Backyard Apiary

Inside the NUC on a top bar hive

The preventative split I made from Hegemone has several capped queen cells, which is great news. Whichever queen emerges first will be the proud matriarch of the backyard hive. The slightly bad news is that the capped queen cells were the swarm cells that I moved over. I had hoped that I split them before any eggs were laid in them, but I was obviously too late. I didn’t open up Hegemone to check and see if they tore down the swarm cells I left behind. It was excessively hot and I was not too eager to lift two boxes with my sore back. I’m out of equipment to make more splits, so the most I could hope to learn by inspecting Hegemone is if I will watch a swarm fly off and start a feral hive. If there were no signs of the split raising its own queen, I was going to take a frame of eggs from the new queen.

The smoker was still going strong so I did a quick check of the two hives on the western edge of my property. The NUC on a top bar hive didn’t really draw out much comb. It seems that they like to festoon off the bars, but have not been doing much wax building. I did find a dead carpenter bee at the bottom of the top bar. The honey bees were in the process of dragging it out.

The other hive, by the basketball hoop, has started to draw comb in the top box. This hive would be great in an observation hive because it doesn’t really propolize anything.