Bees at last, Bees at last, Thank God Almighty I've got Bees at last!

Well the title may seem a little deceiving... I received two frames from my Dad's hive today! His hive is strong enough to sacrifice a couple of frames, so kindly he did. I did NOT catch any swarming bees, but I did save the pheromone, so I may build another nuc and hang it up in the yard.

For the most part taking out frames isn't too much of a hassle. But for starting a nuc we made sure that our frames were abound of brood, honey(for themselves), and bees. While you have the hive open you can also see how things are going: looking for honey, the queen (if you can find her), disease, moths, beetles, etc.. We doubled checked for the queen to make sure she wasn't on one of the frames we took from the hive into my nuc. You don't want to set back the "mother" hive from producing; and removing the queen by accident would do just that. With the weather so nice in Florida, that would be a devastating setback on the hive and screw up the honey production.

After finding a couple of frames meeting the requirements we placed them into the nuc. Then replaced the empty slots in my Dad's hive with new frames. Now that I have a couple of frames in my nuc, its ready for it's permanent relocation under the lemon tree. Hopefully this new family of bees will recognize that they don't have a queen. When the bees recognize the absence of a queen they will secrete "royal jelly" onto one or more of the larvae in the hive. This is why its very important to pull a frame containing brood. "Royal Jelly" is what makes the larvae turn into a queen. In a situation if more than on queen is born, they will fight til the death, or if a queen is born before any others she will kill them off. Anyway, this will all take about 3 weeks. Then the new queen has to mate with drones (the only male bee in the bee world!) and she will be fertilized for life, laying about 1500 eggs a day. If all goes well, there should be a queen laying eggs in that nuc in about 21 days or so... With that being said, I'm going to build a hive for these guys to live in when they out grow the nuc (hopefully I'll make a video). If they out grow the nuc and begin to feel over crowded, they can swarm. I'm going to be prepared.






p.s The little piece of wood in front of the nuc, their "doorway", is a reducer. I put this in place because the colony is too weak to defend itself. It keeps them from all going out at once, or from other bees raiding.