Rough winter, but slowly gaining......

As I prepared for winter, I was quite excited for the upcoming spring. I had (what I thought to be) 8 strong hives, fed throughout fall, treated for mites, and buttoned up for the cold.

Big Hit to Ego

Nature however, had other plans for my girls. One by one, throughout the winter, all but one hive perished. All had plenty of food....but I believe I either had a heavier mite load that I anticipated or I kept feeding too late in the fall, introducing a great deal of moisture into the hives.

Spring left me with one EXTREMELY weak hive. Surprisingly, the girls held on until May. Then, the dumb old beekeeper got in the way.

The queen started laying, but kept to the upper box. Our weather was warming up, so I thought I'd place her and the majority of the bees into the lower box & add a queen excluder, to force her to lay in the bottom where there was plenty of drawn comb & extra honey.

Vermont didn't disappoint - and early May gave us one heck of a cold snap. My best guess is that the majority of the bees went back to the top box to keep the brood (baby bees) warm, abandoning their queen to freeze in the lower box.

When I returned, I found four emergency cells, two of which were each on separate frames. I split the hive using a Snelgrove/split screen board and hoped for the best.

I returned several weeks later to find both queens emerged, but only one seemed to "take" in the top colony. The bottom colony demonstrated all the signs of a laying worker - multiple eggs in several cells, crowded brood in the cells, and "bullet" cells where the ladies extended the cells in order to make room for the growing drones.

Now What?

There's a lot of advice on what to do with a laying worker, but the majority of consensus pointed to two things: Dump the laying worker colony or merge the laying worker colony with a queen-right colony. I couldn't decide....so I did both

By dumping the laying worker colony and forcing them to fly, my goal was to force their integration both into their old hive at the same time as combining the queen-right colony using the newspaper method.

I guess I'll know in two more weeks.......