Winter Hive Check at the Nursery Apiary
March 3, 2020

My second hive, Cecilio, also had an issue because it was not strapped down and two of the frames were missing. 😖  The rest of the frames were not aligned! Someone was tampering with it.

Today as we approached the bee yard, everything seemed intact so that was a good sign. We first opened our beloved Cecilio hive (which is a third-year hive) and this is the hive that was very weak when I last visited. Jeff gave me a full frame of Capped brood and honey. It definitely made a difference because I now have a strong bee population and the queen was laying eggs like crazy. I took two empty frames and checker boarded them between full frames so the bees had more room.

The next hive we inspected was the Leno hive and this hive looks tremendous. This is it’s second year and it’s named after the sweet garden worker who keeps our bucket filled with water for the bees. There were tons of bees, pollen, nectar, capped honey, and the queen was also laying eggs! Yay!

Then we got the smoker going and Jeff opened his hive. Bees were flying everywhere and hitting my suit and the box. These are definitely more aggressive bees but they are doing a great job !

Here’s Jeff’s report: “Hive is very strong! They 50% filled the third box I added last week but I had not put the frames together tightly. Also, I accidentally had a medium frame in the deep hive so they built out a bunch of wonky comb that I had to clean up.”

We went out to lunch to celebrate! ♥️🐝