Status Report

THE HONEYFLOW IS OVER!

Captured Hive:

The population continues to decline but, I transfered some brood and bees to help. Not much has really changed since the last time I looked.

Italian Hive:

The queen has massively decreased egg production and the number of bees appears to have fallen. There is vertually no brood in the intended brood chamber and she's laying in the supers. I've done all I can to try and get here to go back down and, if she's not down by next week I'll have to just run all the bees down with some Bee Quick®. I was able to test for varroa and, the hive is crawling with them. I'm gonna try to get my hands on some ApiGuard given the honeyflow is pretty much over and I'll probably harvest soon.

Russian Hive:

This is currently my most populous hive. The bees are litterally boiling out and two supers are just about filled with brood. They clearly want to swarm given I removed probably 30 queen cups and 3 queen cells. Given the eggs hatched in some cups to create queen cells, also refered to as "peanuts" given they resemble them in shape, I now have to move from swarm prevention to swarm control. In swarm prevention, the only steps are to clip queen cups and add supers. In swarm controll I have to take much more extensive actions. I have to lessen the size of the brood nest and even possibly split the hive. On the plus side, that may mean that I'll get a cheap source of bees for my Kenyan Top Bar Hive. The bees were also oddly aggressive. A sure sign that the older ones are "hanging around" waiting for a swarm to commense. I will probably have to split them next week or lose them in a swarm. That's beekeeping for you...constant new challenges.