Since posting last time, we have been busy with the bees. We have configured one of our hives to serve as an incubator for the new queens we are raising to requeen our hives; we have taken young larvae from one of our strongest hives and placed them in this incubator; and we have harvested the resulting capped queen cells and placed them in small mating colonies that we placed at our new bee yard located off Seneca Road. Because of the persistently warm weather early this season, we got behind on making the queen cells and therefore creating the mating colonies. This resulted in having 6 of our colonies swarm. We were able to use 4 of our grafts to try to requeen a portion of these colonies. We are allowing the other two to requeen themselves. We will be grafting again in two weeks, using our new queens from the first round of grafting to requeen a portion of our existing colonies with a goal of having new queens in all of our colonies by the end of June.
Our Demaree hives are doing well and we have made two horizontal splits and placed our “Ross Round” supers on top of the queen right portion. This is different from last year when we simply placed them on a strong hive. We are hoping that we can take advantage of the “swarm impulse” these hives were experiencing before the split to get these supers more completely built out than last year. .