…Alive and kicking!
Katie and I did our first hive inspection today, and we found the queen bee!
I fired up the smoker and Katie suited up, then we approached our hive, Ambrose, and took off the top supers and feeder pail. The bees were all over the inner cover, which acts as their ceiling.
Then I slowly lifted out the frame that had the queen cage attached, and we saw that the candy cork keeping her prisoner had been eaten through by the bees, setting the queen free!
The frame had wax foundation on it, and the bees were already drawing it out (extruding is closer to a scientific term) into comb. We scanned the frame with our eyes to try to pick out the queen (in order to make sure the bees didn’t kill her or other such calamitous event), but we couldn’t find her.
So I handed the frame to Katie and pulled out the next one, which was also covered in bees. I couldn’t see the queen on that one either, but all of sudden Katie spotted her on the first one! She has a green dot on her back, otherwise we never would have picked her out because there were hundreds and hundreds of bees on each frame.
We took out the queen cage, which the bees had built honeycomb all around, and we put the frames back into the hive box and covered everything back up.
So, thanks be to God, it was a great success. The bees have almost finished the 2 gallons of sugar water, so we will refill that soon, but we won’t do another inspection for about a week or more, to give the bees time to do their thing.
Long live the queen!! This is so exciting! We love learning about the bees and the work you are doing with them. WE ALSO LOVE HONEY! It is Al’s favorite on toast! That makes the bees so much more interesting.
Congrats on the set up of your hive! We look forward to learning more about the bees and watching your garden grown.