Weeks 6 and 7 in the hives! I recommend you read our last Bo's Bees post here, to see how our first few weeks of starting the hives went.
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All 3 of our hives are progressing very nicely! Out of the 3 hives, Hive #1 is the weakest hive...still producing honey, just at a slower pace. As you can see from the pictures, the top super is empty and they are just starting to fill the bottom super with honey.
Top Super:
Bottom Super:
Frame 1 from bottom Super
Frame 2 from bottom Super:
The original queen from this hive we never found, but we did find larva so we know it was there at one point. Throughout the past two weeks, the worker bees started feeding one of the larva cells Royal Jelly, turning it into a new queen cell. Here is a close up:
Next week we will be inspecting this hive to see if that queen cell has hatched. (It is taking a little longer than expected to edit the video we took from our GoPro. As soon as that is done we will upload the video to our You Tube Channel.)
While the worker bees are busy feeding the new queen cell, we have had a lot of dead drones outside of the hive. We believe these drones came with the colony when we first got it a couple of months ago, and now that there is a queen in the making, there is no need for them right now so the worker bees have dragged them out of the hive. When we inspected the drones on the ground outside of the hive, we found that many of them were old, with worn or ripped wings and some still struggling to survive, but too weak to fly.
As you could see from the pictures, this hive has less than two frames of honey in the bottom super. We suspect that when the queen arrives and is able to mate and lay more larva, this hive will regain its strength.
Hive #2 is our strongest hive. It is by far the busiest out of the 3 and when we inspected it in weeks 6 and 7, we found the bottom super completely full of honey and they have moved on to filling the second super.
Top Super:
Due to the amount of honey in the bottom super, we could not lift up any of the frames because they were stuck to the bottom, so we do not have any pictures. We are excited to see the progress of this hive when we next inspect it.
Hive #3 is the middle of the road when we compare it to our other two. Stay tuned for an updated video - we are currently in the process of editing.
UPDATE: Until we have additional supers to add to the hives, we have decided to take the top super off of Hive #1 (the weakest hive) and put it on top of Hive #3 (the strongest hive) since they are producing honey at a much faster pace.
Check back in a couple of weeks to see how Hive #2 is progressing!
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Queen Bee