The two apricot trees I planted in the yard last fall burst into bloom this past weekend, which pleased our bees. We successfully overwintered one hive and added four more about 10 days ago.

When colonies of honeybees come through the winter strong (and if you’ve been reading about problems such as Colony Collapse Disorder, you know some colonies didn’t make it at all), beekeepers can divide them — a sort of buy one, get one free deal with nature.

Normally, such a hive would have enough workers and brood (eggs and unhatched bees) to split in May. But when we pried the cover off our hive on Saturday, I knew we needed to take some action sooner that that. Talk about wall to wall bees! There was abundant honey, pollen and brood, but not much room for the queen to lay eggs.

Preparing bees for their new home

What to do? We called on Mike Mackiewicz, an experienced beekeeper in Scandia, near where we live, and asked his advice. He came over within an hour and we went through the hive together. As beginning beekeepers, it was great to get his observations and help. He pointed out a large number of drones (those are the dudes of the hive, who get to spend the summer hanging out and watching beeTV while the gals do all the work — at least they do until their mating services are needed). And then we saw a queen cell that looked like a small circus peanut. Then another. This hive was thinking seriously about “growing” a second queen so it could swarm –divide itself — and, soon.

The queen bee in her cage

We did some rearranging of boxes and frames to give the queen some room to lay, and slow down their urge to swarm. We’ll get a new queen and split the hive this coming weekend if they haven’t already done the deed themselves. It’s wonderful they are healthy and happy. But the experience was a good reminder that bees don’t read beekeeping calendars or how-to books. They know what they are doing. Now I just need to catch up.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 9:52 am and is filed under Bees. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.