7/18/09: Re-queening the Italians

So based on inspections six and seven, we decided to re-queen the Italian hive. Immediately after finding no eggs or larvae, I put in a call to the closest bee guy. He's the one who sold me the packages and he had one queen available. A Russian he's had for a week. I guess the experiment of one Italian and one Russian hive is over before the first winter. Look out, Europe. The Russians are coming!

We don't even know what happened to the Italian. She was a strong layer who just stopped after we prevented a swarm.

Meet the new Queen and her lone attendant:

We experimented with a queen installation that does not involve removing a frame and installing the cage in it's place. This SHOULD allow for easy release of the queen without building lots of brace comb or the hassel of having to take out a frame that covered in bees and not put it back. Here's what we did:

We removed a bit of wax from two locations at the top of two adjacent frames.

We placed the queen cage in between the adjacent frames and nested them down in the lower hive body. Since there was not enough candy to sufficiently delay the removal of the new queen until the hive had accepted her, I left the cork in. In two or three days I'll sneak back in and remove it with tweezers. The next inspection will be in a week, looking for eggs from the new queen.