Three! Three Hives! Mwahahahahahaha!

We had the one overwintered beehive (we'll call it the Pooh hive) from last June.  It's still going strong.  In fact, for the very first time on April 11, we think we finally saw the queen.

And then on Wednesday evening, we got a second nuc for the fish hive.  It needed to be installed into the hive on Thursday, but it was way too cold in the morning to open them up and separate them, so I begrudgingly had to go off to the day job and let Eric do it later in the day.  Fortuitously, though, some of my college friends were down here from Massachusetts with their kids, and were very into meeting the bees.  So Eric had assistance  installing the nuc after all - from Evan & Hannah, the kids!

It's terrific how totally unconcerned they were, as Evan held a nuc lid full of bees, and Hannah kept trying to get them to walk on her gloved hands.  Meanwhile, their mother was close enough to take photos of the event... and their father was across the yard, looking like he was shielding his eyes from a car wreck.

Ha!

So if you're counting along, that's two active hives.  Not enough!  Plus, when we looked again, the Pooh hive was nearly bursting at the seams with bees.  Time for a split!

So Eric picked up a new queen from a fairly local bee supply place yesterday while I was face painting all day at the Tribeca Film Festival, and today, our first ever hive split!  Behold...



We're so excited about this!  Three active hives!  And even with the split, the strong one should still produce honey.  Fingers crossed people!