We have had the bees for a few weeks now but I have not had the chance to post an update on how they are doing. Let’s use this blog post to catch everyone up.
The NUC I ordered arrived on May 4th and was installed without incident. Upon subsequent inspections I didn’t find a queen or eggs, but the hive was raising some emergency queen cells so I figured I’d let nature take its course. The worst case scenario is they swarm, but they might do that anyways so no harm in letting them take care of themselves.
We had a really nasty storm blow through a few days ago and the bees were mere feet from being squished. Literal feet from disaster, but the universe said “have a little treat” and they are safe.
I gave them a look a few days after the storm to make sure they were OK. They were doing fine. They had packed their box full of nectar, and I mean full. Even the bridge comb they made to hold the lid on was packed full of sticky, syrupy nectar. Since they had filled out maybe 6-1/2 of their 8 frames I added an empty super.
The next week (Yesterday relative to this blog post) I went to check on them. They seemed to be doing well, good numbers, saw young larvae and some brood. They had scraped the plastic foundation in the new super completely clean and used the wax in their bottom box. I’ll need to come back out with re-waxed frames to encourage them to draw the upper frames out.
The last thing I noticed is their nectar stores had lessened over the week so I put up their feeder.
This morning I was curious how much was left in their feeder after one day and it was completely empty and dry. They wasted no time drinking it down, so I refilled it.
I’ll have to melt down the bridge comb I pulled out of their hive and use it to re-coat some extra frames to hopefully encourage them to draw the foundation out. That could be its own blog post though!
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