A Little Boost

The vertical hive had less activity than I wanted to see on it. I added an empty deep on top, but that wasn't what it needed. It has a queen, but a small force of bees to cover brood. So she can only lay as many eggs as they can cover. This makes the build up very slow. To help her out, I went into the long blue hive on June 3, 2022 and removed a frame full of capped worker brood and its adhering bees. I placed that between two brood frames in the vertical. There were frames of brood, it is just a slow process. In the past when I had all vertical hives I would swap the new nuc and the mother hive in their locations. This gave the new nuc the boost of all the returning worker bees since they had to wait three weeks to have a laying queen. It is a lot harder to do that with the long hives, so I just borrowed a frame of brood, which when it all emerges will give them enough extra force to really take advantage of all the forage which is present now.

While I was in the vertical hive, I observed it is cram-packed with honey. There are at least ten or eleven full frames of honey already. I moved one to the back of the hive and put an empty frame in its place. I will build some more frames this week and do some more rearranging so we can have plenty of honey to harvest on our next field day on July 9, 2022.