Second Year Challenges and Success
No real tips or tricks here but it was the closest appropriate flair. Just sharing that persistence and learning work. I'm in my second full year with bees (well third, I tried 45 years ago when I was a boy), and after a successful first year and overwintering I decided to add a second hive this spring. For reference I'm located in SE PA west of Philly. The photo is my small bee yard located in a native plant meadow area we planted on our property to eliminate a small sea of grass.
I shared here how I ran into some troubles along the way--or just the usual bee stuff, but challenging in the first year. My overwintering hive struggled while my nuc from GA really took off gangbusters. The old queen in my overwintered hive was not laying well and the hive numbers were low, so I took a gamble and replaced her. Well, they killed the new queen. Meanwhile the nuc was crowded and I discovered swarm cells, so I split them to try and prevent a swarm. Less than two weeks later I learned I failed to give the nuc enough room in time and they swarmed. I am convinced I missed a first swarm while I was away for a weekend, as the swarm I caught about ten days later clearly had a virgin queen (it was a cast swarm). The nuc now was queenless, but there were about half a dozen supercedure cells still left so I left three in that hive and moved the other frame with queen cups to the hive that killed their purchased queen.
This left me about six weeks ago with four hives, only one of which had a queen, two with sealed queen cups, and the split which I bought a queen for. So three hives all needing new queens and virgin queen from my swarm. My options were limited so I had to just trust that the queens would mate and start laying. I left them all alone for two weeks to give the queens time to hatch and mate and start laying. Two weeks ago I checked and the virgin swarmed queen was laying and so was the split with the purchased queen--there was plenty of visible larvae and lots of cells with shining jelly at the bottom. The other two had signs of laying with tiny bits of white royal jelly in a lot of cells--without my reading glasses I couldn't see any eggs!
Today I checked and all of the hives are doing great. The nuc is built back up and storing away honey in the frames I extracted a few weeks ago. The re-queened hive from last year is going gangbusters and also putting away honey. The split with the purchased queen has good numbers finally and is pulling out most of the frames in their deep, so I added a second one for growth room and to help with this heat wave. Finally the cast swarm has really taken off, she seems to be a great queen. They've pulled all of the lower deep frames and laid up some honey and in the second deep about three quarters of the frames have been started to be pulled with lots of honey and some brood in the lower parts of a few middle frames.
The moral of the story is...just keep at it! Manage the bees the best you can and then trust them to do what's best and raise new queens. Obviously I had to step in to limit the number of queen cells, and swapping them between hives helped me get more queen-right hives. Right now I'm at where I wanted to be next year, with four hives all of which are doing well. I am now thinking I might add two more next spring!
