I wanted to check on the hives to make sure the Queens were out of their cages and all was going well. Dawn, Aaron, Jessica, and I drove up before church, and Aaron & I suited up for getting into the hives. Immediately, we noticed that the bees had gone through quite a bit of sugar water; there was only about a cup left in each feeder, so we topped off the feeders with more 1:1 solution.
We went to the left hive first, and after smoking it I opened the top and found a big surprise. When I pulled out the queen cage attached to it was a long piece of white comb about 6 inches long and 2 inches wide. As I looked closer I could see that the comb had trapped the Queen in her cage! I broke off the comb from the cage and could see that the bees had not eaten all of the candy plug to release their Queen, so I took a match stick and poked out the remaining candy plug and released the Queen. I placed her onto a frame, and she quickly crawled between two frames hopefully to start a long productive life laying thousands and thousands of eggs!
I pulled out one of the frames and could see that the bees were making good progress building up comb. When I checked the other hive, I found they had released their Queen and only built a small amount of comb on the queen cage. Likewise, the right hive also had quite a bit of comb being built on the frame's foundation. I am so pleased with how they are doing thus far!
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