Expensive Delays...

I'm behind about 4 posts, so I'm playing catch up. I've dated the posts based on the day I did the activity, not the day I am writing the post (yay Blogger!).

I have been talking for the last couple of years that I wanted to breed some queens. I wanted to increase my hives and maybe over-winter a nuc or two.

Well, like past years, the time has slipped away and now it's too late to start the process. Since I still want to overwinter my nucs, that leaves me to purchasing some queens. I called up my fellow WCBA member George O'Neil and sure enough, he had a couple of queens I could buy. So I took some of my honey money and bought two queens.

So here's my plan:

• Take the queen in the Green Hive (last year's queen) and move her to a nuc
• Put one of the new queens in the Green Hive
• Take some frames from the Green Hive and make another nuc, and put the second queen in.

The idea is that I would have a good queen in the large green hive, and one in a nuc. The other nuc was last year's queen.

So on Friday I made the two nucs, moving the Green Hive queen into one of them (leaving the Green Hive queenless).

Then on Saturday when I picked up the new queens, I put them in their respective hives. Here's the Green Hive - look how the bees are all over the queen cage. They are excited to have a queen again!

Here is the bee yard now.