When I got into the house my wife told me that her cousin was coming to visit in the next day or so. She happens to live right near my bee breeder. He sells Buckfast bees. I called him up this morning and it is not a problem to pick up a queen. He told me that he recently received new stock from a breeder in Denmark. I wonder if this is his supplier:
This means that I will have to undo my nucleus box being placed on top of my hive. I decided that I would also search through my hive to see if a queen from that hive was in it. Because I do not want to have to pay for queen and have it killed because there is already a queen present! That is an expensive waste. Here is where the biggest miracle happened. I opened the lid and saw that they had not extensively chewed through the newspaper used to combine the hives. I picked up the first frame and I found a queen! She was smaller than normal and she was scurrying around along the edge of the frame. I could not believe it! She was not very big, actually the smallest queen that I have ever seen; which makes me think that she is likely a virgin queen. The queens go for their mating flights and then come back and the workers feed them to make them larger. I took out the frame with the queen on it and put it back in the nucleus box and then I retrieved the remaining frames and shook them out to bring down the population a bit; they are overcrowded in the small nucleus box. I then put my queen excluder back under neath my honey super.
Tomorrow I will be placing the new queen into my hive with a candy cage.
I also checked the green hive and it looks like their queen is laying very well now.
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| Honey anyone? |
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