Category: Education

Releasing The New Queen

Today I released the new Italian queen into the Pasta hive. She has only been in there for 4 days, but it appears from yesterday’s inspcetion they have accepted her. It’s supposed to rain for nearly a week straight so I wanted to release her today.

After letting her go I could see they had eaten about 3/4 of the way through the hole in the candy, so she probably would have been out by tomorrow anyway. Plus I wanted to watch and make sure they had really accepted her. She looks happy to be out, but not nearly as they do

It looks like everything went fine. I think she even started to lay? That’s it for now. I’ll wait 2 weeks until the next inspection to let her get settled and by that time there should be larva and pupa.

Roman Hive Split

There was a break in the weather today, so I added another hive. Yesterday we had 3+ inches of rain. Not exactly a good day to work the bees, but I split a really strong hive of Italians. The process was as follows –

  • Two weeks ago I searched for the queen but could not locate her. Both brood boxes were covered with bees and I went through twice.
  • I added a queen excluder on top of the bottom brood box and 2-inch shim with an entrance over that, then the top brood box.
  • Above that I added another queen excluder and a medium honey super.

The shimmed entrance was to give the drones an escape and also allow foragers easier access to the honey super.

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