Today's check: One Month

I hived the two packages on May 2, so today is their one month anniversary. The East hive, which released its queen a day or two sooner, is building up more slowly. They still have about 4 frames of bees. The queen is laying, and there is brood, but either the package is dying out more quickly or she is laying more slowly. I found the queen on the last frame, wandering around, apparently not happy with the state of the cells. This is the second time I've spotted her, and she never has much of a retinue. I'll give her another few weeks, and we'll see if she's the problem, or if it's just a case of the package bees dying before the new bees could replace them. At one month, we could be at the nadir of the colony's size.

By contrast, the West hive is booming, with bees on every frame. I had to manually release their queen, so they should be a day or more behind the other, and yet... quite a contrast. I didn't bother to hunt down the queen. I saw plenty of bees and capped brood in the frames I pulled, and decided to leave it at that.

Both hives got a second deep hive body, this one with two Pierco drone frames. I'm going to use drone frames for mite reduction. I used this method a couple of years ago, and was successful, so the experiment is worth repeating. The method is simple: every three weeks, pull the capped drone brood, replace the frame with an empty, and freeze the capped brood to kill the trapped mites (and, of course, drones). With only two hives, it shouldn't be too labor intensive.

However, speaking of "labor," my own first baby is due on June 20. So I guess we'll see how time I have for the girls once I have a new girl of my own!