We've had just a couple quick visits with the bees since my last post so I decided to lump them together in this post!
On April 30th the Mite Away Quick Strips had been on for 1 week so it was time to take them off. So, I went out and removed those, replaced the sugar syrup pail, and that was it! It was super windy and I had a hard time even lighting my smoker, let alone keeping any smoke where I puffed it, so I didn't want to get any deeper into the hive and upset the bees. Dad was planning to come a few days later so we looked more then!
On May 3rd we both went out and checked on the bees...not so windy so we were able to look more. We found that the eggs we saw in the last post were now capped brood, however, we did not see any new eggs.
The eggs we saw last time are capped brood now
By now we expected to have seen a lot more eggs, and brood in the various stages of development...larvae, etc. However, it appears the queen stopped laying between our last visit when we saw these eggs and now. This could mean that we've possibly lost our queen, which of course would be a big bummer...now to do a little research and decide if we may want to let the bees re-queen themselves or purchase a new queen. But for now we'll give them a little more time before we do anything. We are hoping to have a NUC soon to install in the other hive, so for now will let them "bee" until that arrives, and will check in on them when we go back to install the NUC. Other than that, we did a reversal...swapping the middle and top boxes. Here's a video from both days!
So, that's it for now...as long as the NUC comes in some time soon, the next post you'll see will be installing new bees!! :-D
No comments:
Post a Comment