I opened up the hives last weekend, as I wanted to see how the bees were getting on with building comb, and also wanted to check if I had queens - and if they were laying. Yes, and yes! - here's the queen of hive #1 (the mystery swarm):
And this is the queen of hive #2 (the swarm I collected):
Interestingly, the queens (and their bees) are quite different. Queen #1 is a mid-amber colour with very thin dark bands, and so are her bees. I would guess from their coloration that they are descended from Italian honey bees (Apis mellifera ligustica). Queen #2 is a little darker, with wider black bands, and her bees are much darker with very wide black bands. They are Apis mellifera mellifera, the north European honey bee. I wonder if I will see distinctly different behaviour from the two colonies?
As for comb building, this is what they'd done with the small piece of comb that I wired into a frame the previous week:
Both colonies had drawn 5 frames of wax (i.e. half the brood box). Here's hive #2 with one (drawn) frame removed, so you can see their progress:
All looking good so far, so the next task will be to mark the queens. Regular readers will know that I name my queens when I mark them, so I will have to decide on new names. My previous bloodline (all descended from my first queen, Rosalind) were all named after scientists and engineers. This time, I might look at a different discipline - or possibly two separate naming schemes, one for each bloodline. That will probably be a task for this weekend.
