The temperment of the Sicilians reflected the beautiful temperature of the day: warm and cheery. Ditto goes to the Italians, though they got a little annoyed when John thunked the inner cover against the pallet their hive rests on to clear of bees so he could scrape burr comb and propolis off. One of the girls let me know of their displeasure and stung me (I wonder if this is the sort of reason most beekeepers are solitary animals).
Both hives contained good honey and bee bread stores. As importantly for this time of year, they both held a good number of eggs, larvae and capped brood. This means that despite not seeing the queens they are active and healthy. Because of the healthy population boom, John and I have set our sights on splitting the hives. Splitting is the most cost effective means of building up one's apiary. And it is just what it sounds like: taking one hive and making two by putting frames with a bunch of brood and capped honey along with plenty of worker bees into another hive. The tricky part is knowing whether the queen remained in the "mother" hive or got moved into the new one. It seems that most beekeepers that do splits just let the queenless hive take care of itself and raise a queen from the brood. However, we have a goal to expand the apiary with different breeds like Russians and Carniolans. So we want to time our splits with having new queens that we order. Judging by the dearth of mail order queens (which reminds me: be careful with searching for Russian queens on the Internet as you get a lot of results that have nothing to do with bees), we might be thinking a bit too early about splits.
Nonetheless, our beekeeping season is officially open and yesterday was a much better day for it!
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