At last. A decent picture of our royal liege. Can you spot her? Look for the yellow paint. She's much larger than her attendants.Since we put our second deep super in a while back, we needed to open up the hives and verify that our queens were laying in the upper hive. Indeed, they are. Unfortunately, we had quite a bit of burr comb that we needed to clean out. Even more unfortunately, the comb was filled with almost-ready-to-emerge larvae, not honey. It's never good to lose your future workforce and we cleaned out the burr comb with heavy hearts.
This is the queen from our Mud Honey Hive. At last, we have a name for this hive. The other one has been the Blue Moon Hive for quite some time but this one has only recently been named. We've yet to spot the Blue Moon Queen but she has an excellent egg laying pattern so we're not too concerned.
