April Update

We have been busy since the bees got back from California about a month ago. The bees have been feed pollen patties and also corn syrup to get them to grow faster. We are trying to up our bee population so that we can fill all of our nucs, 1/2 size hives, to up our number of working hives. Right now we have about 40 regular size hives and 20+ nucs. We were able to get 2 nucs out of each regular hive, or about that. We still have a few hives to split, but most are done. Here is a photo of Addie helping Bryant make pollen patties for the bees.
We also got 12 new queens in the mail this week. 10 of them are regular queens and 2 of them are artificially inseminated queens used for breeding more queens. We have also been grafting queens of our own. We did one graft right before the bees got back from California, but the weather wasn't quite warm enough yet and so not many of that graft took. We just did another graft this weekend of about 27 and we will have to wait and see how many of those take. Bryant is getting another hive ready to graft from and we will probably be doing more grafts this week.