It has been too long since I've posted on our beekeeping adventures. We lost both hives over the winter. One hive was weak going into the winter months and the other froze during a couple artic-blast wind days we had after Christmas. Even though hive loss is common, I still felt like such a bad bee-parent! So we ordered 2 packets from Deseret Hive Supply and were excited to start again in April. (Yes, Ash was the one to clean all the dead bees out of the hive.) This year the queens came premarked in our packages. Blue dot is the color of 2015.
I love having a marked queen - makes spotting her so much easier. Ash has learned how to mark a queen - a video of which he will hopefully upload soon to our youtube channel. Ash has adopted the practice of marking the hive box with the color of the queen to help keep track of which hive has which age queen without having to open it up and find her. A little dot on the corner will keep track of the bee-history.
Ash has been taking care of his family's North Ogden hives as well. One out of the three hives survived the winter, so we ordered a couple packets from IFA which weren't delivered until May. When he went to install them during his lunch break, he found that one of the empty hives had new occupants - a swarm had moved in! That was a pleasant surprise - free bees! So he took the packet back to work and stored it in his office until he came home.
Luckily, I had painted the peach hive boxes and so he installed the packet in our new peach hive here in Kaysville.
If you are wondering what the little brown and green boxes are doing there - they are nukes that Ash has filled with splits of bees he took from the one hive that survived the winter. It was doing so well early this spring with all the warm weather that the hive was growing rather rapidly. He decided to try his hand at raising some queens with the help of a coworker. It worked wonderfully and we now have 2 nukes (like a bee condo instead of a house) with 5 frames full of bees. He can use these to help populate some of the new packet hives, or if a queen dies, we have one ready to go. When we were checking these nukes when the new queens were just hatching, we could hear some queen "piping". It's a special and distinct noise that the queen makes to call the other queens - kind of like a lethal game of marco polo since the queen is trying to locate the others so she can kill them become queen bee. Yeah - it's quite the drama - Shakespeare eat your heart out!
Even though Ash ends up doing most of the North Ogden hive care alone after work, I do try to help with every hive check I can. I finally got to see him mark a queen using a mesh-covered peanut butter jar lid and a crayola paint pen. I had to include this photo of a cute gal on my arm during a hive check.
Because of the cold, wet May we've been having, all the hives have had a rather spotty brood pattern:
Hopefully, once the weather dries out and warms up, the brood patterns should fill in more uniformly. It will be interesting to see how the swarm hive does in comparison to the packet hives. My raspberries are happy to have bees around and we're excited for another adventurous season of beekeeping!
