All Hail the Queen!

Wow! Things have been hectic!

Please allow me to catch you up on things:

On the 11th my older hive swarmed. I was a little surprised as the day before Jason and I had switched out some new brood frames in a move to  A) create more space and B) boost the population in my newer hive.

I didn't put all the clues to why this happened until Wednesday, when I opened them up... what a mess I created.

The population in the Old Hive was drastically diminished. I wish I was over-exaggerating, but I'm not. This hive was almost empty. To make matters worse, I couldn't find a queen (although there were plenty of queen cells to be seen). Needless to say, I had a sleepless night.

I think the hive swarmed because they were unhappy with the plasti-cell foundation that was in the new frames that I put in. It's the only thing that makes sense to me.

Anway, this past Sunday, I added some room to the New Hive and decided to check on things in the Old Hive as well as remove the plasti-cell frames. I cracked Old Hive open and was pleasantly surprised to see quite a few more bees than before. I removed the honey supers and got down to the brood to replace the frames. As I was gathering the plasti-cell frames to put into storage I happened to look down and see the queen! By this point I had already put the hive back together, so I gently scooted her in through the front door.  That was a close one!

I'm happy to report that the Old Hive is thriving and that there is more activity than last week. The New Hive is going gang busters and will probably generate about 20lbs of honey this season! Hooray!