Beltane Waxing Strawberry Moon
My inexperience is showing. At the Hobby Beekeeper’s meeting they suggested we look at each frame. I did that. With three colonies that’s a lot of frames. In the package colony it seemed to me that there were not as many bees as there should be right now, though I stopped here to read Nature’s Nectar and it sounds like other beekeeper’s with packages from his second load (mine) have about the same activity as I do. I put in another pollen patty and left the syrup the same since it was down only about half from the last week. There were larvae so it’s still queen right. It needs to get to three deeps by the fall. I imagine it will make it.
I put a third hive body on the divide. The bees had drawn out comb on the second hive body I put on last week and there were frames with brood. The overall colony looked pretty good. I guess. It’s hard for me to judge since I don’t have an exemplar outside of my own colonies. There were swarm cells and some of them looked chewed. At the Beekeeper’s meeting last week they said that usually means the bees have swarmed. I can’t tell. When bees swarm, they leave a colony behind and a new colony takes off with a queen.
The parent colony has one honey super that is heavy. Really heavy. A second one has some honey and the bees have begun to draw comb on the other two, but not much. Since the bees don’t go out on rainy, cloudy days, the production of honey has slowed down. We need a run of sunny, warm days.
Since I’m studying bee diseases in an online course right now, I imagined I saw disease. Don’t know if it was or not. A learning curve.
