No Bad News Is Good News

Two months later it looks like we’re finally off and running!

Checked on the girls yesterday and we have queens in every hive. Ole and Thor are the farthest along, with eggs and capped brood (as the larvae get close to being done with that part of their life cycle, a cap is placed on that cell and when ready, the new bee chews its way out, about 10 days later).  Lena has eggs, but nothing far enough along to be capped.

All three colonies are building out wax on all the new frames in the top hive body. The bees live in the bottom two boxes of the hive. Once they have those filled out, we will put honey supers on top, which are slightly shorter than the hive body boxes and are only for honey. They’re slightly smaller for easy handling as they will be heavy when full of honey! Eggs nor brood should be in the supers (uh, tho that did happen to us last year because we have bad luck.). Honey from the supers is what we harvest and the honey in the hive is what the bees live on during the winter.

We’re hearing of others that have supers on their hives and are running ahead of schedule. When we have established hives we hope we’ll be running fast like that too.