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Her Royal Highness

Today, during inspection, I was able to lay my eyes on each queen. Although it is never my goal to see the queen during an inspection, but rather evidence of her existence, I was pleased with each sighting. Luckily, I had my phone readily available, and I was able to make snapshots of each queen.

Leia
Copyright 2015 Jason Hotham
Notice the capped brood in picture above? That's the brownish colored capped cells. Also, there is open brood which can be easily seen (eggs and larvae).

Below, is a photo of Chewbacca. She is moving around on a frame with capped brood (upper left corner of photo) and with food (pollen and nectar). She is a bit nestled in among the workers but we can easily recognize her by the large black plate on her upper thorax. What a beauty!

Chewbacca
Copyright 2015 Jason Hotham
Adriana is quite large compared to the other queens. I wonder if she will be able to reign for four or five years. An very impressive specimen, indeed!

 
Adriana
Copyright 2015 Jason Hotham
All three queens have brood of all stages and hopefully Leia's colony will begin to pick up a bit more speed. We also observed a couple of bees hatching! It is amazing stuff.

I also weighed each hive today, just to 1.) test out the scale and 2.) see how much food was in each hive. Before the hives were occupied, I weighed each part of the hive separately so I would know what the empty weight would be for any given configuration. The hives in their current configuration (hive floor, one brood box, and one inner cover with felt mat) weigh 10 kg. A single bee weighs 0.1 grams. I roughly guessed that each hive has about 7000 bees including brood. That means the weight of the hives without counting food ca. 10.7 kg

Here are the results:

Adriana : 16kg (net food ca. 5.3 kg)
Chewbacca: 16kg (net food ca. 5.3 kg)
Leia: 14kg (net food ca. 3.3 kg)

The amount of food is not sufficient for winter stores. I hope the bees start to pick up momentum. I may have to start feeding them on a regular basis sooner than I thought. I will ask my mentor how much the hives should weigh and then I will feed them accordingly.

Katie, looking for eggs
Copyright 2015 Jason Hotham

"Lots of eggs and brood, Dad!"
Copyright 2015 Jason Hotham

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