I drove out to Frederick, MD this morning to pick up a new queen from H. T. Krantz. He doesn’t mark the queens that he sells, so I guess I’ll have to learn how to do that later this summer. Queens come in little wooden boxes with one hole blocked by fondant (cake icing?) The […]
At this point, I have a single hive. It is two 8 frame deeps. I started the hive from a five frame NUC on April the 14th. This should be the peak of the local nectar flow, bit I don’t see these bees taking advantage of the flow. I’m less than impressed with how much
The bees seem to finally be working on building some wax. Two of the foundation frames don’t seem to have been touched and they don’t seem to want to deal with the green drone frame. Other than that, all of the other 16 frames seem to be built out and in use. Most frames are
There is a lot of discussion on the pros and cons of solid bottom boards vs. screened bottom boards. I’m not convinced that bees need additional ventilation or that having a screened bottom will reduce mite counts. However, the screened bottom board that I have has a tray that can be used to examine what
May 4th inspection. Starting to see some good coverage or both larvae and capped brood on the frames that had built out wax when the hive was initially assembled. So far, there does not seem to be much interest in building wax on the foundation frames. I’m starting to think that these may be lazy