The Queens are Out

This even we had temps in the high 50's. It had been in the 60's during the day. Sunny, and calm, it was a good day to open the hive and look at the queen boxes. The marshmallows were gone, and the queens were off and running. The workers were all bunched up on the frames. That's where the queen must be so I pulled out the package and began replacing frames.

I moved the bee clusters to the center. I added some honey and wax to a couple frames and put them in next to the bee clusters. As I scraped the original frame to divide it amongst the hives, I ended up covering three sides of the clean frames. The honey made a huge mess. Luckily there is a large team of workers to clean it all up.
Until today, the bees didn't have any honey. I decided not to smoke the bees, since they wouldn't be able to gorge themselves on honey. When I started moving the frames around, they started getting angry. I am still not used to angry bees yet. It is nice to have the protection of the veil and coveralls.

The tin can in Delores's hive was empty. The bees had consumed half the syrup in the jar already too. Doris's team didn't do quite as well with the can but they made quite a dent in the pollen patty. Both hives got after the honey right off.

One concerning item, there was a lot of dead bees on the bottom screen. There were some that were moving slowly but it was kind of alarming to see how many were lost.
There are still many bees to care for Doris and Delores. Each hive had roughly three full frames covered in bees. I saw good activity outside the hive too. Doris looked like she may have had a little bit bigger of a family.

I couldn't find either of the queens, but the clusters were reassuring. Overall, they were busy working hard.

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