The apiary is doing very well! 11 hives and one baby hive called a "nuke". Here are some pictures of Chris heading out to turn the nuke into a full grown hive. You can see the smaller hive in the next picture marked with a red x.
He will take all of the frames out of this little hive and move them into a regular size hive, called a super because they are totally out of room in there. Next, he puts some empty frames in, and also borrows some frames -and bees- from the neighboring hive with comb that has already been drawn out so that the queen can immediately begin to lay eggs instead of waiting for the workers to make more cells for her.
Here he is making sure that he doesn't accidentally remove the queen from the neighbor hive while "borrowing" bees to fill the new super.
Here she is (I think) at the end of the hive tool you see in the next picture. ( I was zooming in from quite a distance and trying to keep it in focus - see reference to "bad bee experience" in above mentioned post!)
She will stay put in the neighbor hive and continue to do very well. That hive is doing so well, in fact, Chris found two queen cells which means that some of the bees were getting ready to flee with a new queen in search of more room. He took those new queen cells with a few bees and refilled the now vacated nuke. This nuke will make lucky number 13 for the Grand Blanc Apiary! This process will start all over again - hopefully- in a couple of weeks or sooner depending on when the new queen hatches.
Here is the now grown hive all covered up (badly in need of a paint job too) . From now on, as the hive grows, he will just put another empty super on top .
The good news is we've got bees! The bad news is they are growing so fast that I'm not sure Chris has time to keep up with their space requirements. When bees run out of room, they swarm. Not good. I've got a feeling that my role in the apiary may soon become more than photographer/blogger. Stay tuned.....
