A new queen in a new castle

This evening I opened up a swarm that I hived on June 18th. I put them in two boxes, a deep box and a medium box, both ten frame. Their frames were completely empty, only wood surrounding where I wanted them to build their comb. Given that all beeswax foundation is full of nasty chemicals and I'm not able to make my own foundation I've been using a trick where I use a wedge top bar but no foundation, I just turn the wedge on its side (after cleaning up the messy wood bits) and nail it in place. I last looked at them on July 19th and found that most of their comb was being drawn as I wanted and I removed a few pieces that weren't.

I'm proud to report that after that small correction that the bees completely drew out the medium box, nearly perfectly! The hive was packed full of bees and looked very healthy and their mood was very mild, which was a pleasant surprise given that we are entering the time of year when the nectar flow slows to a stop and the bees get a little grumpy. I know that this queen's grandmother was a NWC, New World Carniolan. Despite having opened the hive twice now I have yet to see the queen, she's doing a good enough job that I don't need to inspect her and I can forgive her odd brood pattern given that she's short on space with only 10 frames of comb. I was surprised to see that the other box was not yet drawn out at all. That explains why those 10 frames were packed so tightly with bees.

Given their reluctance to draw out the bottom box I added another medium with ten frames (also no foundation). I removed five drawn frames and alternated every-other frame with drawn and empty, now the top two boxes each have five drawn frames and five empty frames. This will be a bit of a mess because the corners of the drawn frames that have uncapped honey will get drawn out even deeper but I can take care of that later, I don't want to lose their comb drawing instinct. New swarms are great at making comb.

This hive came from a split I made this spring. I'll have to tell tell that story later, it is a good one. I ended up with one of the three hives having too many workers and too much brood and when the queens emerged it swarmed, ending up in this hive.