May 28, 2024
Bee season is well underway and sounds like due to the mild winter the bees got a pretty good start with brood rearing! Im hearing about swarm after swarm in late April and all through May. Great news if your ready for splits, not so great if your not ready. I’ve encountered som challenging situations myself and if you’re following me on Instagram you can follow along on my requeening attempt due to a very mysterious queen loss. My plan was to go in today to see if there is a new queen present, but it has been raining here in MI and it will have to wait until tomorrow. I’ve also been busy planning my oldest son’s high school graduation party up until last weekend, so Ive been pretty exhausted and just not ready to start planting my flowers or really anything yet, but I’m getting there little by little. So far what I do know is that Ive got queen trouble. I was able to make two splits so far and they both had some trouble – one did not make any queen cells from the eggs I put in and the other looks like they did make a queen, but she’s nowhere to be found! There are eggs present, and they appear to be from a new laying queen as the eggs are at the bottom of the cell but there is more than one egg present. In this case the bees will clear out the extra eggs. It is possible the queen is there but I did not see her, or they are planning on requeening for some reason. So I place another frame of eggs from on of my gentler hives into the first split and hopefully they will make a queen. If not I will combine them with the other split if they do make a queen. Hopefull I will have some updates on all the hives later this week. Good luck out there!