The last time I checked in on our bees, they had started raising a bit of brood, but this time the nursery was much bigger.  Baby bees of all ages lined three frames, adding up to a total of two full frames of brood if you merged them all together.

I'm impatiently waiting until our hive has six frames of brood, which is the bare minimum needed to split a hive the easy way without hunting down the queen.  Although it took a month for the hive to build up from half a frame to two frames of brood, I suspect the colony might reach the splitting threshold in just a few weeks now that the wildflowers, fruit trees, and garden weeds are all in full bloom.  Nectar flows usually tempt queens to lay faster, and we're in the midst of one heck of a nectar (and pollen) flow.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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