Honey processing, top feeder, queen cage, nucs

On Saturday Jenn processed the honey harvested the previous weekend. She used a bucket with a filter screen and closable nozzle to filter out debris from the honey, and portion it into cute little hexagonal jars:

She then labeled the jars:

And stored them in plastic containers:

Yesterday we did a quick inspection of the hives. Firstly I added 2:1 sugar syrup to the top feeder on the new hot pink hive:

Here’s a close up of the feeder; if you look closely, you can see cute little tongues on some of the bees:

We then removed the queen cages from the requeened hives. Here you can see a cage after the frames were moved apart:

Jenn lifted the frame so I could grab the cage:

Here’s a queen cage after removing it, with a few bees still inside. The candy has been eaten, and the queen has exited:

We inspected a frame from each of the requeened hives, but didn’t immediately see the queens, and didn’t look further, not wanting to disturb the hives too much at this stage. We didn’t see anything untoward like queen cups, though, so we think they are doing fine. We’ll check again next time to try to find them:

The two nuc boxes with the old queens are still surviving:

We haven’t decided what to do with these yet; we could just leave them as-is, putting the cardboard boxes in the hoop house or other shelter, perhaps supplementing with some frames of honey, and see if they survive the winter. Or we could merge the two boxes into one, by buying wooden nuc boxes. Or we could merge them into the hot pink hive, to bolster that. We’ll continue to consider options.