Remember how I was worried two weeks ago about a bad queen bee?  I think we've experienced a successful supersedure since then!

What's a supersedure, you say?  If a hive isn't happy with its queen, they'll try to make a new one.  A young larva can be moved from the worker track to the queen track by feeding her different food and building her a bigger cup.  When the new queen reaches adulthood, the workers kill the old queen by surrounding her and causing her to overheat, then the new queen takes over the hive.

Two weeks ago, we saw two queen cups in the problem hive.  Yesterday, there were no queen cups but I saw plenty of eggs and young larvae.  It sounds like a successful supersedure, though I won't know for sure until I see some capped larvae.

In other news, as you can see in these pictures, we've whacked the upper garden back into shape!  I'm constantly amazed at how much Mark and I can get done when we work together.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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