I went into my hive on 6/13. Pictured below is one frame in from the outer edge. I see swarm cells and drone brood. This was the only frame I pulled from the brood chamber. I want to go back in a few days and try to tell if my queen is still in there. Is drone brood a bad sign?
I did not get stung on 6/13, which is a win for me. ☺️
Thank you,
Portia
Evening all! Enjoyed the meeting last night and learned a lot about pollen. Have had my first two hives for 1.5 weeks :). I've heard several times about mowing the grass and keeping the area neat around the hives. As a brand spanking newbie....are we wearing bee suits while weed whacking/push mower? I just don't know how much the sound makes the bees mad? I've come within 10 feet on the riding mower, but haven't ventured closer yet while mowing! Thanks for any tips.
Joe
Congratulationson on becoming a Beekeeper!
You could probably cut & weed whacking next to the hive occasionally, but more often than not, at least a couple of sentrys are going to come out to investigate and sometimes the hive will go alert and the response could be much larger. I, personally, always suit up when weed whacking or cutting close to the hives (especially in front of the hives).
We installed our first package yesterday and everything went pretty smoothly.
There were 100-200 bees still in the package box at the end, so we left it sitting close by the hive entrance for the rest of the day and overnight. This morning, there were dozens of dead bees around the area (at least they all looked pretty dead) but in the package box there was a cluster of perhaps 100 bees still. It was 40 degrees and with heavy rain predicted all day, I thought maybe I'd bring them inside and see if they warmed up.
Well they did warm up and now I have around 100 active bees "stranded" in my house (all still in the package box, and with a little bit of 1:1 provided) while it is pouring rain and in the 40's outside.
Can I reunite these ladies with the rest of the hive? If…
Dean great advice thank you and I think we would do that in the future for installations. I was able to get in touch with our HCBA mentor, Tom, who also provided some good advice. I ended up slicing the screen all the way open, then removing the cover just long enough to smack the package box on top of the feeding chamber and knock all the remaining bees into there. The cover was off for less than 10 seconds total, and all the bees are now in the hive. All's well that ends well!
I have three different size boxes that I'm working with and two of them are very similar in size but the frames don't transfer properly. i want to color code the frames so I don't put them in the wrong boxes and smash the bees. Is having paint inside the box okay for the bees?
You only need to paint the outside of the boxes to protect the wood and extend the life. the bees will take care of the inside with wax and propolis, so leave them natural. If you want to color code frames, use a colored thumb tack or just place a dot on the frames; I wouldn't recommend painting the whole frame or even just the top. Keep the inside of the colony natural.
Thanks Paul!!
I will check more brood frames soon.