inspecting my 9 weakest hives

 today............ 29/08/2022

this morning, I checked out my weakest hives - all currently on a pallet on a small box trailer at my in-laws farm. the trailer cause no lifting just hooking up trailer to vehicle and shifting to take advantage of nectar flows at a moments notice (see trailer image attached)

9 hives in total

Two hives have been here for about five-seven weeks and are doing much better now having access to the many flowering trees around and on my in-laws farm near the Adelaide river

The other seven hives have only been here a week and due to the sparsity of anything looking like a flower at my rural block and thus being only fed on banana pulp and sugar syrup I have supplied, all hives were drastically needing a nectar flow to strengthen the hive towards my goal of double brood boxing each of them with the intent to split before the top end wet season takes over

I looked at the weakest of the weak to start with – as if they needed a frame of brood from the other hives these would be the ones that would. And thus, when checking the stronger hives if plenty of brood frames, grab one and place in the weaker hive.

For a while thought no queen in the first hive box – but found a young queen and a small patch of brood. Hopefully, she gets on with it now amongst a few varieties of flowering natives and introduced species of plants about and around the farm

I found the queen in every box - Woohoo!

Two queens seemed to not be laying much, despite the drawn out comb available – will check on them is a few weeks as they might be non-laying queens and will need to be replaced.

A few of the queens were not marked and I marked them when found with last year's colour as not sure when they were born (must keep better records and mark queens from splits - ASAP) - maybe you can spot the fresh white dot queen in the attached image.

I did take a couple of “ideal” sized frames of capped honey – as wife hasn’t tasted our bees honey in a while now as I have feeding sugar syrup. The stronger of the hives at the farm have filled several ideals sized frames in just a few weeks that they have been at the farm with fresh golden honey (as compared to the almost clear honey made from the sugar syrup – which I leave in the hive for food stores). these "ideal" frames being drawn out from scratch and mostly filled and capped in such a short time really indicates the flow happening around the farm.

I am fairly confident that all these hives will be quite strong after 4-5 weeks at the farm (and if trees keep flowering!)

here's one of the nearly marked queens - can you spot her?

Here is the trailer I mentioned - put some cardboard in bottom of box trialer so it doesnt reflect as much heat into the hives.