A Tale of Two Beehives

Back in August, our bees swarmed and broke themselves into a new hive. I caught the swarm and Kirk built a new top bar hive to house them. Since then, we’ve had two side-by-side hives. 

We helped the new hive get started by feeding them some simple syrup so they’d have extra energy to build all the new honey comb they need. I’m not sure they needed our help, though. They built comb super-fast, and they now have 11 or 12 bars completely drawn in the space of just five weeks.

It’s pretty clear that when the original hive swarmed, they sent out their best and brightest: all workers, and lots of them. We were worried about the new group having enough time to get their house in order for the winter, but they’re doing really well:


This is just one of many combs that is heavily laden with honey. Capped honey (the white part at the top) is ready to go for their winter reserves. The center (where most of the bees are) is full of nectar that is ripening and should be capped soon. The bottom part is capped brood, from which new worker bees should hatch soon.

And most of their comb looks just like this, which is awesome.

On the other hand, the old hive is limping along:


This bar is upside down, but you can see that it’s totally empty. And there are quite a few that look just like this in the old hive. That house is full of drones who are good for nothing but eating, and they have literally zero food stored for the winter. I think the bees ate most of the honey and nectar before swarming — they do that to stockpile energy while they find a new home — but it’s like the ones who stayed behind aren’t even trying to put up food for the winter. (Ok, maybe a little bit of pollen and nectar, but it’s definitely not going to be enough — they look like they’re eating it all as fast as it comes in.) They do have an active queen (I think they raised a new one) and some worker brood, but they’ll almost certainly starve to death in the winter, if they even make it that long. 

So if we’re lucky, we’ll break even and have one hive — just in a different location. Fingers crossed the strong new one can get through the winter, and maybe next year we can harvest some honey again!

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