Foundationless frames and another split.

I removed some beautiful capped honey and some nice queen cells from CSX on Saturday.  John had come to check on the inspection when I spotted the queen cells.  Lucky for me he came baring a mothers day present of a corrugated plastic nuc.  This hive has been such a pleasant hive that I'm excited to have another one from this strain.

Frame with Popsicle stick guides and fishing wire for support when extracting.  Hope the wire works.  They seem to draw the foundation right over it so it should work fine.

What to do when the hive is to tall?

CSX and Demeter both came out of winter in full force.  They both have 2 deeps and 2 mediums full.  Nectar is coming in like crazy, but I don't want to add more boxes since I can hardly see over the top already.  This has left me no choice but to pull frame by frame fully capped honey and replace the frames with an empty frame.  I wish I had wired the frames so I could use the extractor and feed drawn out comb back to them.

Atlanta Progressive Preschool peace, love and bugs bee Demo w/ John

John and I did a bee demo for my son's school fundraiser last weekend.  We tried out John's new observation hive and I have to say that bees didn't seem to really like it, it was a hit!  We had so many curious questions about bees and keeping them.

Second package

I checked the second package and the queen had been released and I spotted a few eggs.  Hopefully that means she is going to stay and be content in their new home.

Demeter brood pattern

Demeter has two brood boxs full of a solid pattern of worker brood.

The cost of impatience

The split that hasn't produced a queen and I have added eggs to twice now (today made attempt number 3) I should have been left alone for another 5 days.  It had been five days since I tried putting in eggs again and curiosity had gotten the better of my judgement. New wax is very, very soft.  When I pulled the frame marked with the eggs I accidently squished some of the queen cups.  Sigh, dumb, dumb, dumb.

squished cups

a few cups on the other side were ok.

Frame of eggs with drone brood (unknown at the time) that was tied in.

If they don't make a queen from either the cell above or cups then they will need to be combined back with another hive.

DHS bee club prgress

Yesterday the bee club checked on their install.  Looks like all is well, they had released the queen and have started to build comb on 3 frames and are bringing in nectar.