It seems like this is the year that our family of people and bees both grew! A few days after bring our little Andrew back from the hospital (to be yakked about in another post), our hive (which survived the winter and has been thriving in the early pollen flow) decided that it was too crowded and swarmed. That pretty much means that Ursula got unceremoniously booted from her throne. Not to worry, she left with half the bees. The worrisome part was that they left. Good thing Ursula wasn’t a really good flier so they ended up on the walking path between our two gardens. Ed came home one afternoon and saw that there wasn’t a whole lot of activity in the hive. He took Andrew out for a walk around the garden and saw a big arse pile of bees on the path.
Needless to say, he caught the swarm (basically got Ursala, dumped her in our extra box, and got the colony to follow her). Now we have two hives. The daughter hive (the one with Ursala) is doing well. The parent hive (with the new young queen - Tatiana) has yet to be proven. However as of yesterday (5/19) Ed said he spotted some eggs. So, the Tatiana got herself laid and is ready to populate the parent hive. Throughout this ordeal, we ended getting a new queen (Anastasia), operating under the assumption that the parent hive might be queen less. This is before Ed spotted brood in the parent hive. Now we have an extra queen and are building a nucleus box for her. Eventually, we’ll sell her and her nuc. We’ll see. :)
With the hive swarming, we have a lot of pollen and honey that has yet been used. What’s neat about that is that we can probably take a few of the fully loaded honey frames and extract that. Ed took one frame and hand extracted the comb and honey. Half the honey hasn’t been capped so it’s pretty young honey. Regardless, It’s pretty effing tasty. I can’t wait to taste what the capped honey taste like.
Once the honey flow starts for us….get ready for the Crack Granola production. :)
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| the Swarm |
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| First Honey |
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