A New Hope (with apologies to George Lucas )!
Once I’d noted the demise of the queen, at the vendor’s instruction I planned to inspect the hive in a day or two for brood. I emailed my beekeeping course instructor Mel, and he generously offered to come over to help since he keeps his hives nearby. As a retired physician, I saw it as a house call and final exam combined. Considering I’d managed to get the queen killed in less than a day, I hope he’d give me a gentleman’ s Bee at least!
At about 10 am yesterday, Mel came over and we inspected the hive.
We found no brood but I was surprised that in less than 24 hours they’d started to build out comb.
After a quick call to my vendor, New England Beekeeping, I headed off to pick up my replacement queen, this time with pictures! The Colony, AKA New England Beekeeping is about 35 minutes from my house. It has a full complement of beekeeping equipment. They also carry a variety of honey and even brew their own mead!
Now to get milady and her attendants back home and in the hive.
Time to unbutton the hive again. Mel advised me that my bees are quite docile. Since I thought this would be a quick peek I didn’t wear the pants to my bee suit or gloves. I find the gloves make it tough to handle the tools and it was a tad too cumbersome to pull on the pants for a quick peek (note, elastic at the ankles keeps bees from finding access to pant legs!). Considering I’ve only been at this 2 days, I haven’t been stung yet but common sense argues to wear protective gloves and pants to prevent stung fingers or at worst, inflamed private parts
Here you can see the top feeder in action. There’s openings under the screen in the center bar that allows the bees to fly up from the frames. They can walk down the screen to the syrup, drink, and fly back down to the hive frames. No escapes, no drowned bees!
Ok, a confession is due here. It was my nubie error. I had inadvertently unplugged the wrong side of my first queen’s queen cage resulting in her immediate release to the hive and killing by 10,000 workers that hadn’t forgotten the “smell” of their founding queen. In retrospect, I sure wished the original cage had been labeled like this one…
After hanging the new queen cage on a center frame, again I got things buttoned up. Let me add a word of thanks to my wife who in addition to taking most of these shots from a safe distance, allows me to feed ants at the kitchen table and keep cricket and Dubia roaches in our freezer. Thanks for letting me indulge my hobbies for the past 44 years!
Edited by ConcordAntman, April 13 2023 - 5:48 AM.