I took advantage of being halfway to Underhill on an errand to go visit my parents and look in on the bees. I was particularly interested in Juno hive (the yellow one) which was started from a nuc this Spring and has looked less robust than the other nuc, Ceres the blue hive. I got home around 7:30 and was with the hives a few minutes later.
I smoked Juno and opened her up. The bees were docile and I could see they had not done much of anything in the second deep box I had added to them. Putting that box aside I looked in on the first deep. In addition to the frames that came with the nuc, I had supplied it with frames that had been drawn out (or mostly drawn out) by the hives last year. Doing so should give a bee's leg up to them and it was something I had also done for the Ceres. However, since this comb was older it was darker and still had some debris on it that the bees hadn't cleaned up yet. Looking past those frames I pulled out some frames from the middle which were populated by the bees. I found some larvae, which was what I had been looking for so I know there is a laying queen. I didn't see a lot, but I didn't look at all of them since I was running out of light. I dusted them with powdered sugar for good measure and closed the hive.
I smoked and opened up Ceres. There I saw more bees than in Juno. They had not yet started to draw out the drone frame so I had no need to mess with them any further. I dusted them, just a sprinkle on the top of the top deep... not really a proper dusting, and moved onto Artemis.
I didn't smoke Artemis since I was just opening her to dust her. The bees there were less docile, probably due to the lack of smoking, and very numerous. I sprinkled the last of the confectionery sugar on the top of the super and decided that would be good enough today.
All of this took about twelve minutes. The burgers my parent's had made for me were not even cold.
I will have to make a decision about what to do with Juno in a few weeks when I have the double nuc class and will be bringing home a double nuc and two queens to populate it. Those queens will need a throng of subjects. I could rob some from Artemis and Ceres to fill the nucs. Or I could do what Mike Palmer does, he uses week hives to populate his splits and double nucs. The theory being that while you could drain the resources of a strong hive to supplement a weaker one, its better to leave the strong hive alone to maximize its production (since bees benefit from increased efficiency the more bees there are in a hive) and sacrifice the queen that is under performing since she likely has poorer genetics.
I will try to look in on Juno again this weekend. I will likely remove that second deep as they are not going to be using it anytime soon since they have plenty of empty drawn comb in their first deep box. I may also try to make more sugar to dust them with by putting regular sugar in a blender to make it fine enough for the purpose of getting mites to drop off. Then use this sugar to dust Artemis in earnest.
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