Friday, May 27
My dad (Herb) and I went out to the hives for a quick observation of hive activity. It has been rainy all week and not good weather for foraging I’m afraid. Hive number 3 weighed in at 123 lbs. that’s up 2lbs from last week. The spring flow is in full force but like last year it’s been too wet for the bees to take full advantage of it.
Shelly Haus-Springborn has informed me that “Savanna” is indeed spelled without an H. However, when Terry Smith looked on the campus trail maps it was spelled with an H. The wooden sign at the trail head has it spelled without an H which is why the blog was originally titled the “Savanna Loop Bee Hives”. I’m not changing it again until I hear from “the Nerd” Gov. Snyder.
Friday, June 4, 2011
Ted Nelson and I went into all three hives today. Hive #3 weighed in at 126 lbs. up three more pounds. Not a lot. Once again, all three hives were in about the same shape. Almost no activity in the honey super which is to be expected with so little honey flow. However the queens have been busy! We found a lot of capped brood. Several whole frames in the brood section of each hive that were almost completely full of straw colored capped brood cells on both sides. When these hatch out the hive populations are going to explode. There was also some capped drone cells, but not a lot. This is good. My dad (Herb) says…
“Drone bees just sit around all day reading the paper while the females do all the work, just like people. So you don’t want too many of them around. They do cruise around in the queen corridor in case a virgin queen is on the prowl. “
Some of the first offspring of the carniolan queen have hatched. These bees are darker and do not have the three distinct bands that the three striped Italian bees have. As the summer wears on the Italian bees will eventually be replaced by the offspring of the queen and the hive will be completely populated by the darker carniolan bees. Only a small percentage of the hive appears to be from the queen at this point.
Ted and I switched the bottom two supers which put the queens and the majority of the workers closer to the bottom of the hive. This puts the mostly empty top brood super above the queen as she tends to lay eggs going up. I didn’t want her running into the queen excluder and making the assumption that she is at the top of the hive. The queen may stop laying eggs if she thinks the hive is full. We’ll see if she works her way back up in the coming weeks.
