The lovely Ms. Smith and I went to the horse races at Eureka Downs, Sunday. We met her parents there and enjoyed a lovely afternoon of horse racing, square dancing futile gambling. Her parents used to raise and race horses. While we were there her dad tried to showed me how to read a racing form and how to bet. He might as well have been trying to teach me french.

No money was made, but the weather was excellent and the races were very exciting.

My “recent” experiences with swarming bees left me with some interesting pictures involving the process. After the second swarm, I cracked open the original hive to see if I could make room in the brood chamber. This would, hopefully, reduce the swarming urge in the hive.

I moved some frames of brood around and put empty frames between some of the full frames and then buttoned it back up. While I was in there, I noticed several (6 – 7) queen cells on various frames.

Most were already open and empty. Several, however, were still sealed. I probably should have destroyed the sealed ones, but I was afraid that the hive was waiting on one of the queens to emerge and take over. I was afraid that I would make the hive queen-less if I did.

Like a great man (or woman) once said, “it’s better to be lucky than good”. All three hives are rolling right along. I think I’m even going to steal a little honey from my big hive. It has a full deep of honey that’s so heavy I could hardly move it during the last hive inspection.

Well, it’s been almost two months since my last post. I’ve been busy, but haven’t we all.

When last we spoke, my hive had swarmed – twice. I was pretty upset, because I knew that this would effectively dash my hopes of harvesting any significant amount of honey this year. I was also worried that I had not gotten the queens into the boxes when I recovered the swarms. I checked at one and two week intervals, and found no new eggs or larvae.

I was seriously considering buying a couple of queens and trying to save them, or recombine them into the original hive. None of these alternatives really appealed to me.

Finally, about two weeks ago, while doing a routine check of the hives, I found that both new hives had babies. Not just babies. They had lots of babies. They were flourishing. Even the original hive, the one who’s brood chamber I had to reorganize, was going gangbusters. The picture below is a frame of brood from the original hive. Life is good.