So we made it. Spring has arrived and the hives are starting to kick into gear collecting pollen and nectar, getting ready to make more bees for the Summer. All and all I made it through with the 5 hives but have a bit of a queen issue in at least one of them. The odd things is even when I put in eggs they won't raise a new queen and I can't find the current queen. I have put eggs and larva in the hive twice and they haven't produced a single queen cell. So there has to be a queen in the hive but I can't seem to find her.
One of the hives I visited swarmed and left about 20 cells throughout the hive, unfortunately this year I am running short on equipment with the amount of splits that I am trying to make so I wasn't quite as prepared to take advantage of leveraging all of the cells. I did manage to make at least two boxes, so now it is a waiting game now to see how if the queens hatch and make it back mated.
I also was able to make at least three other splits so I am just around 10 hives now and have been working on getting a few new boxes and more frames so I can make more bees. The goal this year is to get between 10 and 12 colonies total going into the Winter. I am picking up two new Varroa Sensitive Hygene bees from a local supplier to add this strain of genetics into my bees. Being able to get more hygenic bees in my apiary is one of my overall goals. Currently I do think I may have some bees that have this trait, but without being really able to test this out I would rather ensure that I am bringing this into the genetic pool of my apiary.
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