Last week we went to the hive to see how the girls were doing. We wanted to see if the top honey super that had helped them get through the winter was harvestable.
We found that they were consuming quite a lot of the honey that had been capped in that super just the week prior. There were ALOT of bees! We decided that we needed to go deeper to try and find the queen.
Well, we found her! she was clear up through two deep brood boxes and into the new shallow honey super that we had put on with the prior inspection! This means that we should have done a third reversal when we were in last time. Queens only go out and up to lay brood.
Of course the deep that was right below this shallow was chuck full of bees and the one below that was empty of brood.
We put the shallow (with the queen) on the bottom, then the empty deep, then the full deep then an empty honey super, then left the full honey super that they were consuming on top. They now have plenty of room to grow.
I must say, this is one heck of a hard working queen we have been blessed with!
We would like to split this hive, but are having a hard time finding a queen for it. As it is, we are going to be short a queen from what we had intended to have that we ordered a few days later than the rest.
It was so much fun seeing the queen skirt around to the dark side of the frame. You would think she was a cockroach as light shy as she is!
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Sweet dreams......
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