Nuc Buzz...

It has been awhile since my last post, but with good reason: too much to type! Yesterday, I did minor inspection on the nuc and it was full of bees. Compared to last post when I thought the nuc was doomed (even with the queen), there is now hope. When I opened up the hive and looked through the frames, it was obvious that there were three times the amount of bees than last time. There was larvae and brood which suggest a healthy egg-laying queen. There weren't enough brood to really recognize the queen's egg laying pattern, but just to see the brood is definitely encouraging enough. I also noticed that there were a considerable amount of baby bees so I must have had a lot of brood recently hatch. Which leaves me with an army of tyros, and because the bees develop through stages of work, these bees will not be foraging for about a month(22 days give or take...). So the nuc may still be awhile before it reaches 'full potential'. As for the stages: As soon as a bee is born they have to take care of their cell, in other words, they have to clean up the hole they just came out of. Then they become a nurse bee that takes care of larvae. Next, there are many things that the bee can do, which includes hive maintenance, helping/feeding the bee, and fanning the hive, etc... The last step before it can become a forager is to become a guard bee for protection, and finally it can become a forager. So like I said before, full potential of my "money makers" or foragers, wont really be up and running for awhile. Other than that, there was nothing too exciting with the nuc. The only physical changes I made was inserting a beetle trap.