Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Both queens spotted

I inspected both hives today.  Sorry, I didn't take any pictures.
First I looked in the new hive.  I wanted to see what the girls were doing in their new home.  They had drawn comb on a couple of frames, but neither frame was filled.  There was brood and larva on the original nuc frames.  The surface of comb on the nuc frames undulates; it is not level across like in the old hive.  I scraped off the brace comb on the top of the frames (of both hives) and made it into a ball, about baseball size.
Then I spotted my new queen.  At first I thought she was a drone, but then I saw that her thorax wasn't that broad and her eyes were not big.  And workers were paying her obeisance.  She is notably larger than my other queen and lighter in color.
I saw five swarm cells, all empty. I believe they are swarm cells, and not supercedure cells because they were at the bottom of the frame.  I don't think a swarm is imminent.  I have read that Russians are wont to build swarm cells without intent to swarm.
Because the new bees had not drawn much comb, I decided to feed them.  When, later, I went out to put the feeder in, there were clumps of bees in the space above the Vivaldi top opening.  I'll take a look later tonight, and if need be, tomorrow I'll give them a whiff of smoke to drive them back into the hive so I can place the feeder.
It takes a bit of work to get to the brood boxes in the old hive.  I took a quick look in the medium supers- nothing but honey.  In the upper brood box, there was some brood on the lower portion of two frames.  In the lower brood box, there was brood and larvae.  I took out the drone frame, inspected it for the queen, shook off many of the bees and then set it on top of the empty brood box with frames that I had brought down in case the new hive needed more room.  I then looked at the other frames, didn't see the queen and put the frames back in.  Then I looked at the drone frame again, and there she was!  I gently shook her into the brood box and she crawled down between two frames. 
Put the rest of the hive together, trying unsuccessfully to get the edges perfectly aligned, and put the drone frame into the freezer.  I probably won't inspect again for three weeks.

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