The over achiever hive continues to be just that-the honey super that I'll harvest weighs about 50 pounds and the second super is on for their amusement. My more learned colleagues were correct about the lack of activity in July-despite clear and hot weather (which they supposedly prefer) there has been almost no build out in the second super. My guess is that they've just been adding to their winter stores in the bottom two brood chambers a.k.a. hive bodies.
The party girl hive on the other hand, continues to baffle me. I had my mentor join me in a hive examination about three weeks ago and he was amazing. We spent an hour going through the hive-literally frame by frame and he explained a lot of what I was seeing. He felt that the new queen was laying but was pretty weak and the hive was trying to replace her. There's a process (complicated to me) that the hive will undergo when they feel that they need a stronger queen to keep them alive and suffice it to say, there was evidence that my hive was doing just that. There were "supersedure cells"-the large conical cell in this picture-that are essentially new bees that the hive are over feeding to produce a queen.
Instead of being fed 400 times a day, they are fed twice that amount (I could be off a little on the numbers but not much-honest) and are fed "royal jelly", something the bees produce in a fashion that I don't understand at all. At any rate, the bees realize that the reigning queen isn't laying eggs in a strong enough fashion for the colony to survive so there is a coup d'etat and they replace her.
Ok, so anyway, my mentor and I saw signs that this was occuring and he said not to worry, that the hive would take care of itself. I've continued to check them once a week and despite the fact that they were drinking gallons of sugar syrup each week, there still was no sign of any eggs or baby bees in the top brood box. I went in Sunday and was so discouraged when I saw that everything was the same that I came into the house and emailed my mentor to see if I could still re-re-queen the hive or was it too late in the season? I realized after I wrote him, that I had checked the upper brood chamber but not the lower and he'd want to know what was going on there. So despite the fact that they hate being messed with two days in a row, I threw caution to the wind and went in again. And let me tell you, they were REALLY not happy with me. One particular lady on guard duty was especially furious. She was buzzing as loudly as I've ever heard a single bee buzz and kept flinging herself at my face veil letting me know in no uncertain terms that I should get the hell out of her space. I backed away from the hive for a few seconds to let her calm down and then finished looking at things (luckily she'd gotten distracted by something shiny and left me alone).
The bottom brood box looked basically the same as it had when my mentor and I were there. There were a lot of bees so clearly some egg laying had occurred but it was pretty spotty. Just when I was closing up in frustration I decided to check one more frame in the top brood box and VOILA-larvae!!
So to end my dissertation where I began, I really don't know what I do or don't know! It seems that the colony is still limping along-there are far too many bees in it for it to be dying (I'm afraid to say that aloud and curse myself) and they are storing a lot of honey in the brood boxes so...............I've decided to stop worrying and let nature take it's course. I'm going to treat it like it's doing well-continue to feed them and cross my fingers that they'll make it through the winter.
Ok, this is now the length of a novella but only one more paragraph, I promise. I want to give a shout out to my husband for helping me this weekend with a job I was dreading. My mentor told me that I needed to raise my hives so that there was space underneath for debris to fall and that they needed to be turned 90 degrees so that one was not facing the other one (see original picture on first blog). Now, imagine the idea of moving two hives weighing between 75-100 pounds, each with 5 to 7 parts and you can imagine my distress. I had visions of trying to dismantle them and stack them safely so that the queens weren't disturbed etc. Instead my husband (the owner of every tool known to man) brought his hydraulic lifter thing-see below-to the hive platform.
We pried the hives loose from the planks, pushed them easily onto the lift, it raised and rotated them and then we pushed them back out onto the bricks. And believe it or not-they didn't seem the least bit fazed by all the movement. Ok, it took them about 2 hours to figure out where the opening had gone but all in all, a great success.
Thank you.............honey!
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