Checking The New Hives

Beagle Queen

The Beagle queen has been released from her cage and looking pretty good with a white dot on her back. Now the bees need to get to it and draw out some comb! I've kept the entrance feeder on for a few more days because it's a drag needing to remove a top feeder every time I want to check on their progress. I will enjoy comparing the progress of a hive in a deep box to the mediums that I've been using for the past three years.

Chaining

I was expecting to find a queen cell in the Datsyuk hive today but the aggression of the bees the minute I opened the hive let me know I had moved the Dmitry queen along with the frames when I made the split! This was substantiated by other clues as well -- the bees were chaining as I removed the first frame (an indication that a hive is 'queen right'), I found eggs on a different frame than expected where empty cells were, and the bees were chugging down the sugar syrup from the entrance feeder (a small hive wouldn't initially eat that much while they figure out what to do without a queen).

So I carefully checked each frame until I found the Dmitry queen and then I gently nudged her off the frame and onto the entrance of her original hive. This could be a smart move or a very stupid move but I made the quick decision to put her in her original hive with fingers crossed that the bees won't think she is an intruder and kill her. Ideally, I would have spritzed her with a little sugar syrup containing an essential oil to mask that she came from a different hive but I didn't have that handy not expecting to need it....

The Dmitry hive has probably begun creating a new queen, having been queenless for three days. But it is my only strong hive at the moment and I may need to rely on them for augmenting the others this season. All I was thinking is that I needed to get her back home!

Now I wait another few days before checking on the Datsyuk hive, hoping like magic that the bees will have selected an egg and crated their new queen.