about as beekeepers. For starters, they are constantly bearding outside of the hive (see second photo for bearding example). We were even worried about them building comb outside of the hive but checked this weekend and the discoloration on the wall is just their dirty feet. We also took a hard look at whether or not we should take it off the wall, plug up their entrance, crack it open and take out some frames to relieve them of overcrowding. The first photo is an older photo and they are now more full and the glass was entirely "bee feet". We ending up staring at it for a long-time and assessed if the population was at its peak and believe it is. They have brought in a ton of honey and don't have much more room to grow plus the parts of the frames we did see weren't wall-to-wall brood like they were before. Here's to hoping we/they can ride it out until later this summer. Bonus photo: the third photo is a cross-section of a honey cell.
As for the other three hives, they are moving along and making honey! I'll start with our Nuc which is now a full-blown hive. It started as a split earlier this year and then moved into a hive box, was later given a honey super and I just put on another brood box last week. This weekend we checked it and found the queen in that new brood box laying away! You'll see her in the fourth photo as the red/pink marked queen. The next hive I'll get into is our second largest. We found the newly marked green queen and also found lots of honey. The fifth photo is a weird shot I got of them all lined up eating on one of their honey frames. Lastly, we got into our largest hive.
Three weeks ago we made a very valiant effort to mark the queens born this year at the FLC but instead the largest hive's queen decided to jump ship off the frame and was squashed. Killing your new (and very productive) queen is not fun!! So three weeks later, this weekend, we opened it up and chickened out before checking any frames. Here's why: It takes 16 days to "make a queen" from egg to emerging which would be July 9th then 2-4 days for her mating flight which would be July 13th, the day we went in, so we made the executive decision to wait, especially since these are all approximate dates. However, we cracked the lid and the bees were calm, quiet and bringing in both pollen and nectar so we are hopeful they are queen-right. We will check them this weekend for signs of a queen and knock-on-wood... "we will not kill her or attempt to mark her!".
Raise your hand if you have killed your queen on accident?! I've done it consciously twice now. Once at Boise State, I killed her doing an alcohol wash and not checking the frame first and then three weeks ago I fumbled with the queen catcher and knocked her off the frame AND proceeded to step on her.
Beekeeping is really difficult sometimes both mentally and physically but I'm thankful for the community of beekeepers who also make mistakes and share them! Recently Josh went to a hive inspection at Boise State and learned a new way not-to-mess-up-your-hive from Steve Sweet. He taught them to check the queen excluders before setting them down AND make sure you put your queen excluders back on the same way each time so you don't contaminate your honey supers with brood aka don't put your queen in your honey supers by accident! We are officially a "bars-down" apiary.
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