She's Alive!

With fingers crossed, I opened the hive today - 3 hours before I had to leave for the airport.  Roxi's hive was crazy, busy and the bees were very focused.  It's strange that you can tell the temperament of a hive the minute you walk up to it - you don't even need to open it.  Just watching the activity at the door gives you a good indication of how well the hive is working as a whole.  The girls just glide in and out with no wasted motion, crawling over one another but in a very familiar and gentle way.  Better than watching the door traffic is listening to the hive.  You just press your ear against the hive boxes and listen - don't even know how to describe this, but you can tell by the frequency of the buzzing whether they are agitated or happy.

It was a happy contented buzzing today.  Great!  As I opened the hive and inspected each box, the girls were so preoccupied I didn't have to use my smoker.  The top most super (box) was fully drawn out with wax and full of honey.  That was a good sign.  But the litmus test was whether I would see any brood in the lower boxes.  Well GLORY BEE I saw eggs, larvae, and capped brood cells.  The queen, she is alive!

Bottom line, the hive is thriving - and best of all, I was able to put a fourth super on the top.  It's not going to be as bad a honey harvest as I originally thought - because of the drought.  But it is still extremely dry.  So dry that I get nervous lighting my smoker.  I've taken to carrying a large fire extinguisher and 4 or 5 bottles of water with me when I do an inspection.

As I left my hives, I snapped a picture of them.  Here you can see the sign that Barton Creek made in order to keep people away from the girls.  You can see how brown and shriveled the brush and grass is - WHEN, OH WHEN, WILL IT RAIN?

Where is Waldo?

I went out to visit Roxi's old hive yesterday - 6 days after installing the new queen.  I just couldn't wait an entire week to see if she was still there and, most importantly, laying eggs.  When I opened the lower brood box the cage the new queen was shipped in was empty ... that was good news, but I was a bit worried that not only was the hole with the candy fully open, but the cork plug on the opposite side was missing too.  Why would that come out?  What if the cork plug fell out and the queen was released before the hive was used to her pheromones?

The only way to know was to inspect the hive.  I was very careful to check for the queen on every frame I pulled.  I ordered a marked queen in order to make it easier to find her, but I reached the last frame and didn't see her.  Equally distressing was that I couldn't see any brood or larvae developing.  I tried to rationalize that nasty fact by arguing that the bees had probably only eaten through the candy plug a day or two before - hardly enough time for the new queen to start laying eggs.  But, it was equally likely that the new queen was not in residence.

Needless to say, I was devastated as I left the hive.  What was I going to do if the new queen didn't take?  I didn't have time to order a new queen before leaving on vacation, and I didn't want the hive to raise their own queen since I wouldn't have control over the line of progeny.  My only choice was to leave the hive for another 5 days and check it right going on vacation.  If the queen wasn't laying by then, I was just going to have to let Mother Nature take it's course.