Thursday, October 3, 2013

New queen?

I've been really stressed lately about the bees.  I combined the two hives, but they didn't seem to be very friendly to each other.  I did a quick check a few days ago and I didn't see my old queen, which was marked.  From what I could tell, not only did the combine not go well, but my old queen was dead.

I checked the hive again tonight and, to my amazement, I found brood--lots of brood.  I went through and checked every piece of comb for the queen, but I couldn't find her.  Either a new queen just hadn't started laying yet when I checked before, or the bees killed my old queen when I did the combine and made their own.  In any case, there is a lot of brood with a honey dome around them and the bees seemed a lot happier.  Now that the combine is done, I'll start feeding them again to make sure they have enough for the winter.  Here's a picture of what I found when I opened the hive.


Now if I could just find a way to have Congress pass a budget . . .

2 comments:

  1. So when you combined the hives, did you pinch the unmated queen? Or did you just add the two hives together and let the queens duel? Use bee math to help you figure out what you're seeing: capped brood is more than a week old. Did you see open brood?

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    1. I inspected the hive before combining, but I didn't see a queen, brood, or eggs. The new queen may have been there and just not laying yet. There was open brood after combining the hives. If you zoom in on the picture above, you can see the open larvae.

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