May 29th 2023

Today was the first checkup by the official beekeeper since we installed them May 6th. We opened up both hives, checked the middle boxes, which hold the nectar and pollen stores, and checked the bottom boxes where the Queen Bee lays the eggs and the larvae are raised. A bee egg takes 21 days to become a bee.

Unfortunately Hive #1 didn’t have any eggs, no signs of the Queen and the worker bees had built a number of Queen Bee cells (big peanut shaped things that hold baby queens). The problem is that because there are no eggs there are no eggs to put in the queen cell to make a new queen. Since there were no eggs we believe the queen left about 3 weeks ago. Without intervention that hive would die

Luckily the second hive was doing extremely well! They have multiple frames full of bee eggs and some of them have even hatched already, making the hive bigger and stronger. After some research we (Mason) decided to combine the hives. We took the best frames out of the weak hive and consolidated them into one box. Then we put a piece of newspaper on top of the strong hive and placed the weak hive on the newspaper. Over the next couple days the bees will eat through the paper while getting used to each other’s scents and they’ll integrate into one big hive.

Mason will be back next week to check on the big ol’ hive to see if all the bees have become one happy family. Both hives had already stored a lot of nectar in their middle boxes so hopefully they’ll have lots of honey when it’s time to harvest!

Each hive was made of 3 boxes. The bees live in the bottom two, the top has a tray filled with sugar water that they can access through one hole. They drink the sugar water until they find flowers to get pollen from.

Beekeeper checking the brood chamber for baby bees

So many bees!

The medium brown cells in the middle are capped bee pupae that are growing into adult bees. You can see the holes where a couple have already hatched

The queen cell where a new queen would be raised. However, you can see there are no eggs on this frame that could be transplanted and raised into a queen.

An empty frame where the bees could build their own honeycomb. You can see the start of one swarm cell (unfinished queen bee cell) at the middle bottom.

Two hives without their sugar trays since they’re building plenty of honeycomb and weren’t drinking it anymore.

One (1) newly constructed mega-hive

All the bees were annoyed we were messing with their hives but were still very gentle and didn’t sting us at all.

She is just LOADED with pollen! What a hard worker

Opened up the second entrance to the hive since the population will be growing fast

All the lil bees :)