Baraboo Bees

Picture for attention because I didn’t get a chance to take pictures or videos while doing inspections.
We have 2 very young queens that emerged from some queen cells we collected. One of the cells was emerging when we found it. I put that frame along with a frame of brood/nurse bees and some resources into a nuc box. We found fresh eggs and larvae yesterday! Another frame with queen cells went into a hive that was struggling and we couldn’t find signs of the queen. They have a new queen now. When we go Wednesday I’ll put a frame or 2 of nurse bees and brood to help them build their numbers. We do have 1 hive that is queenless right now. We had done a walk away split. The other 1/2 got the queen, but we should have been seeing queen cells by now. We’ll have to find a frame with eggs to help them make a queen. Fingers crossed!

We checked the Garden hives tonight. All are heavy with bees. We had done a walk away split about a month ago. The queenless 1/2 again did not produce a queen. We gave them a frame with eggs and brood. The other hives are healthy and happy. They were completely in the shade when we arrived so we were prepared for war! They were actually pretty calm! The mosquitos were worse that the bees!

We did a walk away split with one of the hives at the Garden of Angels. They had 2 brood boxes that were over flowing. We just split the 2 boxes, added another deep to each. We’ll find out in about a month if it worked! We added a second brood box to the sister hive that survived winter with a single brood box. We hope to split them in a couple weeks. We treated the psychedelic hive but the treatment wand quit working. We’ll go back to the Garden in the morning.

The 2 new hives I was most worried about in Richland Center are doing great! We added a 2nd brood box to each. It may have been a little premature, but we were there and had the equipment! One of the surviving hives was busting at the seams. The new hive right next to it wasn’t doing well at all. There are deficiencies less bees than we put in that box a week ago. We didn’t see much brood, and no new eggs. We pulled a couple frames of brood and nurse bees from the surviving hive to increase numbers in the weak hive. One of the frames has a few capped queen cells so we added that as well.
In the surviving hive we found more queen cells that were capped. One was emerging! We put that frame and 3 frames of brood and nurse bees in a 4 frame nuc. They should develop into a full hive quickly since the queen was being hatched while we were there! I need to
Make more equipment for the RC hives!! We’ll try to get down there one night this week for mite treatment!
I grabbed some still shots from the wrap up videos today. It would have been a great day to have the camera running while the hives were open! I personally have never seen a queen starting to emerge before today!

We cleaned up the hives today. No video from the Richland Center hives. They were GRUMPY!!. I’ll post videos of The Garden of Angels hives in the comments since FB insists I make a Reel video. The Garden has 3 strong hives that we’ll split soon. Joanne said the bees were spicy so we used smoke right away. They were actually very manageable today. The Richland Center hives have always been pretty docile so we weren’t concerned. Mistake #1. We did what we had to do and left. We’re getting 4 new nucs for Richland. We need to set 1 more hive. We’ll do 2 splits which means we need more equipment. Enjoy the videos!

I took a video of adding supplemental resources to the hives today. Apparently I can’t post a video without making it a “reels” video. (Video is in the comments)
The Garden of Angels has 3 surviving hives of the 5 we winterized. The bees were up in the honey supers meaning that with the warmer weather they were running out of food. With the warmer weather the bees are more active, and therefore use more resources. One of the dead out hives had all the bees on top of the frames. We didn’t take the hive apart, but it’s possible that we didn’t arrive soon enough with the emergency feed.

The Richland Center hives had 2 surviving hives when we winterized. Both of those hives are still alive. They are still down in the brood boxes, so they still have food left in the honey supers. They work their way up in the winter, and will move down in the spring. We sometimes rotate the boxes in the spring to make them start storing honey in the bottom box first.

So far we have an over 50% survival rate since we winterized. Fingers crossed they will continue to thrive! We ordered 4 nucs for this spring and we can start doing splits off the strongest hives as soon as nectar starts flowing!