Second Chance & "Bee" Hives Updates July 2017

Second Chance Hive showing increase in population.

I have had people asking about my beehives, especially the Second Chance Hive, so here is the update.

When my beekeeping teacher came to bring the new queen for the Second Chance hive, we looked through it to double check for a queen. He said because of how dark the honeybees were – mostly black bodies, that they were probably Russian honeybees. These Russian bees were quite the workers!! The comb they drew out without a queen was amazing. The unfortunate part is that now this hive is an Italian cross honeybee hive, and they are not working as good. (The Russian bees died.) Oh, how I wished this hive had had a Russian queen still alive and producing brood. 

Young baby bees working to take care of the brood - lots of
capped brood here. What looks like holes are open cells
which have worker bee larva still being fed, and which will
be capped soon.

After re-queening the Second Chance Hive, it was getting so depleted in population, that I had to do something to help, or I was going to loose it. (In the summer, worker bees only live about 40 days, unless something causes their death sooner.) To help this hive, I did what I call - “a jump re-start.” I pulled two frames of brood from my other hive, which is my “Bee Hive” because of the bee decorations on the front. I put those frames into the Second Chance hive to help increase the population quicker.

Close up of capped and uncapped brood. You can see the
uncapped brood - little white larva in different stages of
development. Some cells have a very small white dot.

There was another problem that occurred – I lost the queen in the Bee Hive, but I realized she was gone fairly quickly before the population dropped. That hive was re-queened successfully; and there is a lot of capped brood once again. Still hoping I might get some honey this year from this hive. It would be the first time getting honey since I started in 2013.