Bees, bees and more bees!!

Our Apiary is growing by leaps and bounds!!  We had no idea what we were getting  ourselves into when we decided to keep a few bees.  We had a total of three swarms, and then split all the other hives/nucs before more swarms could take place.

We allowed the splits to raise their own queens and removed a few of the extra queen cells to try raising queens in a queen castles. It's always good to have a few extra queens on hand in case you lose a queen.  

It was a little nerve racking having so many nucs/hives without queens at the same time. We just had to trust they knew what they were doing.  When we peeked inside after a couple of weeks we spotted on of the virgin queens. So we attempted to mark her, but she flew away!! We had no idea the new queens would fly like that!  After freaking out slightly, we moved onto a new hive and spotted another virgin queen.  This time we didn't even mark her, as soon as she saw us she flew away!!  So we closed up all the hives and had to walk away for a few days.

We peeked in again after about a week and were relieved to see eggs!!  We have never been able to spot eggs, because they are so tiny, but Kenan bought some dark foundations to help us spots eggs and sure enough there they were!  

These tiny eggs mean that our flyaway queens returned and they are now mated!!  

Now that all the hives have queens they are busy raising brood, drawing frames and bringing in lots of nectar!! The spring honey flow (Poplar, clover and Locust) has started and we've placed queen excluders on the strongest hives and will finally be able to collect honey if all goes well.

We decided to try using wax foundations instead of plastic, so we can potentially offer honey with cut comb. :)  We've had several local folks request it.

This week, we had a really good day in the bee yard! We found and marked 2 new mated queens and found one more unmarked virgin queen. So we have successfully raised 9 new queens, and combined 3 hives with 3 nucs to strength the hives for honey making. We currently have 6 hives, 11 nucs and 3 colonies in the queen castle.  We are really hoping for a good honey harvest!!