Spring Inspections

Today my bee mentor came over to help me with the initial spring inspections. I still have the one hive with very little activity and the other with high activity. Sadly, upon opening and inspecting hive #1, we found the hive to be “queen less”. 😩 Not what any beekeeper wants to hear. I guess the good news is that the other hive looks great. Plenty of brood and lots of bees. 

As for the queen less hive, we think we might be able to take a few frames of brood from the strong hive and try to requeen hive #1. The cost of a single queen is a fraction of the cost of a new nucleus colony. Hopefully the bees will accept her. We’ll attempt this move this week. Fingers crossed everyone gets along and hive #1 can get back on track. 

I did ask about letting the bees raise a new queen – they might. But when a hive raises a queen out of desperation you run the risk that she might not be that good. It will also take more time to raise the queen on their own. Purchasing a queen from a reputable source better ensures queen quality and saves time…letting us get back to honey production as quickly as possible. 

Now, something to think about…if BOTH hives had been strong today (goodness I wish they would have been) we would have been placing the honey supers on. Hopefully this is just a slight delay and we’ll be working with two strong hives again soon. 

Lessons learned…I should have taken a peek into the hive sooner (on a warm day in March). I wish I would have taken better note to when I first noticed hive #1 appearing not as strong as hive #2. We do recall that hive #1 was always a little behind hive #2 last year…maybe this was due to the fact that the queen wasn’t as strong. Either way, I sure thought she would last longer than just one year. I hadn’t expected to be faced with requeening until at least year three. Unfortunately, here we are in our second spring and already desperate for a second queen. 

Fortunately this requeening process is simple enough as my mentor is awesome! Just so happens he ordered 40 queens and they are scheduled to be delivered on Friday. He doesn’t think he will need all 40 which means he’ll have one for me to purchase! I’m hoping the bees in hive #1 can hang on through this week and then we’ll be able to successfully introduce the new queen with some brood from hive #2 to get hive #1 up and buzzing again. A little stressful, a lot could go wrong but maybe it will all work out alright. 

On another note, my mentor hooked me up with some old bee equipment to serve as decor on my front porch. A bottom board, two brood boxes and an outer cover now stand as a hive outside my front door. Maybe some day when our honey production picks up I , too, will be able to tell honey purchasers that “the honey is in the hive”. Our mentor will have porch pick ups for his honey (he’s a seriously successful beekeeper) – customers know where to find it and there’s an envelope inside labeled “honey money”…how fun is that?!?!? For now ours is empty and simply serves as decor but I feel it holds a lot of potential! 

Waiting for the arrival of the new queen is going to be hard. In the mean time I hope the small amount of bees in hive #1 can hold on. I guess time will tell. I’m learning that beekeeping comes with steep highs and lows. I’m ready for the next high…specifically, successful acceptance of a new queen and a strong hive #1. Please! 

-Worker Bee 2021