The queen is larger than the workers and comes marked with a dot on her upper back. We FINALLY found someone who can ship us a new Italian queen. An Italian queen bred in Hawaii to live in our Texas hive. She's going to be quite worldly! Since she's coming from Hawaii, we've [...]
Queen cell, also called a swarm cell or a supercedure cell. I've had quite a few people ask me about the queen bee; how long does she live, what happens if she dies, etc. I had a few answers, but never had a very complete answer (at least not in my head). I [...]
We did a quick check of the bees this afternoon, mainly just to feed them. Last weekend, we put a medium box on hives 1 and 3 to give the bees a little more room. Hives 1 and 3 have been building like crazy and we didn't want them to get honey bound during the [...]
We went out to the hives on Saturday to check on the girls. We noticed last weekend that hive 2 wasn't nearly as strong as the other two, so we wanted to check for activity and see if we could find the queen, or some indication that she is laying. We went about our normal [...]
Three 4-frame NUCs wrapped in mesh bags in the hatch of my car. We got up bright and early to drive to Navasota, TX to pick up our bees. We had bought 3 NUCs of bees, 1 for each hive. A NUC (short for 'nucleus') is basically a mini-hive. It has 3 or [...]
I ordered a 'starter' kit of 3 hives, each with a stand, 3 medium boxes, inner cover, and lid. It didn't sound like much, but when UPS arrived he had TWELVE boxes to deliver! Yikes! Luckily I had a hand truck (as did he) and we loaded them all into the garage. Since hives are [...]
