I’ve been surprised to continually see activity in two of my bee hives.  I had abandoned my bees for the summer and expected them to disappear since none of the hives had queens.  I had an opportunity with the sunny weather we’ve been having to suit up and check things out.  First I setup my top bar beehive even though it’s much to late to get bees in there.  Maybe next year I’ll be able to produce a queen or catch a swarm.

When I discovered I no longer had queens in my hives I started the process of trying to rebuild a colony.  Since the weather was so bad for bees and the beekeeper we know could not spare any queens we tried to setup a hive to make our own.  We learned that you can reduce a regular super down to four frames to make a nuke.  This way once the queen is established you can just add more frames and another super instead of trying to transfer everything over to where you want it.  We also learned that a worker bee can lay an egg to produce a queen bee.  Unfortunately I got caught with bad weather and then no time to finish what we had started.  I put a queen cap into the four frame nuke and closed it up but never got a chance to see if there was fresh larvae and try to do the grafting.  That was a month ago.  As it appears now the bees made their own queen and populated the nuke.  I didn’t find the queen but there are more bees there now then when I setup the nukes.  I opened up the super, added the rest of the frames and closed it up.  Hopefully I’ll be have a couple of hives to winter.