Backyard Apiary

Hegemone, Chloris and Antheia

The weather cooperated today and I was able to do a quick inspection of some of the hives. I started by adding a fourth medium box to Antheia and Hegemone. Despite both hives swarming, there were a lot of bees when I popped the tops and all of the frames in the 3rd box were fully drawn. I didn’t even have hives this time last year and they are already as strong as they were at the end of last summer. The bees get to keep whatever is in the lower 3 boxes, the rest of the honey is mine! I expect to get at least 10 full frames of honey (~50 lbs) because the tulip poplar trees are still blooming.

Chloris has a decent number of bees. I didn’t inspect any of the frames and only wanted to replace some of the frames in the second box because a few of them were assembled, but didn’t have wax or a starter strip. I didn’t have enough frames ready when I made the split and I wanted to make sure there were 5 frames to prevent them from drawing comb out from the inner cover. They didn’t expand in to the top frame yet.

Melissa, the second swarm hive

I next inspected Melissa, the second swarm located on the Western side of my yard. The hive was drawing out nice straight frames. I didn’t see the queen, but I did see eggs laid in the cells. A single egg laid in the center of each cell and she put one in every bit of comb that she could. It’s been 9 days since I caught the swarm and eggs are 0-3 days old. This confirms that a virgin queen swarmed and this raises my confidence that this swarm also came from Antheia. It’s crazy that the hive swarmed twice in the same day.

Demeter after the remodeling

The final hive I opened was Demeter, the first swarm I caught and currently located next to the shed. I didn’t have enough frames made when I caught the swarm, so some of the comb they made wasn’t straight. They decided to attach to combs to the edge frame. When I first went back in to the hive and dropped in a foundation-less frame, they did as I expected and attached the comb on to that frame. They didn’t attach it enough to prevent it from collapsing when I cut it off the original frame. End result is the picture on the left with the collapsed comb removed from the broodnest. They stocked away a lot of pollen in that little bit of comb sitting in front of the hive. I moved the comb up to a top feeder. I couldn’t find where I put the screened tops, so I used one of the utility hive boxes with the screened bottom. This was to prevent robbers from having access up there and to keep them from attaching comb to the outer cover. There was a lot of honey dripping all over the place from the collapsed comb, so I reduced the entrance as much as possible with the scraps of wood I had laying around.

Demeter after the remodeling

Hindsight, I should have brought some string with me so I could tie the comb on to one of the frames they haven’t drawn out yet. That wouldn’t have set their wax building back as far. It would have also spared them the effort of now transferring all of the pollen and honey down in to new wax that they have to make. Demeter was a larger swarm than Melissa and it shows by how much faster they are building up.