June Status
Checking the Hives and Feeding
For most of the month of June the bees just built up the population towards the middle of month one
hive could put away a half gallon of sugar syrup in less than 24hrs. This was amazing. The pictures
for June come from the earlier part of the month and show only two medium hive bodies on the hive. By
the end of the month the bees had moved into three medium hive bodies.
Checking in on the Bees
Alright one of the first things to being a good beekeeper is to be able to tell if you have a
queen in your hive or not. If you don't things are in trouble and you better get one fast. There
are two main ways to find evidence of the queen; either find the queen yourself (see likes to run and
hide), or to find eggs that she recently laid. Kendra is the queen spotting pro in this house. She
can look for one bee while I am trying to avoid getting stung by the other 80,000. She found the
queen early in June and that resulted in this picture below. Can you spot the queen? In addition
notice the white capped cells in the upper right corner that is where the bees have capped sugar
syrup (no honey yet). The light brown capped cells in the lower left of the picture is capped brood.
These are future bees that have spun a cocoon and been capped by their sisters until they emerge in
about a week.
