today wasn't much of a bee day for me in the way of hive management. however, yesterday was just off the hook bee crazy.
first stop
i spent the early afternoon working bees with my boy billy-g in yountville. at first it wasn't so bad until about mid-day when the heat kept climbing and the quality of the hives declined. i really thought we had some great colonies out there but with each hive we opened there was another problem.
colony number one had numerous laying workers. at first appearance the bees and brood looked fine until i started noticing eggs in the pollen then eventually as we worked through the hive we saw more and more eggs in each cell. at one point i saw a section of brood with what must have been 10-20 eggs in each unused cell up in the honey stores.
look really close deep into these cells, they're just jammed packed with unfertile eggs. i guess perhaps i could be a newly mated queen that hasn't yet sorted out the laying order. if so she has a long way to go. since i never saw a queen and there was some nice even laying im going to keep my fingers crossed and come back in a week. hopefully i wont pop my inner cover and there be a zillion drones.
bill and i also found a hive that looked great in population but on closer inspection we noticed a pretty serious brood disorder. no sunken in capped brood, bee scale, or funny smell but definitely problematic brood with dying cells of brown disease. we shook all the bees in question onto new fresh drawn comb and burnt all the frames and foundation that looked a little sickly. it's sad to kill bees but on the other hand if we are seeing a colony with little of no disease resistance we really don't want that genetic pool mixing with our stronger survival stock. i will also check this colony in one week to see their status.
i saw a really interesting marking on a queen. a big black dot on her
i've never seen anything like that before.
while working the bees i also saw a wasp fly up and start attacking a worker. ripping it in half before the guard bees were able to push the yellow jacket off. i guess this is the time of year the yellow jackets start needing protein.
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