I went through the hives today and things are looking good. Antheia has a queen, but no capped brood. I checked every frame, in both boxes, but couldn’t see any sign of a laying queen. I’m assuming there are eggs that I cannot see through my veil or she has been spending her time getting friendly with the local drones. I know about 3 other hives within a quarter mile, so she should have a good selection of drones for her mating. I don’t know why Antheia keeps replacing queens, but as long as the hive is still strong I don’t really care.
Hegemone is doing extremely well. The inspection stopped after looking at four frames in the second (top) hive box. All four frames were full of capped brood. There were two foundationless frames on the far side of the box that have not been drawn out yet, but I decided to give them another box and move one of the fully capped frames up to the third box. Three medium boxes is slightly larger surface area than two deep boxes, so the queen should be happy to have all this space.
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Beeyard June 2009
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Hegemone frame full of brood. The queen doesn’t like to lay in cells that have the wire.
Inspection antheia, hegemone, hive, Inspection
It’s been a about a week since I found the dead queen on the landing board of Antheia. After the inspection of the hive, I think that the old queen may have been superceded. Just like what we saw in Hegemone a short while ago, there was lots of capped brood, but no signs of a laying queen. We took off the masks to check for eggs this time. There were a few more queen cells with the sides ripped out and it looked like a few that emerged. Hopefully the hive has a virgin queen off on mating flights.
The girls were not too happy with my rearranging of the hive, I pulled a few frames up to the second brood box. One of the girls climbed on to my left middle finger and gave me the kiss of fire. I pulled the stinger out after about 5 seconds, but she definitely got a little bit of venom in to me. My hand didn’t swell at all and I was left with only a small red mark. The red mark was gone in less than an hour. This confirms that I am not allergic to bee stings. With many years of this apitherapy ahead of me, I should be less likely to suffer from arthritis as I age.
I took off the cover of Hegemone and there were a lot of bees in the upper box. The frames contained lots of capped and uncapped brood, meaning the queen is using both boxes for brood. There were clear signs of a laying queen, so we didn’t progress in to the lower box. There was no point moving down further and potentially injuring or disturbing the queen. I put frames that were still being drawn out between the frames with brood. This should encourage the queen to expand the brood nest in to these frames and increase the number of bees in the hive.
Beekeeping Tip: Finding signs of a laying queen is just as good as finding the queen.
Inspection antheia, hegemone, sting