Hive Inspection and a Hive Combination
It’s Saturday May 17th, 2025 and one week since we took a peek into the hives. We have been feeding 4 of the 5 hives. We are not feeding the hive we are planning to take honey from because we don’t want “funny honey”. Starting from the left end, we have the hoover hive which had brood, larvae, and some new comb being built. Mountain hive had a little bit of wonky comb, eggs, larvae and some brood. Adam Hive’s numbers were still very small, but the queen appeared to be a good layer. She just doesn’t have the work force to get everything done to be a successful hive. Pooh Bear hive isn’t drawing out any frames in the medium box that we stuck on for honey. Wildflower hive had comb, but the queen didn’t appear to have a great laying pattern. Her numbers were poor.
We weighed our options about different ways we could manipulate the hives. We could continue to leave them alone, but we knew the risk of loosing both if we didn’t do anything. Chances are…they would both fail. We decided to locate the queen from the Adam hive and move her and her colony into the Wildflower hive. We were able to locate the queen from the Adam hive quickly, but our Wildflower queen was elusive. Once we spotted her, we were able to get her into a jar. We sprayed sugar water over all the frames of bees and smoked them really well before placing the Adam queen and her bees into the Wildflower colony. The reason for the spray and smoke is to mask the pheromones and hopefully produce a better chance of acceptance for the moved colony.
We topped off the feeders, except for Pooh Bear. We are using Hive Alive this spring in our feeders to give a little more boost for the bees.
We have decided the frames we bought don’t have enough wax on them. I headed to the local thrift stores to find a crockpot to melt beeswax and paint more wax onto the frames. The only crockpots I located were too small. So that is a project that still needs to be completed this week.
Next weekend, we will want to see how the Wildflower hive is getting along with their new queen. We hope to see they accepted her, no swarm, eggs, larvae and brood. We will most likely have to top off feed mid week at the rate the bees are consuming.
Check out the short video below of this week’s inspection.
