In my last post - back at the beginning of July - I found hive #2 empty, and burned the frames. I left the hive empty for a while, and waited for the new queen in the blue nuc to emerge, mate and start laying. She hatched out of her wax queen cell during the first week of July, and by the third week she was laying. At the end of July I moved the colony from the nucleus into hive #2. They slowly built up numbers (and comb) through August, though they hadn't collected anything in terms of honey.
Back in Hive #1, Laura's bees have filled two supers (of 10 frames each) and left another half-filled. One of the full supers is theirs - they'll need the honey to get through winter. The second, I will extract. The last time I checked, the honey was still a little runny, so I'm leaving it for a bit longer while the bees evaporate off the water and get the honey to the correct constituency (18% water, 82% sugar).
I decided to move the half-filled super to hive #2, to get them started on their winter stores. I've also been feeding them - at the beginning of September, I bought 24 x 1kg bags of sugar. They've gone through 14kg already! But at least the super is feeling a lot fuller. Also, they are starting to deposit honey (or, to be strictly accurate, sugar syrup) into the brood frames, as you can see from this photo:
The other thing I've noticed is that hive #1 has a really large amount of bees, while hive #2 (having changed queens late in the season) has been struggling to build up numbers. So I've been donating frames of capped larvae from Laura's hive to #2, to try to even the numbers up. The number of bees in #2 has certainly increased over the last three weeks, so it seems to be working.
Coming up in the next post - the long-overdue naming of the queen in #2...!
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