A New Found Respect

HIVE INSPECTION: 04/25/21

Here is a photo of a man with new respect for bees.

I bought a smaller full suit over the weekend (when we picked up our bees) so Hubby inherited this first one I bought. It worked out well because this one was just too big for me. Both being in full suits, along with thin gloves under our leather gloves, saved us today. Not one sting! So two thumbs for proper gear .👍👍

BUT. Our time with the bees today was not as successful as we planned.

We were looking to split the Spice Girlz hive (creating two smaller hives from the one large one ) and install the 2 new queens. But working with live animals, who are probably smarter than you to begin with, doesn’t always goes as planned. We began dismantling Hive A, the Spice Girlz hive, that had two deep boxes (18 frames) and one super box of brood (10 frames) to look through - all to find the queen and dispatch her. On the 26th of 28 frames I finally spotted her. I went to grab the queen catcher but it had fallen underneath a hive and I couldn’t see it. Robbin kept an eye on her as I frantically looked for the clear plastic cage. He ended up just trying to pinch her and got a grip on her but she wriggled away and flew somewhere. We spent the next hour looking through all the frames again and about a billion bees (or at least it felt like a billion) to try and find her again. We failed. By then the Spice Girlz were getting a tad unruly. We made an executive decision to simply split the hive and install the two new queens anyway. One hive (that will be queen-less) should be ok, as long as they accept the new top bee. The other hive with the old, possibly injured(?) queen will be, in about 2 days, like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. May the strongest queen win. Whatever happens happens - we’ll know next weekend.

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