Hive Two - Second Inspection and some plans

Hive two now consists of 2 full depth, one .75 and a queen excluder. Its too big for my small yard now and I now have two young boys running around in the garden so the chances of bees getting squashed by them is increasing. They don't like being stung either...

I still want to try my hand at breeding a quantity of queens but I plan to use the top bar hive for that. The top bar hive still isn't populated. I did have it populated but they died out over winter. More on this in a later post...

There is a community garden just a few blocks away from where I live. They sound keen to have a hive there so I plan to move hive two onto their land. Because it is so close normally I'd have to move the bees twice. Once to a temporary location more than 5km away and then move them to their final location a few weeks later. This is because the bees are extremely good at navigating but forget to check where home is when they leave so if I move the hive a short distance the bees will take off in the morning, recognise the area they are in and so return to the old site.

To overcome this I plan to do the following

1. Breed a new queen in hive two
2. When the queen is almost ready to hatch move the current queen and some workers into the Top Bar Hive. If I do a graft today they should be almost capped next weekend (7.5 days) so next Sunday might be the time to make the move. Taking that into account, I won't do the graft today.
3. At the same time move Hive two aside and place the Top Bar Hive in its place
4. Move Hive two to its new location, about 1km away.

This should mean that any of Hive two's field bees that return to the old location will find their way into the Top Bar Hive, boosting its population. Any new field bees, heading out on their first flight, will orientate themselves based on the new location and return there.

In preparation for this I have located Hive two's queen and isolated her to the bottom box. I've also placed my queen rearing frame into the hive so that the bees can prepare it for a graft.

The hive is brimming with bees, every frame was reasonably well covered in bees, right out to the side walls. I weighed the top box (the .75) as I thought it would be interesting to see how quickly its weight increases. It is currently 16kg. This includes all the bees in the box at the time, 9 frames, a couple of frames of almost capped nectar and the remainder brood.

I've yet to see any significant varroa activity this season. I inserted a drone frame during the last inpection and it is almost all drawn out now. There was some brood in it but its not capped yet. Drone take about 14 days from capping to emerge so I want to remove the frame some time in the next two weeks. I spotted one worker with a mite on its back but otherwise all seems good. I still have put a sticky board in the mesh to see what the mite drop is, I really should get on to that.