It’s Spring!
April 16, 2020

It’s such a gorgeous day and we were looking forward to checking our hives because those bees should be very busy after the rains.

The Cecilio hive is only one box so I brought another box to put on top of it, if needed. When I open the hive I couldn’t believe how many bees were there! And all eight frames were filled with bees! Although I didn’t see the queen, I saw that she’s been a very very active and she has been busy laying eggs (there was larva throughout the hive in different places.) I did see some queen cups which I removed so they don’t decide to raise another queen. She is doing a great job! I then put the second box on and gave them sugar water since they had lots of nectar but no reserves of capped honey.

There were quite a few drone cells which I removed and I also kicked some of the drones out of the hive since I saw quite a few.

I then opened the Leno hive which now has two boxes and again, I was surprised how little capped honey they had. There was a lot of nectar though which they will turn into honey. I am assuming that during these many, many rainy days that they were living off their stores of honey. There was quite a bit of nectar and capped brood but I did not see the queen. I did notice that there were five peanut shaped supersedure cells but they were not open so I only left one or two and cut the rest off. I also checked for mites. 7! That is too many! Next time we’ll treat with oxalic acid.

Jeff’s hive has three boxes and he inspected each box and was surprised to see that the bee population is down. It didn’t appear that there was any larva so I am wondering if they decided to swarm and took the queen with them. He did have several peanut shaped cells that were open so it may be that the queens are out mating and will return to start laying eggs again. One thing he will want to do is swap out that feral queen with a nice Italian queen. Also it was interesting but his bees were very gentle today and not acting like they normally do which is very aggressive. We wondered if that’s because the queen is missing. The beat goes on… three new hives arrive next week…