This is it – our last attempt with bees. We’ve done a lot of work to make sure we are sucessful this year. We won’t purchase more next year – so hopefully we can get more than a 50% survival rate.

We bought our packages this year from Starr Farms out of Creswell Oregon. This is where we obtained our emergency replacement queen last year and she is doing fantastic! The overwintered hives are both heavy with bees and we are taking some steps to mitigate the risk of swarming, but bees will do as bees will do. The replaced Russian Queen in particular has a very strong brood and a few open queen cells.

We are making sure she has extra room. If we had been able to find her we might have done a split (when you remove some of the bees and brood and move them to another hive to establish their own colony.

I had made a bit of room by removing a couple of frames for pollen patties (bee bread) and over three days the drew down some fanstic comb. We pulled this off and put in the frames again to encourage them to fill out frames correctly.

As for the new bees – these are Carniolan Bees, a Germanic breed that we had used once before. They were very docile and we had perfect weather for the install, cool with no wind or rain. The installation went well, into the newly minted “orange” and “blue” hives.

The queens were caged for three days and on inspection had managed to be sprung by the others after they chewed through the sugar plugs. Both hives are happy and healthy, doing some housecleaning and setting up shop.

We were able to find one of the new queens (blue hive) and could see eggs and some just barely forming larva in both new hives. We are off to a good start.