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 foundation the bees are or are not building out into comb. The queen seems to just be laying small patches of eggs (although I haven’t figured out how to see eggs yet).
So far, only eight of the 16 frames are comb and the other eight are untouched foundation. Granted, I did give them a couple of frames of built out comb and they do seem to be making use of it. Seven of the frames have caped brood or larvae covering 10 – 30 percent of the frames. One does have about 90% capped brood, so possibly there is hope.
They do seem to be building out a little drone comb in to open area of the split foundation frames that I made. I’m concerned that there may be performance issues with this queen, so I have a replacement from H. T. Krantz on the way.
According to local lore, this is supposed to be the time of year when the bees are killing it with the pollen and nectar. Not much evidence of that this week. The weather probably has not been too cooperative for nectar production. I wonder if this means a nectar flow that extends further into June or if the flow will happen all in a few weeks and the bees won’t be able to take advantage of it.