Queen cage check on the Saint Valentine hive

Today, Holy Saturday, we went out to check the hives to see whether the queens had escaped their cages. We started with the Saint Valentine hive. We opened it up to find a surprising amount of comb on the inner cover and over the queen cage, as well as a really large number of bees in the upper deep body, which ideally should contain nothing but the feeder bucket. The bees were so thick around the queen cage that it was difficult to tell whether the queen was out. Burr comb covered the plug hole; when I removed it, it seemed as if the candy plug was all eaten, but I really could not be sure that the queen had escaped. So I put the cage back in, just laying it over the frames on the east side of the hive. (Wednesday we had hung it on the west side of the hive.) Then I closed the hive up.

There were so many bees flying about, that I decided against opening the Saint Benedict hive. We’ll put it off till tomorrow, Easter Sunday.