The first day of summer is the the "turn of the year" on the beekeeping calendar. After this point, everything moves from spring buildup to preparation for winter. It is best to not start new hives beyond this point, but to encourage the existing hives to build up as much as possible by providing lots of forage and lots of room for them to store up what they find. Today I checked all four, yes, FOUR, hives. It is great to actually have that many that are healthy and happy once again. The newest hive was only started four days ago with two frames from my first nuc from Mary Bouma, and a new Saskatraz queen from Oliveraz. I checked today to see if the queen was released. The cage was way
Today I installed a second nuc from Mary Bouma. This one has a new queen from this year. I installed this one into the white Long Hive, which is double-walled. So now I have both Long Hives occupied and one of the vertical hives. The plan now is to take a frame of brood from each of the first two hives, put a purchased queen with them and get the fourth hive going in a week or so.
I checked the hives on Thursday June 7, 2018. We had a field day scheduled for Saturday the 9th, but the weather was looking not so good for Saturday, so I checked on Thursday just in case. I scythed down the tall grass and weeds in front of the hives. Both hives were looking really good. The Long Hive had pretty much doubled in size in three weeks' time. It had only three frames of brood and one empty frame of drawn comb to start. All the rest of the frames were empty foundationless frames. It had seven drawn frames, some honey, lots of brood and had also added comb to the bottom of the original medium nuc frames. I didn't see the queen, but her evidence was there. That hive is a bi
