Beekeeping it’s the bee’s knees

More than last year time to split

 

Well made some splits to the yard

 

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Nice b’s you have there....











(where did I go wrong with this.)
What’s biggest tire with out a lift can I fit on my hive.

 

Dropped a frame while I was inspecting the hive this weekend.

Queen wasn't on it, and it was 90% capped honey/pollen, but it did squish a few of the girls when it landed and knocked most of the rest off (and pissed them off in good shape, too). Landed vertically, at least, and I caught it before it tipped over. I was holding it with one hand and scraping burr comb from the top of the frame with the other. Hive tool slipped, knocked my thumb, and I dropped it.

So I ordered a frame hanger as soon as I finished my inspection

 

Been there and done that. 5 out of 8 splits I made made a queen.

 

Summer flow still going strong. About 80+lbs of honey currently on a handful of the colonies. We'll probably hit 100-120lbs per hive by October and end the harvest. Leave the rest for the girls till next year.

 

Nice we are starting fall flow soon, so you guys run single brood boxes. I have started doing this in Fl so far been good for me

 

We’re running a single deep and a single shallow as our brood chamber. Previously we would run a single deep brood box but then would have to deal with 2-3 swarms per hive per year.
As long as the queen has about 8 frames in the deep and 6-8 frames in the shallow available for laying, we found that the swarming decreased to maybe once a year (we actually prefer our colonies to swarm or requeen once a year).

 

Sounds good I have been pseudo swarming my hives. Force brood breaks, also how I make my splits after summer solstice

 

so educate me...is there one queen per box? or is it per section?

 

It is one queen per colony (group of boxes). We keep her in the bottom two boxes via a queen excluder, which is a screen that is only big enough for the worker bees to pass through. This allows only the storage of honey on the upper boxes, reducing the risk of injury to the queen and the young bees.

 

In the news Cuckoo bee spotted in northern WI. Thought to be extinct until they were spotted in Canada in 2002.

 

So an unexpected development in the hive this week...
I'm going to be gone for most of this weekend, so I did my hive invasion last night. I checked all of the usual brood frames, and couldn't find the queen (she's marked, so it doesn't take long to spot her). So I went through more carefully and reexamined them, and spotted this:



Did she lose her bright yellow tramp stamp? Does that happen? Or did my bees replace her? I haven't noticed any queen cells during my hive inspections, so unless they hid it under a honey frame somehow, and then removed the wax capsule once she hatched, I don't know where she came from. And I KNOW that they haven't swarmed; there's been no population reduction, and as you can see in the picture they're still building comb, so they haven't run out of space.

 

Sometimes the supersede them and you get a new queen for spring laying after the summer solstice is a good thing, was there eggs

 

Yeah, there's been no interruption in the brood cycle; I had fresh eggs last week, along with curlers and capped ghost bees. This week I had fresh eggs, curlers, and ghosts. I'm stumped.

 

A lot of times a superseder will stay with her mother and lay together till the cull the queen mum. But it is a nice looking queen

 

All strapped in for the ride

 

Aha, that would explain things, then. Because the marked queen was still running around on Sunday, but I obviously haven't been looking for a second queen once I spotted the one I knew about. So even if this new girl was on the same frame, I could pretty easily have missed her.

 

Yep or y
They killed her after the new queen started laying a good pattern