The Importance of having more than one Bee colony

Hello fellow Steembeeks , Its been quite a few days since my last post, but I wanted to take the time to show the importance of having more than one colony.... Especially if you are just starting out.

I was walking past the bee yard yesterday and noticed a problem.... from 90 ft away. See the above photo, what do you see?

If you said you see bearding, you are correct!

But Uncle Harley, it's August and it's super hot, isn't bearding normal?

Yes, it is normal, and if I only had 1 colony I wouldn't have thought twice to look inside. HOWEVER.....since I have several colonies and only ONE was bearding..... well that set off my spidey senses ! ......Lets suit up and see what's inside!

But first a little back story. ..... A few weeks ago this hive was a monster, it was 8 boxes tall, I harvested the honey and condensed it down to the 4 boxes you see which is my normal size for over wintering here. Any honey they make from here on out will get used to pack the brood nest and will be their winter stores. By doing this early, I keeps me from having to feed sugar to weight come fall, but I gotta keep an eye on them.

Once inside I immediately noticed there weren't as many bees as would be expected after condensing them down, and then I saw what the problem was I must have rolled the queen when harvesting honey there was 2 frames that had partial brood in the bottom super that I brushed off and went ahead and took.

They raised a bunch of emergency cells and then ..... they swarmed ..... and buy my best guess a few times. As you can see below there are many cells torn out the side indicating a new queens arrival.

Now what you don't see because these bees were getting pissy and I had to put my gloves on and could no longer operate my phone for pics is that below these there were 5 cells that hatched normal..... that means there were 5 queens running around in this colony. There was also one single cell that was untouched.

At this point I went against what I would advise new beeks to do and I opened it hoping to find a dead queen that hadn't been removed yet, that would mean one queen was still there.

To my dismay there was a viable queen. ..... I probably just killed this colony!

DON'T EVER CUT A QUEEN CELL UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!

After my investigation was complete based off experience my guess is that cluster I saw was a swarm that had returned and then left again at some point. Probably the last one.

So how did I fix it? I pulled a frame of eggs from my best colony, in 48 hrs I will check that frame to see if they pulled queen cells. If they don't , they have a queen and the colony will have a chance, If they do start pulling queen cells, I will pinch them and combine them with one of the small nucs I keep just for this purpose.

I always keep a few small nucs around to basically bank queens, and by the end of the yr if I don't need them they will be overwintered as nucs if big enough or combined to make one or two big colonies.

So in conclusion..... Always, Always , Always have more than one colony, you never know when you might need to rob Peter to pay Paul. Not only will you have the resources to fix something immediately if need be, buy oddities like bearding when no one else is bearding sticks out like a sore thumb. And lesson 2 is don't ever cut a queen cell unless you or the bees have the ability to fix it if it was a mistake.

Last but not least, I don't blog often, but I'm more than happy to answer questions, If you have one, make a post and tag me @uncleharley and I'll be more than glad to try and answer it once I see it. Until next time, keep your smoker lit and keep on learning from your bees!