Queen inspection

Approaching the first hive we observed a fair bit of activity at the entrance. This was an encouraging sign as after we dumped out the bees at the side of the house from this hive last week many of the bees that we wanted to make it back did. However as we got a little closer we noticed two bees fighting to the death at the entrance. This wasn't good. A lot of activity and bees fighting at the entrance is an indication of robbing.  Robbing is where bees will actively go and steal the honey from a hive that is weak and unable to defend itself ( as the Carniolans are ). We watched for a while and observed normal enough activity, the girls were landing heavy ( loaded with pollen and nectar ), and took off light. If there were robbing this would be opposite. The bees would be taking off with a dip before gaining altitude due to being loaded down with stolen honey. The fighting bees was perhaps just a guard fighting off a lone opportunistic scout, who by now was dead.

  We opened the hive and examined the queen in her plastic cage ( see picture ). It was covered with worker bees that were feeding her through the holes. This meant she had been excepted. The lid was eased open and she crawled out with the bees still tending to her, they had accepted their queen. We checked to make sure there was no eggs and put a half full feeder jar in and closed the lid.

The Italian hive next to it is still going from strength to strength, they have almost filled their second super, and it looks like we can add a honey super in the next week or two.

The third hive at the back has made some modest progress, they have almost filled all the frames on the lower super but they haven't built comb in their second super. Again, we had to abandon the inspection as they turned mean and started stinging our gloves and shirts after five minutes. After they calmed down some we put a couple of full frames and moved them up to the upper super to encourage the bees and queen to move upwards.

Posted by John Rodgers