The Tardis hive seems to be real active and healthy. Time to tear it down and see how things are really going. While I have observed what I think are good quantities of wet brood and capped brood, I haven’t found the queen the last couple of times I’ve done an inspection. Today’s plan was to see if there was enough brood to steal a frame to reinforce the Misty NUC (which has had back-to-back brood breaks due to queen supercedure). Chris, the queen breeder from H. T. Krantz said that he does not mark his queens because they are so hygienic that they clean off the marking. Sounds like marketing to me, but I did mark here at my first opportunity. Time will tell.
Before taking a frame of brood for Misty, I wanted to be absolutely and positively sure that the Tardis queen was not on the frame that I was transferring. The only way I could think of to be positive would be to find and cage the queen before taking the frame.
So here she is, caught in a queen clip before the transfer. You can see her marking at the leftish bottom of the clip. Looks just like it did when I marked her. No wear and tear no the marking yet. While I did find her rather easily (on the 20th frame that I looked for her on) I have to remember that I did not see her on my two previous inspections of this hive. I’m having second thoughts about using white markings, but I’m not sure what would work better. I might try emergency green next year.
Tardis looks to be in great shape. Lots of stores and brood in the two deep brood boxes. About half of the frames in the medium super on top are built out in wax and they are storing phony honey (from sugar syrup) there. I felt real comfortable taking a frame of brood for the Misty NUC.
I put the frame of brood in the middle of the new upper brood chamber (5 over 5 frames) to draw more of the Misty bees into the upper box to get them started on building it out with Winter resources. The other side of the frame only has about half the capped brood that this side does. It will be interesting to see if they follow my plan:)