Revive the Hive!

After weeks of waiting patiently to see if the supercedure cells had yielded a new queen, I accepted the fact that the hive was without a queen and dwindling. Jodi, the beekeeping instructor, had a solution.

Jeremy and I went to Jodi's house last Sunday (7/18) to get a new queen and some frames of brood to help boost the population of workers in my hive, until the new queen started laying eggs.

The new queen - who has a blue dot like the last queen - came from Washington state, and she is a Russian! Evidently, Russians are better at surviving the winter than Italians, who are more focused on building out comb. We placed a few frames of brood and honey in a "nuke box" (styrofoam box for transporting bees) and headed to Hurricane Road.

Jeremy felt like the hive was getting too much direct sun, possibly causing the bees to spend too much time and energy cooling the hive. We decided to move the hive to a spot by the blueberry bushes where they would have mid-day shade.

The new queen was installed, as well as 3 frames of brood/honey, and left alone to do their thing. A week later (7/25), I returned to the hive to remove the tape covering the candy plug on the queen box. This gave the queen a week to spread her phermones to the hive, and now there will be several more days until the bees eat through the candy plug and release the queen into the hive.

For now, more waiting... sigh... but if all goes as planned, we revived the hive