Newspaper combine: Queen introduction

My blue hive queen has been doing poorly since the beginning of the year. The workers have been attempting to replace her but no supercedure cells resulted.  I found the queen Thursday evening and pinched her to kill her (Yes, it is very heart breaking to do this; I hate it). I then went to my other bee yard and took three pollen and honey frames from my big hive; which I had determined was pollen and honey heavy. I replaced these frames with brand new undrawn frames so that they can take some time to draw those frames out and their queen will have more room to lay.

Frame with pollen and some honey. Notice variety of colors (different flower sources)

Pollen in center and mostly uncapped honey surrounding

Thursday night I also went out to close one of my nucleus hives with  some wire mesh. When I went out there I saw that a skunk was rubaging through the grass in front of my big hive. I went back to the house to get the camera (shotgun would have been more appropriate) and this is the poor picture I took.

Skunk at my hives!

I followed it around for a bit to figure out where it was from but it took off and left a pretty nasty scent. I went back to the hives and put a wire mesh on the entrance to the nucleus hive that I was going to combine with my other hive.

The next morning I brought the bees and all my gear to the other bee yard. I placed the single sheet of newspaper down and put a small slit in the middle of the paper with my hive tool and then put all of my frames into the top box.
When I was placing the nucleus frames into the top box I was inspecting them while holding the frames generally above the box. I heard a very faint thud. The sound of bees falling and landing onto newspaper actually. It turns out that the very thing that I was looking for, fell right down into the box. It was the queen. Not a word of a lie. Had I not been holding the frame above the box, she would have fallen on the ground and all of my work would have been for nothing!

Saturday, this is what the newspaper looked like! It looks like the two hives are pretty much combined!

Lesson for the day: Always inspect frames while holding them above the hive box!

Nucleus Hives : Queens Laying!

Things have been really busy around the farm. I was ready to give up on my nucleus hives but an inspection tonight shows that both hives have laying queens. The eggs are very young, meaning that the queens just started to lay in the last couple of days.

4-frame nuc box

In other news, I found some evidence of a skunk going around my hives so I placed a skunk trap near my boxes last weekend. I did not catch anything yet. I think I am going to have to try something other than peanut butter on bread ( a suggested skunk bait).

Skunk trap

The hive which I created my nuc boxes from was very heavily congested so I spread out their existing frames and added another 9-frame box on top. I added 6 brand new frames into the hive and 3 used frames which were partially drawn out. I hope this keeps the bees busy and avoids a swarm. A swarm cell was found on a frame and I kept it in case that my nucs would not work. I must go back into the hive and cut it out as soon as possible!

Another deep super added to my 'swarm' hive

The next order of business is to place my new laying queen onto my blue hive so that the hive can start doing better.