I was very kindly invited back to work the bees of my Bee mentor Rob , last weekend. A beautiful sunny Sunday , temps in the 60's finally.
The Red Maples were in full bloom and the bees are definitely working the nectar and pollens.
Rob gave Dylan a lesson in lighting the smoker again, using the scorched knuckle method. We started looking at a hive that Rob was worried about, in fact when he opened it , it was showing swarm tendencies, with a few queen cups and good brood patterns, lots of stores still, and a good cluster, We found the queen too and saw all stages of bees, plus a few drones. This time Dylan was with me and worked with us right next to the hives , which really impressed me that he had taken so big a step.
The next hive was the one that had a duff queen the last time out (she was only laying drones), and we confirmed again that she was not laying worker brood. We searched for her and caught her and Rob put her in a queen cage, then started planning for combining the rest of the hive with the hive of this queens daughter.
The good hive was checked , and once confirmed that the queen was laying strongly, Rob added a sheet of newspaper over it, made a few slits in the paper and started stacking the hive deeps onto the new hive. At the top the top covers were put together back to back so that the new top based hive had an entrance. The lower still had its old entrance on the bottom board.
This was pretty fascinating to do. By now the wind had come up and we also had overcast weather so stopped for the day.
I learned about combining hives, I learned again about lighting the smoker, I learned about the stages of brood, handled and felt the weight of a good food store "super", I saw queen cups and saw royal jelly , so a great day
Pics to follow
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