Well today is the day to check on hive 1 and see if the queen has established herself within the hive, we left it late in the day to check and soon got kitted up :)
Once the roof was off kim took out the empty syrup feeder then we removed each frame to check for the queen
wew were really pleased to find the cage, the candy plug was gone and the cage was empty which meant the queen was out :)
we checked each frame at one point kim thought she found some eggs though if they were eggs it was a little worrying as the eggs were near the top of each cell meaning it might not be a queen laying them...but as we were not sure they were eggs we left them. After checking the frames twice we still had not come across the new queen :( there were a lot of pollen stores and honey stores but no brood and for the moment no sign of the queen. We closed the hive up and checked on number 2....well what a difference! Kim had to sit down to go through these frames as they were heavy with stores and bee's
when we checked the frames we were pleasantly suprised lots of brood not yet capped
If you look at the picture above at the top middle of the picture you can see three different size larvae (click on the picture then again at the top middle of the same picture)
In this picture you can still spot larvae, but some of the holes have been blocked...this is called capped brood which means the larvae have gone into a pupae stage meaning they will turn into bee's then force them selves out to become one with the hive :)
So hive 2 is very well established just hive 1 we still have problems with...i will leave the hives till next weekend so we will know for sure if hive 1 is ok, if not we may have to think of something drastic anyway thank you for reading the blog and until next week....l8rs :)
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