New bees installed

Bought two bee packages from Virginia bee supply, installed 4/23/2016. Set up one hive box for each, installed bottom boards, entrance reducers, and boardman feeders. Put the rest of the corn syrup from the package feeders into the boardmans. Checked Monday 4/25, found queens were released. Starting to fill stores from boardman - clear liquid in some cells. Did not see queens, which are unmarked. bought sugar and refilled boardmans. Here we go again, best of luck to our new girls.

Hive inspection

Last weekend we inspected the hives. They are taking 2 gal of 2:1 syrup in less than a week. The top feeders we bought run dry and bees hang out I'm the syrup well waiting for a tsunami of sugar to come down them. The frames all seem well drawn out in both boxes. Saw brood in hive 1 but did not check in hive 2 due to aggression, we saw no reason to press the point.
3 weeks ago we treated with half dose of mite-away strips. We started feeding protein patties and doubled the syrup strength after that treatment, and we added the top feeders from Virginia bee supply in Remington.
His trick of scrubbing pads as a beetle trap seemed to gather beetles but we had to catch them. We tore the pad a little to see if that helped beetles get in it. I wonder if we need to put some sugar syrup on the pad so the bees tear it.

quick hive update

Just returned from a weekend trip, here are some external observations on the hives. we can see good activity at each hive, see pollen coming in both. Hive 2 has many more bees on the bottom of the hive, outside the screen bottom.

hive two installed

picked up a nuc form Chris H. and installed them to hive two. Queen is marked red.  five deep frames; the outers were hardly drawn out -- smaller than our other nuc. put into a new 8-frame deep super on a new bottom board next to hive one.

Did a quick check of hive one; Lisa spotted a queen running around! a few of the queen cells are opened and there are about 5 more that are still capped.  So we have a hatched queen just about when predicted; she should be mated and laying (and killed the other hatching queens) by the end of May.