On May 11th we installed a screen cone going from a hole in the top of a wine barrel to a hole in the bottom board, see topic below, and got most of our bees to move in to a super with drawn comb. We used a purched queen to help establish the new hive.
Yesterday we moved the hive to its permanent location. We blocked the enterance for the move then removed the block when it was in place on its stand.
We did an inspection the day before and found some queen cells and some med. and large larva. We were planning on poss. removing the queen cells after the move, but alas, we found a swarm back in the shed that housed the barrel this afternoon, when we checked the origional hive we found that the numbers appear to have dropped conciderably. And since we have extremely little experience it is hard to tell for sure, but it seems that there were too many bees in the swarm to have come from our hive and to still have as many left as there were.
We have hived the swarm and left the hive in the shed for the stragglers to find and join them.
We origionaly used a super and about two weeks later added a hive body with plain foundation. Now it's about 5 weeks later and the girls had done nothing to that execept for a bit of propolis to glue the two together, no drawing on the foundation. The drawn comb has some uncapped honey, larva, and one frame has about and inch and a half of capped honey, and as I said earlier some queen cells.
Am I expecting too much to think that the super should have been pretty full and that they should have been further along on the new foundation?
And the next question is how long will the bees left in the barrel survive with out being able to get out to get water? Since they are under roof I don't see how it is possible for them to be getting any. We looked for another enterance today and could not find one. But there are still quite a few bees alive in there.
Sorry for the long post! ANY input is appreciated!
http://www.beemaster.com/beebbs/viewtopic.php?t=533