Saturday, August 13, 2011

Setbacks and Success at the PG County CC Hive

To refresh our collective memory we have two hives here at the community college that were part of the April install of our Russian shipment.  They seemed to struggle from the beginning (much like the hives we have at Bread For the City) and we requeened, traded frames, rebalanced, all for naught. 

When I installed a brand new nuc in the right hive, two weeks ago, the left hive was still showing reasonable signs of life.  But on today's visit there was no ambiguity, all lost.  So on the left hive I need to install a new nuc pronto...perhaps next week and with the swarm we captured.

The right hive, however, is looking great.
 Those are some pollen patties on top that I left for them when I installed the nuc.  but you can see how active the hive is on either side of them.  And they had taken about a gallon+ of syrup in the couple of weeks since they were installed.

So note to self, nucs are the most dependable way to go to start a new and robust hive so screw spending money on requeening unless that queen is going into a nuc for development of a new hive.

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