As you probably know, we've had some bee ups and downs lately. We found a bunch of swarm cells in our hive a couple of months ago, so we split it up in order to convince the bees that they had swarmed.
We thought that worked, but then it appeared that we had no queen in either hive and our numbers were dwindling rapidly. We were saddened by the potential bee-lessness.
So, we decided to get two new nucs with the hopes that at least one of them would be healthy at all times. Kirk captured a swarm and brought it over.
Then Russell and Kirk did a BBQ cutout in Redondo last week.
They went to install it in our main box and discovered a capped queen cell. There is hope for the original hive after all!
We pared that hive down to the frame that has the queen cell, a bit of brood and some honey & pollen. There were boxes and frames everywhere, but the bees were pretty mellow throughout.
We had 3 extra frames of capped honey lef over from the original hive. We crushed, strained and tasted...it's our best yet.
It now appears that we have 3(!) healthy hives going. Long live the bees.
