Yesterday I went out to the hives to check the progress of the honeybees in regards to releasing their queens. The first two hives did a bang up job. They were even able to pull the queen cages to the front entrance for easy extraction. How they did this, I do not know, since I had the cages wedged between two frames in the traditional manner.
The last cage however the beekeeper forgot to drill a small hole through the sugar candy to make it easier on the workers. As a result she was still sitting inside her bower staring glumly out of the cage while the attendants assured her they were working on the problem. I took the small cage out and pulled off the screen gently and let her out into the frames. For a brief second I worried she may just fly off with a “Smell You Later!”, taking her colony with her but luckily she decided her new home was good enough.
This year I decided to use the frame division feeders. You simply replace one of the normal frames with a frame shaped container which holds about 1 gallon of sugar syrup. Two hives had sucked it down like a fat kid on a 7-eleven slurpy. The other one had imbibed about half of the sugar syrup. Fortunately, my new beekeeping friend brought some sugar water with him and let me use his to refill my containers.
The bees had started drawing out comb in good order. I saw some eggs in the two hives with the freed queens and pollen was also seen in some of the cells. I also centered the cluster as they had begun drawing out comb close to the hives wall. Other than that everything looks pretty good. I will go out again on Friday or Saturday to feed them more.
Jesse
