As always we have been super busy here at the farm. We now have three hives that seem to be doing really well. We will know for sure on the newest two in a few days. Today C split the first hive into a queen castle he had made.
The hive was doing really well and was full of bees. There were lots of capped brood as well as larvae. They also had a few frames of honey and pollen too. We have a really calm colony. We have no problem messing with them without gloves.
We found the queen pretty easily. She is quite large compared to the other bees. She layed about 5 eggs while we watched her and we really wanted that frame for the queen castle. C gently moved her to another frame and placed the frame she was on into the castle.
We moved another frame we thought had new eggs in it as well. Without a queen the nurse bees will create a queen out of one of those new eggs, which will hopefully give us two new hives. Then we gave them a pollen patty and put a feeder with a 1:1 sugar syrup on top. We will check on them again in a week to see if they have created queen cells. I’ll keep you posted on that!
