Beginning at 7:30am it was a non- stop day! Ed headed off to the local welding shop to pick up Liquid Nitrogen while Mary began looking for the FedEx truck which was carrying our Sue Cobey New World Carniolan breeder queen. Then Kyle arrived and then Dave arrived. The queen was safely delivered and everyone headed to the breeding yard to begin the day’s work. Kyle fed the bees while Dave and Mary began the Hygienic testing. A number of splits were made. Ed made deliveries to FedEx and to a number of local customers and also handled numerous calls covering wedding favor, honey, queen and Nuc requests. We had our second swarm of the season earlier in the week and would you believe they are still hanging in a maple tree 50 feet above our breeding yard – watching all of our activities. We did put an empty brood super at the foot of the tree and today Mary found a solitary queen in the empty hive – there were no other bees in it. So Mary went ahead a created another split with this queen. Tomorrow we will review the hives that were Hygienic tested and add their results to our selection database that we developed in FileMaker Pro version 11. We ended the day after we left a message for a fellow beekeeper, who has a tree service business, to see if he can come by with his Cherry Picker truck – maybe we can try to capture the swarm in our breeding yard, tomorrow.
