Some days on the roof are about solving problems. Today wasn’t one of those days. Today was about checking the progress, making one smart upgrade, and having the discipline to leave well enough alone.
The First: new feeder, new comb
We started with The First, our split. The main job here was swapping out the plastic in-hive feeder for a hive top feeder. This might sound like a minor equipment change, but it matters more than you’d think. The plastic feeders that sit inside the hive work fine in warm weather, but they’re a liability heading into winter. They crack and break in the cold, and when a feeder breaks inside a hive in January, it can flood the colony with sugar water and kill the whole hive. A hive top feeder sits on top of the frames, outside the main hive body. It’s sturdier, easier to refill without disturbing the bees, and it doesn’t shatter when the temperature drops.
It’s June — winter is months away. But the time to make changes like this is now, when the colony is growing and can handle the disruption, not in November when they’re clustered and every opened lid costs them heat.
While we were in there, we checked on the queen and the overall productivity. She’s still laying well. But the thing that caught my eye was the foundation frames. The bees are drawing out new comb on bare foundation — building fresh wax comb from scratch. That takes real energy. A colony won’t invest in wax production unless it has the workforce and the food supply to support it. The fact that The First is choosing to build rather than just maintain tells you this hive has crossed over from surviving to growing. On day 75 it didn’t even have foragers leaving. Now it’s producing wax. That’s a colony that’s figured itself out.
The nuc: clean bill of health
The nuc got its regular inspection plus a mite test. This was the moment of truth — we treated this hive with chemical strips two weeks ago after finding a varroa problem. Today we tested to see if the treatment worked.
Zero mites.
Not a low count. Zero. Out of a full sample of bees, not a single mite. That’s about as clean a result as you can get, and it confirms we caught the problem early enough and treated effectively. The nuc is laying well, the colony is healthy, and the honey super we added last time is giving them room to work. Nothing else to do here today except close it up and let them keep going.
The OG: patience
The OG stays closed. No inspection, no opening the brood box, no pulling frames.
Here’s why. On day 75 we left two strong queen cells in this hive. By now, a queen has almost certainly hatched. But a virgin queen isn’t a laying queen — not yet. She needs to do orientation flights first, learning the area around the hive so she can find her way back. Then she needs to leave on her mating flights, find a drone congregation area, mate with multiple drones, and return. Only after all of that can she start laying fertilized eggs.
That whole process takes time, and the worst thing we could do right now is open the hive and interrupt it. A virgin queen is small, fast, and skittish — she can fly off a frame when you pull it out, and if she doesn’t make it back, the colony is done. Even if she stays put, the disruption can delay her mating flights by days.
So we leave it alone. It’s hard. The OG has been the hive I worry about the most since we split it — weak, defensive, queenless. But the right call is to let the process play out. We’ll go in on the next inspection and look for fresh eggs, which would confirm a mated queen is laying. Until then, we wait.
Where we stand
Three hives, three different stories, but all of them are pointed the right direction. The First is building comb and thriving. The nuc tested clean and is producing. The OG is in the hands of a queen we haven’t met yet.
The part of beekeeping nobody warns you about is how much of it is waiting. You do the work — inspect, treat, swap equipment, manage frames — and then you close the lid and walk away and trust the bees to handle the rest. Today was a good reminder that sometimes the most productive thing you can do is nothing.
More soon.