reverse Doolittle double split

Beekeeper heaven

I have been in beekeeper heaven the whole time I've been down here, I'm in my bee suit most of the day, with hive tool in hand.  No more playing around with grafting, though, it is time for real work now.  Today, 4 of us turned 120 colonies into 220, or so, in about 4 hours.  It was 94', too, so I dripped the whole time.  The queen rearing set up made me really appreciate the double deeps that I prefer when Langstroth beekeeping, and even after lifting and moving all those hives today, I still like them.  The yard we worked today was mostly story and a halfs, a deep and a medium, though.  We'll see how we do tomorrow when we get to the double deep yards.  The scale of how things are done in a commercial setting vs. we backyard beekeepers is pretty different.  We keep our bees as pets, and know everything about each colony, taking care never to kill a bee.  In commercial beekeeping, there is no way you can even keep track of hives as individuals, except for big things.  A rock on top means we did this one, it just doesn't look like it.  A crossed out Q means we found the queen and dispatched her.  
   This is the first time in my life I've killed queens without at least dropping them in my jar of queen juice so she would at least have a further purpose.  There are so many hives that even if the pattern is fantastic, the bees are nice, and everything looks perfect in a hive, if the yard is scheduled for new queens, they all get new queens.  It is just a different perspective.  These guys are super good at finding queens, too.  I thought I was good at it until I got here.  You only have about 2 seconds to look at each side of a frame, then move on.  The guys say that to find the queen, you don't hold the frame out in front of you, square to your face, you hold it angling down and away from your face, and the queen pops right out.  Something to try at home!
   I don't have another graft acceptance score sheet, but on Sunday, Yonnie and I had a contest, and marked each frame of grafts.  One box counted today, T 26, Y 32, out of a  possible 36.   It was a good day.  yesterday, our last day of grafting was a tough one, the jelly was sticky and lumpy.  Too dry, I guess.  I should have put the frame I was working from away and tried another, though they may all have been like that.  Hind site is 20-20.  So, I'm not expecting a good take on that one, but yonnie will get a count tomorrow while the rest of us are out doing splits.  Also, I understand that often, if you dent the new queen cup while it is being drawn, the bees will usually repair it.  I guess I was unlucky one time while practicing at this last year.  Supposedly, the queens are very fragile while in their capped cells, just before emergence (this from Marla Spivak), because their wings are forming then, and virgin queens obviously need their wings to be great.  Just something to keep in mind.  T