Clover & Thistle

To avoid what happened last week, Charlie went ahead and started inspecting our hives while Hannah was still working on hers.  I went back and forth between the two taking pictures and adding my 2 cents worth when asked.  He started with the carniolan hive, which we are calling Clover.

Clover is the hive we did the "gentle" install on, so this is one week past install.  The queen was released, and the colony had moved out of the package as we had hoped they would. But, they did build a bunch of burr comb, we pulled it out, some even had uncapped honey in it.

We found lots of eggs, pollen and nectar, but did not find the queen.  Not a big issue, but we will be sure to find her next inspection. The colony didn't touch the pollen patty but used about half their sugar syrup, so we topped that up.  We added a second deep to Clover by moving two frames from the bottom box to the top, and adding two new frames to the bottom box for them to draw out.  The scent of the drawn  frames from the bottom box lures the bees up so they will start drawing out the new frames in the top box.  

Hannah finished up her hive inspection and came over and popped open Thistle, our Italian colony.  

Since this hive was started from a nuc, we saw lots of eggs, larvae, and capped brood.  We had forgotten to bring out a second brood box so Charlie and Matthew walked back to the house and grabbed them.  While they were gone Hannah and I found the queen and placed her safely back into the bottom box, we also found quite a few supersedure cells, which we squished.  Once Charlie and Matthew were back we added the second brood box and did a little burr comb scraping.

We added a partial box of honey from last year's hive instead of filling their syrup feeder, replaced the pollen patty and closed it up.

Our Growing Apiary