Catching up on Waxen City Part II

 June 1 - June 15--Queen Olivia is getting frisky!

I decided to go through Olivia from top to bottom to see how she was doing.  She is a booming hive and that makes me nervous.  You all know by now that a healthy hive wants to split (swarm) to reproduce and she is soooo healthy.  My goal this season is to learn how to keep the hives from swarming.  It's my responsibility as an urban beekeeper to avoid swarms since it is so epic when they swarm. I also want to learn to avoid them since a pile of honey and 1/2 the bees go with the swarm and that is a great loss.  Also, the hive has to make a new queen which takes time and sets the colony back.

Olivia has tons of capped brood and tons of open brood.  I added open frames between all the frames of brood again.  I added a box of empty frames for honey storage.  I didn't find the queen but all seemed well until I spotted one queen cell with a larva in it.  There were nurse bees feeding it!  Yikes!    The cell is in the centre of the frame which usually means supersedure (something wrong with the queen so the bees have to make a new queen) so now it is even more important to find the queen.  I will have to go in again as soon as possible to see what is up. I'm nervous!

Queen cell with larva being fed

I then went into Mab who is looking really good.  I am continuing to add frames to keep the brood open and hope that this will do the trick.  I found her majesty...though she seems slow, she is a great layer and I think that I have underestimated her.

Her Majesty Queen Mab and her retinue

She is a gorgeous fat queen with lovely stripes...a combination of Ontario genes mixed with Buckfast.  I have been worried about her since she comes from a queen who swarmed very early in the season last year.

June 15  Fathers Day            

Queen Olivia sets her sights on the horizon!  With trepidation I went into Olivia to see why I had found a queen cup with larva.  Worse and worse, I found about 8 capped queen cups throughout the hive!  Some of the capped queen cells were on the bottom and some in the centre of the frames.  The hive was very agitated.  I had Kelly visiting today and found that I had difficulty making a decision about what to do.  Was Olivia planning to swarm or had something bad happened to the queen and was the hive  trying to replace her?  As we went through the hive we finally found Queen Olivia in the last box we checked.  She was a lot skinnier than the last time we saw her which should have told me what was up immediately.  When a queen decides that it is time to swarm she will lay eggs in queen cups for the workers to take care of.  She will also start losing weight to get ready to fly again.  Remember that she has not flown since she was fertilized so she needs to do some yoga and exercise to get fit.

Capped queen cell

Queen Olivia...see if you can find her

Queen Olivia laying eggs...her butt is in a cell

I took off my gear and sat with a glass of ice water to think about my next steps.  I decided that the only thing I could do would be to build a whole new hive with all the queen cells.  I waited an hour to let Olivia stop being so angry about being taken apart since I knew I would be doing exactly the same thing again.

I found every single frame with queen cells and put them into a new box.  I added honey frames and a lot of frames with capped and open brood so there would be lots of workers in the hive.  I made sure to find the queen again so that I didn't accidentally put her in the new hive.  This new hive ended up being three boxes high with the top box being full of nectar frames.  I also added empty frames to give them work.  Here is the math of what happened in Olivia and what should happen in this hive:

June 4    Olivia laid the eggs in the queen cups.

June 7    The eggs hatch into larva which I spotted on June 9

June 12   The queen cups get capped and the larva goes through changes

June 15    I moved the queen cups into the new hive.               

June 20   The queen emerges and if she is first she kills all other queens in their cells

June 24   The queen has oriented herself and is ready to fly out to be fertilized by drones

July 3      The queen starts to lay 2000 eggs per day and never leaves the hive again...unless...sigh...

Building the new hive

So now I am the proud owner of three hives!  

Three hive bee yard!

I put a branch in front of the new hives opening so that the bees become aware of the change.  Most of the foragers were out so they will go back to their original hive.  As the brood emerges the new hive will build its own foragers.  The queen won't be laying until the beginning of July so this hive will have a gap in its timing and hopefully I have given it enough bees and honey to keep it going.

New hive with branch crossing opening

Olivia is already more relaxed and is buzzing away like nothing happened.    This is all very exciting and if it works I will still have succeeded in avoiding a swarm...the split that I just did is also known as an artificial swarm since Olivia will think that she has in fact swarmed (kind of).  Mab didn't even notice all the commotion next door.

My next job will be to check Mab to make sure she isn't having similar urges.  I will also check the new hive to see if a queen has emerged.  Next post!