The Word of the Day is "Bearding"

Hello!

On Thursday we added some boxes filled with plastic foundation that we'd ordered to the nucs and a few of the hives.

Today we did an abbreviated hive check of half of the Flow Hive hives including the two nucs, Hive 5 (Queenless Yellow Queen Split) and Hive 3 (Queenless White Queen Split w/ New Flow Super).

The Good:
Nuc 1 - Had eggs though we didn't spot the queen.
Nuc 2 - Was acting queenright though we didn't see a queen or eggs, but did note some queen cells, one that looked like a queen had emerged and another that had a hole in the side, so we're hopeful that a virgin queen just hadn't started laying yet.
Hive 5 - We saw a lovely unmarked very dark, almost black queen. (D1 = white, D2 = white)
Hive 3 - Had several Flow Frames almost ready to harvest!

The Bad:
Hive 3 - Had no signs of a queen, or queen cells, or brood of any kind with D1 being filled with honey, pollen, and nectar. Because there were no signs of queen cells, we combined the queenright Nuc 1 with this hive by placing Nuc 1's frames in a box and putting that box on Hive 3's bottom board as the new D1. We tried very hard to get a sheet of newspaper between this new D1 and the old D1 from Hive 3, but were only partially successful for reasons that including a stinging incident. We will have to see if this combination worked out okay at our next check and hopefully find and mark the queen from Nuc 1. [D1 = white (former Nuc 1), Newspaper, D2 = white (used to be D1, filled with honey, nectar, pollen), Queen Excluder, New Flow Super]

Also, the swarm traps are still empty. :(

The word of the day is "bearding" because I, like so many beekeepers before me, misdiagnosed one of our hives and several of the other teaching apiary hives as preparing to swarm when really they were just bearding (had many bees hanging out on the outside of the hive) to cool down the interior of the hives. Not surprising since it was 90F in the bee yard today!

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Next check we'll peek in Hives 1, 2, 4, & 6 and mark any new queens that we find (time and weather permitting). Check to see how the combination of Nuc 1 and Hive 3 went. Recheck Nuc 2 to see if it has a laying queen. And maybe do the long-promised harvest from the Flow Supers.

Our next Flow Hive check will be Sunday, June 11th at 10am in the A2B2 Teaching Apiary at Matthaei Botanical Gardens next to the Project Grow Garden in the Campus Farm area.

If you would like to join the A2B2 Flow Hive Team or would like to know more about the Flow Hive in general, please contact Jen Haeger at [email protected].