People assume keeping bees means doing the same thing to every hive on the same day. It almost never works out that way. By Day 75 we were running three colonies, and walking the roof that morning it was clear each one was going to ask us for something completely different.
Here’s the lay of the land, because it matters for the rest of this. We have three hives going right now, and they didn’t all get here the same way. There’s the OG hive — our original package, the one we started with. Earlier in the season we split it to create a second colony we call The First, since it’s the first hive we made ourselves rather than bought. And then there’s the nuc, a small starter colony we brought in from a bee farm. So it’s two stories really: one hive we grew by dividing what we already had, and one we bought in. Three hives, three sets of needs.
The First: a young colony finding its feet
We started with the split, The First, because a new colony is the one most likely to surprise you. The good news came fast — we found fresh eggs, which means the queen is laying and the split took. That’s the moment you exhale a little. A split can fail quietly, and you don’t always know until you open it up.
What was strange, at first, was how still it was. The bees were calm to the point of barely moving, and nobody was leaving the hive. No traffic in and out. For a second that’s unnerving — you want to see bees coming and going. But it made sense once we thought it through: a fresh split doesn’t have foragers yet. The older bees that would normally be out collecting pollen hadn’t aged into that job in this colony. Sure enough, within a few days we started seeing bees heading out for pollen for the first time.
To carry them through that gap, we put a feeder on with sugar water. Without foragers bringing food in, a young colony can stall, and the sugar water keeps them fed while they build up the workforce to feed themselves. It’s a temporary crutch, not a long-term plan, but it’s exactly what a new split needs.
The nuc: no super yet, but a mite problem
Next we checked the nuc. The main question was whether it needed a super — that’s the extra box you add to give the colony more room, both for the queen to lay and for the bees to store honey. You add it when they’re running out of space. They weren’t there yet, so the super stays off for now. Adding room a colony isn’t ready to fill just gives them more space to defend and heat for no reason.
The less welcome news was mites. When we looked closely, the nuc had a varroa problem, so we treated it with chemical strips that go between the frames and knock the mite population down over the following weeks. Varroa is the thing that quietly ends colonies if you ignore it, so catching it on a small hive before it explodes is about the best outcome you can ask for.
The OG hive: weak, defensive, and raising a new queen
We saved the OG for last, and it was the hardest of the three. This is the hive we split from, and splitting takes a lot out of a colony — it’s down in numbers and in a genuinely weak state right now. You could feel it the moment we opened it. Where The First was calm, the OG was defensive and agitated. That’s not a bad sign though. A weak colony knows it’s vulnerable, so it protects itself harder. The temperament was the hive telling us it’s aware of its own situation.
The real job here was the queen cells. The OG is working on raising a new queen, and when a colony does that it often builds more queen cells than it needs, of varying quality. Our job was to go through and cull the weak ones so the hive puts its energy into the best candidates. We removed several lower-quality cells and left two strong ones. Neither is capped yet, so we’re not out of the woods — but two good cells is exactly what you want to see.
The one thing that genuinely reassured me about the OG: we ran a mite test on it, and it came back 2 mites out of 300 bees. That’s a clean result, well under any treatment threshold. For a hive that’s already weak, the last thing you’d want is a mite load stacked on top of it. So the OG has problems, but mites aren’t one of them.
Where that leaves us
By the end of the day all three hives were in a reasonable spot, which on a three-hive day is about as much as you can ask for. The First is laying and starting to forage. The nuc is being treated and holding steady. The OG is weak but defended, clean on mites, and raising its next queen.
None of them needed the same thing. That’s the part nobody tells you when you start — that “checking on the bees” is really three or four separate problems wearing the same beekeeping suit. But we walked off the roof that day feeling good. Everybody’s alive, everybody’s got a plan, and the queens are doing their work.
More soon.