Long live the queen!

When  I left this blog two weeks ago, I was pretty sure that my first hive was queen-less. That could occur because the hive rejected her, she was "defective" (although I hate to label anyone) or she died/escaped during the hive installation. At any rate, I sent some photos to my mentor and he confirmed my suspicions. Luckily, one of the apiaries that our class dealt with was getting in a shipment of queens within 24 hours and I was able to secure one. (This has been a very bad year for acquiring bees/queen bees for those of us in the Northeast as we get them primarily from Georgia, and as we all know, they had terrible spring weather).
My instructor was going to the apiary to pick up some other bee equipment so he graciously picked up my new queen and brought her to us.
Now, as you may remember from my stinging incident, bees hate being messed with when the weather is cold or rainy and all of May pretty much fit that bill. When the new queen arrived it was misting and right around 50 degrees but my instructor said to install her anyway since rain was predicted for the next several days and this was about as good as it was going to get.
When the first packages/queens were installed, the queen came in one of these cages that had been suspended into the box of bees.

By the time we installed them into our hives, all the bees had traveled with one another for several days so were familiar with each other and the queen and accepted her as their monarch. Since this was not the case now, the queen had to be installed differently and more slowly otherwise the colony would see her as an intruder and kill her, which would be bad for me but far worse for her!
She arrived in a different kind of cage accompanied by attendant bees who would groom and feed her until she was freed-there were two plugs of fondant candy in the cage that provided their nourishment.

(Not to worry, that's not blood on the cage, not really sure what it was but.....). So the process was, insert this cage into the hive in the middle of the largest mass of bees and leave it securely capped for two or three days so that they could get used to her and accept her as the boss. Then I was to go in and remove the pink cap on the left which would now leave only a plug of candy between her and the colony. If all was to go well, the attendants would eat their way out as the colony was eating their way in to free her-imagine the building of the trans-continental railroad and you'll get the idea.
I installed her on Monday evening, took the cap off on Thursday and as the colony was very upset when I touched the cap, I felt it to be a very good sign. They voice their displeasure very clearly by nearly doubling their humming when they feel attacked or protective and the noise was definitely louder when I was messing with the queen cage. It was all good on Sunday when I went in again-the queen cage was empty and the bees were feverishly working on all of the frames.


Meanwhile, the other hive is also going to town. Those bees were filling the frames with comb fast enough that I put a second hive body on Thursday when I was checking the queen situation. The theory is that in order to survive the winter, both hives need to have two hive bodies filled with honey-the total weight of each hive should be around 80 pounds. That doesn't guarantee their survival but gives them the best possible scenario.
Both hives were slowing down on the amount of sugar syrup that they were consuming, again a positive sign that they were bringing in pollen and nectar to serve at meal time.
That was nearly a week ago and since the weather has FINALLY improved, the "girls" have been out the hive every day which should bode well for me checking things this weekend.