Well, I figured that the 4th of July would be a good day to dig into the “Bees Rules” hive to catch and mark the new queen from Snyder’s. Three frames into the first brood box I ran into a frame with several capped supercedure cells. I very carefully and thoroughly inspected every frame to […]
Note: It is a lot more work to inspect two hives than one little hive. In the Tardis Earlier in the week (June 3rd) I got into the Tardis hive to see if the new queen had been released. She was still in the queen cage, but the bees seemed to have accepted her.
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
Well, the spring weather here in Maryland was a lot colder and wetter than usual. My bee supplier (prudently) pushed back the delivery date on my NUC from April 1st to April 14th. The 14th turned out to be a nice day for transferring the NUC to my hive box. Kevin had taken the precaution
So my first NUC colony is planned for an April 1st delivery. March has been a rather un-cooperative month for beekeeping in Maryland. We have had four nor’easters in as many weeks. Lots of below average temperatures. To top it all off, the last storm dropped about eight inches of snow and is keeping the
I have come to the determination that the very first thing that I need to make this beekeeping “project” work is to develop an inventory of built out comb frame. Comb frames are movable frames that are used by the bees to store food and raise young. This is the hexagonal wax honeycomb that first
Whew… Getting through Winter here in Maryland. The groundhog stuck his head out of the burrow and scurried back in for another six weeks. So what are some of the things that I know now that I hadn’t considered … The pine that BrushyMountain and Mann Lake use for their hive woodenware it not the