What's the latest Buzz?

Various people have asked me what has happened with the hives as I have not posted in a while. While I have made observations, I have not had a chance to update the blog till now.

My parents observed fewer bees flying around Artemis a few days after the last post. I observed the same behavior a week or so later. And this has continued over the last few weeks. I am hoping that this means that a new queen has been crowned and now Artemis is again queenright and thus, less agitated.

Following my mentor's advice to feed the bees to encourage more comb to be drawn out for the new queen to lay in, my parents have started to offer sugar water to the bees. We have two quart sized feeders that I bought on a lark when I picked up the bees. We had tried to feed the bees when we first installed them. At the time, they used them moderately, draining them after a few days and only a few bees at a time ever at the feeders. I wondered at the time if their lack of enthusiasm was due to either the feeders not being very enticing or if there was a much more alluring nectar source flowing at the time.

The first few days of feeding didn't show much promise. I had started to wonder if the feeders needed to be jazzed up with some blue landing stripes to encourage them to come and feed. However, I called my parents today and apparently, while one feeder only had a few patrons, the other feeder had around 80 patrons... it must have been happy hour.

I plan on visiting the hives this weekend and taking a peek. I would like to observe the status of the queen cells, look for new eggs and brood, and perhaps find the new queen *crosses fingers* in Artemis. I also should take a peek into Juno and see how things are there. Depending on how they are doing, I may consider adding supers to them, supers being any additional boxes placed on top of the brood boxes. Supers could be left on for additional food for the hives this winter or pulled off for human enjoyment. But I shouldn't bottle my honey until its extracted.

I am also considering giving Artemis a comb of brood from Juno in order to make sure Artemis has some new workers while the new queen's *knock wax* progeny develop. Mite monitoring should also be done at some point. I have not seen any so far, but I have not really looked hard.

Here are pictures from a week ago of the hives sporting their new (and freshly painted) top brood boxes.