june update

we managed to get through swarm season and we hope that we're done for this year!  we went from four hives to eight.  we have several new queens. 
the first is sheba, who is the daughter of jamaica and granddaughter of astoria. she has the hive that astoria lived in. 

sheba is lovely and dark like her mother and is already on the job, trying to rebuild the population of her hive, which was severely decreased when astoria passed away early this spring. 

the next new queen is orla, now head of the hive jamaica swarmed from. she is jamaica's daughter. she hatched after a secondary swarm from jamaica's hive happened on may 28th. the secondary swarm took off with the little black virgin queen we spotted previously. we weren't home to catch the swarm, however, even if we had been, they clustered 30' up in a tree behind the hive, so we wouldn't have been able to capture them.  

anyways, we found orla in the hive during our inspection on june 5th. she is golden!

we saw the third new queen in our four-frame nuc. she is also jamaica's daughter.  she's already got all kinds of eggs, larva and brood in her little home. we used one of jamaica's extra swarm cells to get her. she is striped! we decided to call her dido.

finally, on a very sad note, we have to report that we were unable to see rosie in her hive last wednesday, but found the hive full of emergency cells. we can only surmise that something happened to her during the previous inspection we did - either we lost her or squished her. it is incredibly sad, she was really beautiful and a very good queen. this was our first attempt at an artificial swarm. i must say everything went terribly wrong.  we culled nearly a dozen excess cells from the hive on the 6th, and we're waiting for rosie's daughter with great anticipation - she's due on the 12th or 13th. 

Really?

Erin Forbes, master bee-keeper from Portland, Maine, tongue-in-cheek declared may 17th to be the official opening day for swarm season here. well, she wasn't far off at all. on wednesday, may 15th at 11:00a.m., Jamaica swarmed and all of a sudden, our backyard was full of bees in the air. since we had seen some indication of swarming on our last inspection, we had decided to pull Jamaica from the hive and do an artificial swarm at the beginning of the week, however, the weather was very cool and windy and Lawrence didn't like the idea of exposing the brood.  of course, with the first halfway-decent weather on wednesday morning, she was "outta there".  the swarm landed in one of our hemlock trees in the backyard and after lots of discussion, we ended up topping the tree and shaking the clump into the waiting, baited hive.  the operation seemed successful, since everyone stayed in there. the moment we were done we went up to the nursery and performed a preemptive maneuver, removing Rosie from her hive to begin the artificial swarm process, although her hive wasn't nearly as ready to swarm, as Jamaica's had been. the following day, Peggy and Lawrence went through Jamaica's old hive and found 20 (yes!) queen cells in various stages of development. they removed four for our two nucs and left two really lovely ones in the hive and culled the rest. with that the swarm episode concluded and now our backyard apiary looks like this -

plus we have two more at the nursery. never a dull moment with bees.

Spring Has Sprung

the girls are back and so the beekeepers' work has resumed.  we made our first inspection of our hives on April 24th.  Jamaica's and Rosie's hives were 

           

          Jamaica

Rosie

going gangbusters. we saw many frames of eggs, larva and brood in each. With both of them doing so well, we decided to put them on a swarm watch, with the idea of preventing a swarm if possible. 

we carefully inspected Astoria's hive and alas, we saw no eggs, larva or brood, no sign of Astoria and a greatly reduced number of bees in the hive.  after consulting with Peggy and Richard (our bee-mentors) we guess that Astoria probably passed away sometime earlier in the spring.  she was one of our original queens from Bob Egan and we figured that she had been born in the summer of 2010, which would have made her nearly 3 years old. she was an amazing queen and wonderful egg-layer.  after she swarmed last year, she repopulated her new hive in record time. many of the pictures of perfect brood frames in this blog were from her hive last year. of course, we were very sad to lose her, however, Peggy and Richard suggested that we insert frames of eggs, larva and brood from Jamaica's hive (Astoria's daughter) so that the remaining bees could make a new queen for themselves.  we did that and are now eagerly awaiting Astoria's granddaughter!

finally, we took a look through crazy Katherine's hive and saw some brood, larva and eggs, although not nearly as much as we would have liked to see.  we're not sure if Katherine was able to mate well in the autumn last year. we did see her, but, I have to confess that she looked rather thin and small - not at all plump and rotund like a well-mated queen should look.  we added a couple of frames of brood from Rosie's hive to help out Katherine's colony, and we will give her some more time to get laying before we make any decisions about her.