The second year as a beekeeper, you face a different set of challenges than year one.  Even if you aren't successful in overwintering your bees, the hive "box" was at least fixed up by the previous year's bees.

I had three hives come through with bees in them.  100%, which is astounding.  Two hives, Bangor and Calais, had lots-o-bees.  Acadia had few.  On thing I noticed about Bangor is they made a lot of wax after my last inspection.  I didn't think that was necessarily a good thing.

My brother has been after me to make sure I was queenright -- meaning I have a laying queen in each hive.  I have been loath to open the hives, and even worse, break the brood area because of the weather.  You see, there is never a good time to do that, but when rain is on the way, or it's cold out, or windy, it's worse.

Today I noticed that the Acadia and Calais hives had more bees flying than Bangor.  Remember, Acadia had very few live bees this spring, but their numbers seem to be increasing.  Several of the bees I saw today were taking their first flights (they make a little loop and go right back in so they don't get lost).  So if some bees are actually hatching and flying in two hives, and decreasing in the other, probably no queen.

I started by trying the method I used for inspection last year.  Take out a few bars behind the last drawn-out bar, then move the draw-out bars back until you get to the ones you want to inspect.  Unfortunately, those bars were chock full of honey.  This was not just a pain in the butt, it is a bad sign.  Cutting the bars out took time, and aggravated the bees.

So I went straight for the brood area.  Sure enough, nothing alive on or in it.  No nurse bees, no guard bees trying to sting me, no signs of life at all.  That means the queen didn't overwinter.

I stole two bars of brood from the Calais hive.  The bees were very unhappy about the situation, and I can't say I blame them.  I could not see eggs in my inspection (I have never seen eggs), and you need one to two day old eggs for the nurse bees to make queens out of.  I did see a little capped brood, and larvae at progressively younger stages of development.  So it's a little of a crap shoot.

If successful, the bees will make a queen out of the young eggs they have.  She will have the genetics of my Calais hive, which overwintered the best, and wasn't too testy to handle last season.  I really liked the laid back bees in the Acadia hive, but thought it best to take from the healthiest hive for a variety of reasons, genetics one of them.  I will still get genetics from Acadia's drones, so hopefully some laid back bees that make honey and overwinter.  It's a human-based breeding program that also relies on natural selection.  Pretty cool.

The virgin queen should emerge and breed with drones from the other two hives and any other bees in the area.  Hopefully, I will get some feral bee genetics.  At the minimum I am sure to get some genes from hives that overwintered -- tolerating both the climate and my suspect beekeeping skills.

It will take a minimum of 24 days to know if it worked or not.  If it did not, I will either get my hands on a package (which I can do late because I have drawn comb for the bees) or make another split, with more resources from the other hive.