Swarms and Supers

We're well into the spring nectar flow now and a lot is going on.

Now that is the lawn of a beekeeper! Good dandelion crop this year.

The scale hive continues to be the star of the bee yard.  One full super and filling the second. Some queen cups but no real swarm cells. 

And photogenic to boot.

Their grandmother was from Bob's nuc last year and I think she was part Italian. I raised the mother here last summer so the drone fathers were from Spokane.

I'm trying to raise some more queens from this hive this spring and have a few cells cooking in a nuc.

The bad news is that the other two hives aren't doing as well. This is a queen I got at Tate's to re-queen the hive that was Bob's nuc last year. They were looking puny with a scattered brood pattern and they had mites. In April! So I treated with formic and got the counts down from 25 to 2 (per 300 bees).  Then I bit the bullet and killed the old queen (hate that!) and put the new one in. We'll see if she's any good. If she is, I'll try to raise a queen or two off of her. That would improve the diversity in my apiary.

And then there's the swarm from last year. They were building up like crazy and also filled a super but really wanted to swarm. I guess that should come as no surprise. I kept pulling brood frames out for nucs and cut out the swarm cells but I think they went and swarmed anyway! At last check I saw only capped brood, no eggs or open brood and no queen. If that hive was on a scale I'd know for sure. Anyway, I was prepared to risk it since I was thinking of re-queening it anyway. I think I'll put a frame of eggs from the scale hive in and see what they do with it. If they start making emergency cells I know they're queenless. If not, I missed the queen somehow. I'm kind of hoping they are queenless and then can just raise a new one from the scale hive. Fingers crossed!