Thursday was an interesting morning for me. I was scheduled to work from 3 PM to 11 PM and was looking forward to spending some time cleaning and preparing our boat Take Five for the upcoming Venetian Boat Parade Party and Independence Day Celebration this weekend. Natalie and I spent Wednesday evening on the boat. I ended up heading home in the morning (a mile from Take Five’s location in the Sheboygan River) on my Vespa to pick up a few items I needed. As I walked into the backyard, I noticed that there was a small swarm forming on my sturgeon yard ornament I purchased years ago at a benefit auction in Door County.
I decided to place the swarm in a new hive body and also decided I needed to check my other two hives in case they were now missing their queens. To my disappointment, both of my hives were missing queens and would perish unless I was able to find two more queens to introduce and salvage the current hives. Luckily, I was able to call a local beekeeper that just happened to be working in one of his yards north of Race America in Elkhart Lake and he told me to head over and he would get me a couple of mated queens. I headed out there in my 1972 MGB Roadster as I had no other vehicle (other than my Vespa) to get out there. The gravel drive out to the large bee yard was a slight challenge in the MGB, but I was able to make it there without incident. I got the queens and headed back home to introduce them to the hives.
The queens come in a small cage that has a candy plug on the end that when placed in between the frames of the hive. The worker bees eat the plug over an extended period of one or two days and eventually release the queen into the hive. This period of time is necessary in order to ensure that the workers become accustomed to her presence and don’t see her as a “foreign threat”. If she were introduced immediately, they would almost certainly kill her. Over the next 48 hours, I will recheck the queens and make sure they are released so they can start doing what queens do.
