The main purpose of working the bees today was to attempt to weaken the packaged bee hive and give it more space while in turn strengthening the swarm hive. First I swapped locations for these two hives so that the field force of the packaged bee hive would end up going into the swarm hive in its new location improving its population. I then got into the swarm hive, and noticed right away that they had built some supersedure cells (because they had such a weak queen) and I removed those cells.
I looked to see if they had released the new queen, which they had. I looked further to see if she had started laying eggs and the good news was that she had laid eggs. I removed three frames, checking as I went to make sure the queen was not in them. As I was checking, I knocked as many bees off the frames as possible back into the hive and set them aside. I looked into my top brood chamber box of my packaged bee hive and looked for three frames with capped brood. I swept bees off of those back into that hive and moved the frames into the middle of the swarm hive's brood chamber. This accomplishes two things, the first being giving the swarm hive a head start on some brood and the second is to give the packaged bee hive more space to lay brood and hopefully not swarm.
I noticed that in only four days the swarm hive had gone through three quarters of the inside feeder. I'll need to fill the feeder up in the next couple of days and start preparing another deep super as an eventual addition. This could be in as soon as one week. I also took a quick check on my hive from last year and you can see from the picture of the capped brood that things looked good.
The main purpose of working the bees today was to attempt to weaken the packaged bee hive and give it more space while in turn strengthening the swarm hive. First I swapped locations for these two hives so that the field force of the packaged bee hive would end up going into the swarm hive in its new location improving its population. I then got into the swarm hive, and noticed right away that they had built some supercedure cells (because they had such a weak queen) and I removed those cells.
I looked to see if they had released the new queen, which they had. I looked further to see if she had started laying eggs and the good news was that she had laid eggs. I removed three frames, checking as I went to make sure the queen was not in them. As I was checking, I knocked as many bees off the frames as possible back into the hive and set them aside. I looked into my top brood chamber box of my packaged bee hive and looked for three frames with capped brood. I swept bees off of those back into that hive and moved the frames into the middle of the swarm hive's brood chamber. This accomplishes two things, the first being giving the swarm hive a head start on some brood and the second is to give the packaged bee hive more space to lay brood and hopefully not swarm.
I noticed that in only four days the swarm hive had gone through three quarters of the inside feeder. I'll need to fill the feeder up in the next couple of days and start preparing another deep super as an eventual addition. This could be in as soon as one week. I also took a quick check on my hive from last year and you can see from the picture of the capped brood that things looked good.