Last Week Update

Good Morning! The sun has already risen here and it promises to be a beautiful day. I've got to head outside early and get some yard work done, but I thought I'd put the weekend news online first.
I went back to market on Saturday. Too bad I was pretty much alone there. Don't get me wrong, there were a few other farm folks there but when I got there I found out the market doesn't start until this week. Great. . . . so I stayed anyway and made a whole $8.50. Hardly worth my time, but I did manage to catch up with some of the folks who did show up, and yes I made a couple of new friends as well. I only stayed until 1:00 and then came home. I know there is always a good side of things, and mine will be that I don't have to do a thing to go to market this week, I'm pretty much ready.

Sunday Jim and I went into the hives, we have a pretty good schedule going now. One week its the new hives the next week its the older hives. That way we aren't in them tooo much and when we find problem we mark the hive by putting an extra brick on it so that we check on it during the week.

This weekend we tackled two problems:

One was a drone laying queen. I knew she was there but we just hadn't been able to take care of her, and when I went to pick up the bees a few weeks ago someone there told me to take all the frames away from the hive and head to some brush making sure I put some distance between the hive and the bees and brush them all off the frames. The drone laying queen wouldn't be able to make it back to the hive and the bees would go back to the hive by themselves. So if I didn't plan on ordering a queen today and putting a new queen in as well as a frame of new bees I could have left the hive alone and let them raise a new queen on their own. I have no idea if this will work, that's why I've got the hive marked. I'll check on it throughout the week and let you know just what happened.

The second thing we noticed was a new queen cell that should be emerging any time in a hive we had been worried about. We equalized it anyway by giving it a frame of new bees and hope that the queen takes off and does well.
It never seems to end. I'm going to upload the pictures from this weekend on a separate post. That way I can tell you what to look for in each picture.