Catching Up
May 4, 2018

A lot has happened since our last posting on April 23.

April 14th

. Jeff installed his package of bees at the Paramount Nursery. He released his queen on Tuesday, April 17. We visited this hive today and Jeff was so pleased to see three frames filled with capped brood. Those baby bees will start emerging on May 8th. His bee population was good and bees are bringing in nectar and pollen.

April 25th-May 4th

I went back to the nursery to check on my hive. The bee population was strong although there was a lot of drone brood and cross comb which I removed. That queen has been busy!

For some crazy reason, I thought that I wanted another hive so I could work with my flow hive for the first year. A friend of mine Holly Hawk was going north to get some bees so she brought me a package of bees and an extra queen. My good friend Les told me about how I could make a mini nucleus hive to house the queen until I might need her. You may remember that my hives have 2017 Queens and Queens generally are strong layers for only 1 to 2 years.

Since I did not have a nucleus box which is quite small, Les told me I could create one by putting frames into a black bag to compress the space and only move two or three frames from the strong hive. I did this and installed the new queen. Two more empty frames on the ends.

Because the bees will be confused because they were taken from their home next door, I blocked off the entrance for three days so that they could not go out of the hive. It was quite cool and rainy so they were fine and I fed them sugar water. After 3-4 days, they will do new orientation flights to figure out thier “home.”

I released the queen on Thursday May 4th. I will leave her alone now for two weeks and then check to see if she has been laying.

for the new package…

I trekked out to the nursery again on April 30th, and found a new location for the package which I have now named “Cecilio” after the owner of the nursery. The installation went well and since the bees had been together four days already, I put marshmallows in the queen cage for the bees to eat through and release the queen naturally.

I checked on that hive today and Cecelio recommended that we move it because it was under the electrical grid and he thought the Edison people might not like having bees so close. He helped us find a beautiful spot and we moved it.

We also created a bee habitat using a method that our friend Brisa taught us. You use a plastic wine barrel and water hyacinth or water lettuce with chicken wire over the top to keep the raccoons out. I added little fish to eat the mosquito larva. It’s good source of water for the bees and they can land on the leaves to drink from the pot of water. The nursery fellow Lino will keep it filled with water.

I inspected my “Paloma hive” and it was fabulous with tons of capped brood and larva on the first box and good strong brood on the second box.

Here we go again with 4 hives and a nuc box with a queen in waiting!

🐝🐝🐝