Thing 1
The bees had built only a minimal amount of comb and were hardly moving around. In addition, there were barely any bees on the frames. The majority of them seemed to be in the big clump where they feel when they were shaken into the hive. This pretty much confirmed our suspicion that Thing 1 was not doing too hot.Shark managed to find the queen (I couldn't pick her out to save
my life.) and catch here in the queen catcher. Unfortunately, when we tried to transfer her to the tube to be marked she squirmed her way out and flew away =x We are not exactly sure where she ended up. After that mishap, we were pretty much convinced that Thing 1 was now queen-less.Thing 2
Overall, the bees looked great and were moving all over the place. They had already started to build up comb on multiple frames and a few of the cells were actually filled with something! Based on how much we had seen Thing 2 flying this past week, we we're not really concerned about the hive, but we were still impressed with how much work they had already done! We decided not to look for the queen based on our previous Thing 1 experience.Horton / The Fuzz
Although this hive had only been setup for a few days we decided to bust it open... after all, we were checking the other hives out and couldn't resist. Let me tell you, these are what they are talking about when they say "busy bees". After only being in the swarm box for about two days, they had already built up more comb than Thing 1. These bees seemed to be in good shape, even though they were confined to the swarm box.
After all the inspections were complete, we decided to go ahead and combine Thing 1 and Horton for a couple of reasons...
- The Thing 1 queen was MIA
- Thing 1 had built hardly any comb in over a week
- Horton had a lot of bees to be confined to the swarm box
...And then there were two!
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