Wednesday July 04
The Spin-Off was the first hive I actually got to take care of. I smoked them and took the frames out to see how they were doing. They look good, have brood and although we didn't spot the queen she seems to be laying. We took the frame feeder out to put into The Great Divide. Since we only have one frame feeder we decided we would move it around to the newest hive just to get them going with sugar syrup.
It's believed that it is best to feed them as much as possible when they are starting out so that they gain strength and pull comb. We've given the two top feeders to Thing One and Thing Two with 4ltrs of sugar syrup in each so that we can ensure they receive the same treatment (it is better for comparison to treat the similar hives almost identically). When we got our first two hives (The Boss and The Revolutionaries) they were so different in size that it was hard to compare. But Thing One and Thing Two (although disappointingly small compared to B and R) were very similar in size. We should be able to compare them fairly well. The other three (Shubie Swarm, Spin-Off, and Great Divide) are all 'stand alone' hives and although we can observe them we cannot use them for direct comparison.
June 2012
The Boss was getting too big to move and we decided that we should split it in half since they were doing well and were a strong hive. We took the queen from The Boss and put it into The Spin-Off. There was a lot of back and forth before deciding where to leave the original queen, but this was the decision we ended up making. Luckily The Boss quickly realized they were queen-less and started making queen cups.
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