This past week has been unusually cool, and this cool weather has slowed our bees spring build up. Last week, at the end of a week of unusually warm weather, we were able to get the hives reconfigured for the spring nectar flow and split hive 1. Since last week, the bees have continued to hatch out more new bees, but have not brought in much new nectar. Tbey have largely stopped the preparations for swarming we were going to take advantage of to split our colonies.
Hive 7, the colony we collected from the home in Manassas, was inspected this week. We found that the queen was present and has started laying eggs again. The population remains strong and they have largely repaired the comb that was damaged during the transfer process. We tested them for Varroa mite infestation and inspected them for signs of pests and disease. Varroa mites were borderline for treatment at 1 mite per 110 bees (yes, I counted both the mites and the bees from the sample!).
Hive 2 continues to be the apiary’s superstar this spring. The population is large enough that we have taken some bees from it to add to hive 6 which has been slow to build up this spring. They are also, without question, the spiciest. We will split this hive at least once this spring, probably next week.
On inspection last week we saw that Hive 1 had built and capped several swarm cells, indicating that they were going to swarm soon (a swarm cell is a piece of comb with an enlarged cell that is specially prepared to raise a new queen). We took advantage of this and took the queen, some brood and bees out of the hive and placed them in a new hive at our second yard at Helen and Milt’s home.