But the cherry blossoms are the star, it's just spectacular how beautiful these blooms were at the park. It just took my breath away, wow.
I take a walk through the park near us almost everyday, and it always have some surprises. Today I spotted these pretty bleeding hearts. I love this plant. The foilage is a little boring, but then it has these incredible flowers. Just stunning. Spring is quite easily my favorite season. I just wish the blooms lasted longer!
I did a hive inspection of the overwintered hive and the Queen is laying really well. Perfect brood pattern. My only concern was that on the left there looks to be two supercedure cells forming. I didn't remove them and let the bees do what they do. If they decide to replace the overwinter Queen, I will let them be, to see what they do. They know more about the health of their Queen than I do.
Here is a closer view of the brood. You can see that there is larvae in those Queen supercedure cups.
I moved the brood box to the bottom and put two more boxes above it to allow the Queen to go up and have plenty of room to lay eggs. I really love how the blooming tree looks next to the beehive.
Here is a video of our other beehive in slow motion. I could watch this for hours.
The bees were building a lot of burr comb, so I removed all of it. I'm so happy the hives are doing well! I'm still feeding the bees sugar water because we are still waiting for the neighborhood to start blooming. Look forward to the next inspection!
Then I went over to my hives to install a new package since one of our hives did not survive. My friend Amy picked up the bee packages from Beehive Barn in Cranbury, NJ. This year, I decided to do the gentle install of the bee package instead of pouring the bees out of the box.
To do this, you remove the Queen box and put it in between two beehive frames. Then you leave the open bee package box next to the frames in the deep. The bees will come out of the box to find the Queen. This is a more gentle way of getting the bees out instead of pouring them out of the box. Here is the Queen at the top of the Queen box.
Here is the hive all installed! In 3 days time, I come back to check that the Queen bee is released from the Queen box by her attendants. They will eat the sugar plug to let her out. We named this Queen George Lee. Long live the Queen!
I unwrapped the hives only to find frame after frame of dead bees. The whole hive of frames had mold. And on this frame you can see all the bees clustered together trying to stay warm. Moisture and mold killed these bees. I feel so sad. All these frames along with the honey went into the garbage. I don't want to reuse frames that have mold on them. It might be diseased as well and I don't want our new bees getting sick from it.
We decided that we were going to purchase a new package of bees to install into this hive. Then I went to our other beehive location. I saw bees flying around and already knew that this was a good sign. One of the two hives in this location had survived the winter! What a relief!!
I was smiling, grinning actually from ear to ear. This makes me sooooo happy! We had a really harsh winter with lots of cold days and snow. So to know that this hive survived is pretty amazing! Here is another video of a closeup of the hive.
I moved the hive back to it's original location and removed all the tar paper wrapping. So happy to see the bees flying around!
