July Field Day

We had a beautiful day to have our first field day at our new location. It was sunny and mid 70's. We had a really new beekeeper join us this time, he is only four years old and can already recognize brood!

The first hive we checked I will call hive #1, it is the flat roofed horizontal hive. It has gained some strength since I last checked it. We did see the queen. We planned to add a frame of brood from the strongest hive if we felt it could spare it. Next, we checked hive #2, the vertical hive that had been at my neighbor's house. It had also gained strength. We gave it a box of drawn comb to help it out. We saw the queen there as well. Everyone agrees it is really handy to have the queen marked, we see her much faster. Next we checked hive #3, the peaked roofed horizontal hive. It had very few bees, not good. Then we saw that it only had scattered capped brood and no young larva. It was easy to tell it was queenless and very weak. We decided to just put what was left in hive #1 and leave it empty for now. It is too late in the year, especially with the weakness of the other hives to try to get it going for now. I am not sure what happened to the queen, but it is possible she got damaged in the move, or that she was somewhat weak to begin with since she was with the first shipment that had three dead queens. Either way, that hive is empty for now. Lastly, we checked hive #4. That one looked really good. We did see the queen there as well and decided that it could spare one frame of brood to help out hive #1.

So, now we have three hives, but we saw all three queens and all three hives are improving, so I am happy with that. It's always sad to leave a hive empty, especially such a nice hive as my peaked roof horizontal, but we will be using this location for awhile, so it will have bees in it eventually.