28 August, 2010 - 10 am

Partly cloudy, slight breeze and about 90º at the Back Yard bee hive.

Backyard Bees

There were a lot of bees out on the landing area this morning, I didn't know why until a little later after I finished looking through the hive.

The top honey super has two fully capped frames that can be harvested. The rest are being filled. There are also a lot of bees in this top honey super.

Bottom honey super has three fully capped frames that can be harvested and the rest are being capped.

Top hive body - the frames are full of bees, I removed the ninth frame and found eggs. larva and capped brood. This frame also had a lot of honey around the brood area and the other side was all honey filled cells, capped.

While going through the honey supers and hive bodies I noticed an unusual amount of bees in the air. They were not aggressive but there were a lot flying. So I put everything back together. About an hour later I looked out the window to check on the bees and saw a large gathering of bees at the back of the top honey super. I thought that maybe I had misplaced my queen. I suited up and checked things out. I found a large cluster of bees in a ball shape and thousands more all around on the top honey super. So picked up the ball of bees and moved bees around to see if there was a queen. And there was! I still thought she was my queen so I put her at the front hive entrance and immediately bees balled up on her! And it was then that I noticed the difference in color of the bees. My bees are a very light colored bee, the bees that were on the back of the hive are a darker color with dark bands. Its kind of hard to see these things some times because of the bee veil. But once I saw that color difference and the behavior I got the queen out of there. I put her in a queen cage and sealed it. I then put her in a five frame nuc and I began to try and collect the swarm bees. I am hoping the swarm bees will go to their queen and leave my hive alone. So far the swarm bees are still trying to get into the hive. It rained pretty hard so hopefully that will slow down what appears to be an assault.

Its 4 pm, I took a look in the nuc to see if any bees decided to take care of the queen. And there were 5 or so that were on the queen cage and they appeared to be feeding her. I noticed on the inside back of the nuc a small cluster of bees. I found another queen! So now I am really wondering what is going on here. I put that queen in a queen cage and now have both queens tucked into the middle area of the nuc. There are about 40 or so bees crawling around the queens. Both queens appear to be injured and may be rejected.

Now I need to really look through my hive to find the queen or at least see what damage was done by this assault.

27 August, 2010 - 10:30am

Alpha Hive
The bees have continued to fill the bottom honey super. Three frames are capped and ready for harvest. The rest of the super frames are being heavily worked. I didn't look through the hive bodies at this time.

Beta Hive
The hive is slowing building up numbers. I checked three frames in the top hive body and the bottom hive body. These frames had fresh eggs, larva and capped brood throughout.

Swarm Hive
I didn't look at the hive today. I cleaned up the grass around the hive and put down insecticide to deal with the ants. This was also done to the other two hives.