From the Hive

We have a new queen -- and honey!

I was repeatedly warned not to expect any honey in the first year of beekeeping.  The bees have a LOT of work to do building out wax comb on all of the empty frames in the hive and their population starts at a mere 3,000 bees, a fraction of their eventual population of 80,000+ in late summer.  Add to that the mysterious disappearance of my queen in June – Was she crushed? Killed by the workers?  Did she swarm without anyone seeing?  -- which leaves the colony down 30,000+ workers since neither the missing queen nor the new, developing queen, were laying eggs for 2+ weeks.  

Despite all of that, the colony is thriving!  There are two honey supers (boxes meant just for honey production/storage) on the hive and the new queen is laying thousands of new eggs per day.  Last week we were able to extract four frames with 19 pounds of honey!  The bees will need 100 pounds of honey to survive the winter so we will leave them the rest of the honey frames for now.