SOOOOOOO friends,
I checked the hives today...( all 8 frame )
The 2 packages that I installed on April 12 are going like gangbusters ( I think anyway ). This is what I saw:
Bottom Brood (medium )...full of brood and honey
2nd Brood ( medium ) lots of brood and honey
3rd Brood (medium ) still has a way to go...looks like a few capped drones up there...some drawing out
BTW, small cell foundation and starter strip was used on these...
This are Russian/Yugo. These bees are not as dark as I though they would be...there is golden in that woodshed...
The original hive that started me off on my beek adventure, has been through some transition. I do think it did swarm on me ( lessoned learned ). After time it was doing poorly and I noticed no queen...the swarm colony that started to tank looked iffy too, so I did a combine and kept my fingers crossed.
With the addition of the swarm colony, I ended up with 3 deeps, which I took down to 2 deeps around 2 weeks ago...I noticed capped brood in the swarm colony deep, which I placed on the bottom, I then placed the remainder of the bees atop the brood box...I had some mega bee so I gave them some...
They have eaten the mega bee ALL up...their numbers have increased and the drone population is way down...they have a lot of honey and are building up nicely.
Question 1:
The package bees keep all their honey this year, is that correct? So as they fill each super, I should just keep adding HS for them to use for Winter?
Question 2:
Should I treat the original hive as a package, since they had the afore mentioned transitions?
Question 3:
Does the color of the bees always indicate it's ancestry?
Many Thanks
Sharon