...And much has happened since then. My son, of whom I am very proud, is now making final plans for his upcoming college education - he starts in August. It has been fun to see him mature into the man he is now and I look forward to seeing God continue His good work in him.
Ok. Here is the long and short of the last five (or so) weeks for Airy Ripe Rakes.
I went into winter with four hives and emerged on the back side with only two (the hive loss stories are in previous posts). These colonies were my original hive that I started beekeeping with in 2011 and the McFadden colony I purchased late last year.
So, late in the spring I split the McFadden hive by creating a nucleus hive but misread the signs of imminent swarming. I expected and wanted natural queen creation from swarm cells. Apparently the swarm cells were from past use - I now know how to detect this - and I ended up with a nuc and no queen.
The "Tom" hive - which was my very first colony - had an aging queen who wasn't laying very well at all. So I removed her expecting the colony would naturally create a new queen from recently laid eggs. This did not happen.
And somehow - for reasons unknown to me - after the split and after removing the queen from Tom, the McFadden hive lost their queen. So, during my hive inspections three weeks ago, I didn't find any eggs or larvae in any of the three hives (McFadden, Tom, and the nuc). By the way "nuc" is short for nucleus and is pronounced "nuke". So I had to scramble and ordered three queens. On Friday the 31st of May, my brother-in-law and I installed new queen boxes into the three hives. These are tiny little boxes that house the queen and a few attendant worker bees. They can be easily slipped in between two frames to allow the existing colony to get used to the new queen scent. The following day, the 1st of June, my lovely assistant and I released the queens using the hand release method. My assumption was that the hives had been queenless for up to two weeks and there wasn't any lingering old queen scent to cause the workers to rebel against the new queens. The overnight stay in their queen boxes allowed their scent to permeate the colony and allow the workers time to get used to the new queen scent.
Everything was a success! As of Saturday the 14th we have 14 day old brood, which will begin hatching on the 21st. I actually checked to see if the queens were laying 3-4 days after their introduction to make sure everything was OK. But seeing all of the new capped brood cells on several frames in each hive yesterday made my heart sing!
