I wanted to make sure that the re-queening of Hive East went OK. We decided to do a full inspection of Hive East, and a mini-inspection of Hive West.
Hive East is still not really drawing out the foundation on the supers. This is disappointing. More on this in a moment.
We carefully checked both brood chambers of Hive East for the queen, and found some disturbing signs:
– We did not see the queen (more on this in a moment)
– We found maybe a couple dozen eggs total. While this is good, it’s evidence that there’s a laying problem (and could be laying workers)
– Almost the entire brood chamber is full of honey (ah, ha).
I called Beez Kneez Apiary Supply and talked with Quentin about the situation. He gave me some good advice.
First and foremost, having a brood chamber full of honey is a situation called being “honey bound”. In a honey bound state, the queen won’t lay as much; no place to lay, no laying gets done. So, we need to let things roll for another week, then re-check to see where we are.
Second, there are a variety of ways to induce the bees to build out the foundation in the supers; we could “bait” the supers using either a frame full of honey from the brood chamber (which is a bit problematic because the boxes are different heights, but can be handled), or with a frame with foundation from Hive West (more on that in a moment!), or we could pre-wax the frames for the eastern hive supers, like we did for the brood chamber frames. Quentin suggested that pre-waxing the frames, especially for supers, is very important. He says it’s even more important to pre-wax the supers than the brood chamber. Also, we can pull frames out of the supers, wax them, and reinstall them. Getting the bees to build out foundation in the supers means they can move the honey up from the brood chambers, which means they won’t be honey-bound, which means everything gets better.
Once that starts settling out, we should be able to see a normal queen brood pattern emerge again. We still don’t know if we have the queen we bought, a possibly-still-virgin hatched queen, or if the hive is queenless. But, we’ll know more as soon as there’s space for her majesty to lay.
Hive East is still in trouble. At this point, it’s an OK kind of trouble (lots of honey), but it’s going to get serious, quickly, if we don’t help to fix it.
With Hive East done, we moved on to Hive West. Mainly, we just wanted to make sure that they were not having the same foundation-building problems as the eastern hive. We were very pleased to see that Hive West has at least 2 frames in the lower honey super that are getting filled with honey! W00T! Hive West rocks! We gave them lots of encouraging words, and left them to their devices.
It was also very cool that a couple of the honey cells had different colored honey in them. I should say that, at the moment, these are still “nectar” cells, because until they’re capped, they’re not officially honey. But there were two different colors! Nifty. I’m very excited to think that we might get some honey off of Hive West this year!
Go Hive West!
Straighten up and fly right, Hive East.