Action Taken

Saturday, September 4th, I went to my parents to check on the bees. The big question on my mind was if Juno would show signs of having a queen. The answer was a resounding no. No larvae, no eggs, and certainly no queen was visible. Also, during the inspection I twice noticed what appeared to be one bee attacking another and flying off with it. I suspect that might be a response to being frequently robbed by Artemis and/or a symptom of being queenless.

I tried to consolidate down to just one box, but there seemed to be just a few too many frames that had honey on them. Also, I was getting low on smoke. So, I put the frames back in and looked in on Artemis. She was doing fine with many more bees than Juno. I tried to take out the drone frame, but I should have taken out one of the outer frames first to provide more room. If I had, I would not have made a mess out of pulling the brood frame out since it had some bracing comb on it. That made the bees irate, and me with no smoke at that point. So I quickly put down the queen excluder on top of Artemis's top box, then placed two pieces of newspaper in which I had cut slits. Then I moved Juno onto of Artemis, making a bee high rise. The idea is that Juno is doomed since no queen and no eggs/larvae to make a new queen = extinction. So rather than loose those bees to a gradual death, they would be better off combined with Artemis where they could provide more bee-power for the goldenrod flow. But if I added them in directly there would be the risk of fighting between the hives. So, the newspaper will separate them for the time it takes for the workers to eat away at the paper. During that time the hive scents should mix... and the former Juno's will latch onto the scent of a queen and become honorary Artemis's.


A few hours later I saw what appeared to be foragers returning to both the bottom and the top (which I had left open mostly because there were a lot of bees hanging onto the inside of the top outer cover that had come off a frame I had propped on top of it). It occurred to me then that Juno's foragers returning from the fields would be likely to recognize 'their' hive, even with the increase in altitude, and would be able to enter through the top entrance without having to go through the Artemis entrance.

I touched base with my mentor via the phone today. He agreed that that sounded like the right thing to do. He also suggested that I order my wintering supplies in advance of the the workshop I will be attending Sept 11. I will hopefully have a chance to help him out with extracting. It would be good experience for me and its the least I could do for his help.