Great news everyone! The Bees are doing wonderfully, in fact 

We just completed our first split Saturday night. We knew it was time for a split because our population was growing very quickly and the frames inside of the hive were nearly filled with larva or pupating bees (that’s when the larva starts to transform into an adult bee).

Looking closely, you can see the eggs in the center/open cells, and the capped cells contain pupating larva

It is extremely important to maintain the population of a beehive, if the queen bee starts to run out of room and can’t find empty cells to lay her eggs, she will decide it’s time to find a new home and will begin to influence the worker bees to raise a replacement queen. This is called swarming. In nature, swarming is natural and sets up two separate bee colonies, which is excellent. When you are a beekeeper, you definitely don’t want a swarm to occur because you will essentially lose 75% of your bees and your productivity will become extremely low while they repopulate. 

We were a bit worried, the split was supposed to take place on Sunday, but due to our extremely wet summer, we had to beat the rain and split the hive a day early. Luckily, the bees did wonderfully and made the trip to Traverse City without a hitch. They were introduced into our hive box and accepted their new queen quickly. 

The apiary in Traverse City is quickly growing and we were able to try the honey! It was delicious!! It had the most perfect golden color, it was light and sweet. It was hard to stop eating it with only one taste test. The bees couldn’t resist either, they had to eat some too.. 

In a few weeks we should be ready to harvest at a large scale 🙂