"If bees are not cleaned from the floor, bees must be cleaned upon ship-ment, lest the floor becomes a slippery mess. In these conditions, the humans wear respirators. What about the bees?" #🐝
Saturday I'll check on them. She won't have much space, so maybe no eggs by then in any case. But to pull the cage and see if things look normal, what aggression is like. #🐝
Stage 3 is harvesting the honey from the second deep box, which I'm waiting on an extractor for. Once the extractor arrives, I'll extract all the honey from the second deep, and return the empty frames on the bottom, to become the new primary brood box. #🐝
Because the colony was clearly far along and needed a queen (was confirming with inspection that queen was gone), I went straight ahead and installed the new queen. The workers weren't aggressive but WERE really excited, immediately spreading her scent. #🐝
Some of the proof of not having a queen: See that bulge just right-of-center? The comb comes outward because they're building drone comb; drones are much larger than workers.
And the workers are laying! There is ~5-day-old larva. East hive. #🐝
The West hive has been steadily growing, and has a phat beard on the front these days. The East hive hasn't shrunk, but it hasn't been getting big like that. No SHBs! So, I ordered a Russian-Italian queen Saturday, which shipped today.
Saturday I did an inspection of the East hive. It's honey-bound; there is too much honey and no room for brood. But more than that, I did not see any eggs, zero larvae except for a few drones that were almost ready and a scattered brood pattern.
The East hive has thoroughly cleaned its deep hive and is very well along building the comb. They are almost done with the middle frames, working their way out. #🐝
This is an interesting frame that had been *filled* with pollen last year. I scraped a bunch of comb out this Spring because it was a dead-out, and had been pretty gross.
They've cleaned it off, but left the piles of pollen. Hopefully they can use it! #🐝
West hive I gave 5 more frames to work through last Saturday, so they've been filling that in. But East only had a deep (now filled) and a super (mostly full), and they were clearly feeling squeezed, so I went ahead and gave them a full deep. #🐝