This year has been a little light on blog posts but that is mostly because things have been going so well.  Two days ago I addressed the only issue I have really had to face so far this year and that was with Boatmurdered.  Queen Freyja appears to have left with a swarm that I unfortunatly did not witness or catch.  The hive failed to make a new queen or she was eaten on a mating flight, so after giving them 2 frames of open brood and eggs to prevent a laying worker situation I decided to order a new queen.  Queens have been scarce locally, so I decided to order one online from a queen breeder in Florida who works with hygenic northern stock.  A couple of other people in the Philadelphia Beekeeper Guild also needed queens so we put in a group order and the queens were delivered to me.  I was a little surprised when they arrived, because they were in a battery box in plastic cages and all of the attendents were loose in the box and taking care of all 5 queens that were shipped up.  This was quite different from the wooden queen cages I was use to.  Ultimately everything worked well, but it was a bit of a pain that I couldn't open the battery box unless I was in the bee yard because of all of the loose attendents. Frederica I was installed successfully and now I just have to wait to release her and hope she is accepted by the workers that stayed behind from Freyja.

Other than this hiccup everything has been great!  All of the hives have been building up well.  Leaf Litter has built out the least, but that isn't saying much since they have two deeps filled out and are just not working on the wax in medium supers for honey storage.  Everyone else just keeps building frames and filling them up.  Should be a good honey harvest this year, especially considering it is the first year for 3 of these 4 hives.  Go bees!