One year ago today we picked up our first two bee nucs. Today our apiary holds one thriving hive and one nuc box (thanks to our amazing bee mentor).
Quick recap, hive #1 was queenless this spring. Our mentor was able to hook us up with a new queen, brood frames, bees and the bees from our hive #1 that were queenless. All this in a nuc box that now sits were hive #1 sat. It’s also worth noting that hive #2 is already supered (the third box on top of the two brood boxes where our honey goes)
The queen in the nuc box is currently in a queen cage. We hope the bees will feed her and accept her. On Tuesday I will give the bees access to free her and allow her to find her way out of her queen cage and down to the frames. Ten days from Tuesday we’ll inspect the frames for eggs/brood. Hopefully there will be evidence that the queen is laying and has been accepted. At that point we will be able to place the frames back into the brood boxes – strategically!
With the nuc replacing the hive #1 brood box I need to store the beeless frames for about two weeks…while there are no bees, the ants are sure drawn to the brood box. And the brood box is leaking honey everywhere I set it. This is the bottom board and should NOT have honey dripping from above down to the bottom…I miss the bees taking care of this mess!
I didn’t want to leave the box on the ground outside as I was afraid the ants would be everywhere in it. I didn’t want to store it in the garage or basement for fear of ants and a mess of leaking honey. My best idea was to place it on a folding table off the ground outside. I’m hoping this will be a decent temporary set up until we can put the new queen and the bees back into this brood box with the frames of honey.
While hive #1 is on the rebuild we’ll be hoping hive #2 doesn’t attempt to swarm. We’ll be keeping an eye out for swarm cells and watching to be sure the bees have enough space in hive #2. There are a lot of bees in hive #2 They should be able to complete a lot of work and produce a lot of honey.
While the bees are hard at work we took some time today to celebrate one whole year of beekeeeping. We have a lot goals and ideas on how to improve and grow our hobby all while learning more as we go. We’re hoping to make some improvements to our very basic website and improve the info that can be found there as well. April 24th…bee day…the day we first introduced bees to our apiary…that’s worth celebrating, right?!?!?!
While our second year of beekeeping is off to a bit of a challenging start, we hope we’ll be able to successfully work through it and harvest honey again at the end of summer.
Stay tuned…exciting times right now in our apiary!!!
Worker Bee 2021
Howards' Hives and Honey 