What did you do in your Apiary/Bee yard today?

[jtcmedic]

Cleanish for now , glue  tommorow

[Bill Murray]

Well here it goes.
1st batch almost dipped

[Bill Murray]

Marley working the second batch while 1st is being dipped. It worked, Ha.

[Ben Framed]

Thumbs Up Bill!  The dip way seems to be catching on among beekeepers.  I bet you and Marley make a good team! It's good to see Dad and Daughter spending good quality time together. 

Phillip

Edit:
Sorry Bill, I was thinking Marley was your daughter until Jims post. Either way its good for the fellowship of you both! Thumbs Up!   

[jtcmedic]

Looks great bill

[BeeMaster2]

It?s great to have your granddaughter working with you. 😊
I take it that all of those boxes are engraved with your new Falcon 2. What does it say inside the circle?
Jim Altmiller

[Bill Murray]

Jim that was our original brand I made that never worked well on wood. it was to large and held to much heat, and just looked bad.so after trying it, it was retired to the scrap bin. I shrunk it down to I think 3 inches and I am really happy. As far as Im concerned the laser works great It takes 10-12 min a box but while its etching I can be doing something else. And it looks good.

[The15thMember]

I inspected the supers in my two biggest hives today.  In the first colony I had my stack of boxes that I had removed from the hive tip and the top box slid to the ground, dislodging a lot of bees and making the entire colony very irritated with me.  I didn't get stung, but they weren't really responding to smoke after that, so I saw what I needed to see and got out of there as quick as possible.  I did some rearranging in my other big colony, since they had basically a full honey super dividing the brood nest last time I looked in on them.  They had done some of the rearranging on their own it seems, as that box was now half brood and one of the supers that had been half empty was almost full.  There is very little nectar coming in right now, so I surmise they must have just moved the honey up higher in the stack.  I also checked a medium-sized colony that had a new queen at last inspection because I wanted to analyze her pattern better (she'd had very little brood when I checked the first time).  There was plenty of brood today, and her pattern was good in the sense that there were no skipped cells, but the capped worker brood had a lot of drones interspersed in it, which is concerning.  I still haven't seen this queen physically yet, so I'll have to keep an eye on that situation and maybe requeen or combine them with one of my small colonies.   

[Bill Murray]

My incompetence really shined today I killed 2 queens, Dumped a pallet of medium capped supers that got a brutal robbing frenzy started in not just one but 2 yards. The one where it happened then my home yard when I brought them in. So due to the robbing, I got nothing done at the home yard I wanted to this afternoon. And there just aint no moving the supers till Dark. gonna be a long night.

[The15thMember]

Oh man, sounds rough, Bill!  That kind of makes my very slight mishap of today seem like no big deal. 

[Bill Murray]

Well member according to Marley we didnt have a very good day but it could have been worse.

[Terri Yaki]

It sounds like bad days for two of you. I expect I'll have my chance to compete.

[The15thMember]

Well member according to Marley we didnt have a very good day but it could have been worse.

I think that is a sound assessment. 

[Terri Yaki]

I took the dive a day early to bypass the heat. Things are looking pretty good with a couple of exceptions. Last week I moved a queen cell to a nuc with all the fixin's for a new hive but today, that queen cell has already been opened and I think it's too early for a queen to have hatched. On top of that, my original hive has about five supersedure cells built onto the comb. I did not disturb them. Now I'm wondering what to do and think I have two options. 1) Check hive #1 in a week, after the heat breaks and if there are any charged queen cells, I could move the old queen to the nuc and 2) I could paper merge the nuc into the swarm hive (hive #2) and leave all else alone. That 'old' queen has eggs laid in a lot of frames wherever there is a clean cell to lay in.

[The15thMember]

It's only 16 days from egg to adult for queens, and that is an average, so it wouldn't surprise me, based on how small that QC was, if she has hatched already, because it's been at least a week since that cell was capped, if I'm thinking right.  So it's kind of a question of which queen you'd prefer to keep.  If I were you, I'd trust the bees in the big hive and let them supersede her, because they may know something is wrong with her that you can't see.  But if you have more confidence in her than the queen in the nuc, who still has to survive a mating flight by the way, you could always remove that queen and replace her with her mother.  You could also put the mother queen in the nuc with the daughter, let them fight, and assume the strong one will survive.  You've got 4 (or more) queens and 3 hives, and so you just need to decide which queen you'd like to favor.  But do know the bees will likely make the best decision if you let them.

By the way, I'm inclined to think it is a supersedure based on the position of the cells (although that alone isn't enough of an indicator, as swarming bees will also frequently build out queen cells around larvae), the time of year (I'm assuming swarm season is coming to a close in your area, since it is in mine and you are farther north), and the fact that there aren't very many queen cells (swarming hives will often build 20 QCs or more in my experience).     

[Terri Yaki]

So it sounds like I should go out in a week and see if I can find a queen then.

[Occam]

Did a follow up manipulation to try and give my dink hive a boost. Some pollen/stores, capped brood, and a half gallon of 1:2. Swapped frames from one hive to the other so the stronger hive now has two frames that need further building. They have lots of nectar and seem to still be bringing in more though we're close to the end of our flow. I'll check back in a couple weeks

[Michael Bush]

>My incompetence really shined today...

Some days are like that...

[Terri Yaki]

I call them ?biden moments?, we all have them,just some more than others.

[The15thMember]

Yesterday I stained the rest of my new equipment, and I almost got done building the frames.  Once I've got the frames built, I should be good to go with boxes for the next several years.  At least, that's what I think, we'll see if the bees agree. 

It was very hot and humid today, but I did go through my 3 little colonies, all of which needed another box, which I was glad to see.  My smoker just wouldn't stay lit today, which was kind of infuriating at times, but better today than when I'm going through the brood nest of a big 7-box hive.