Krameria Rhatany Ratany

Still working on figuring this one out.  Let me know if you recognize it.  Jackie found it in one of her books - Krameria genus, or Ratany, or Rhatany.  I found several patches of it on the land (in central OK)  It's low growing and viny.  Growth habit resembles purslane.  Leaves are alternate and it's hairy. 

Found a great write up on this: http://beetlesinthebush.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/friday-flower-krameria-lanceolata/   In summary:  The flowers produce not nectar, but fatty oils.  Apparently bees of the genus Centris use the oils and pollen for their larvae.  There are other oil producing plants as well!  (who knew?) Also, these plants are "obligate semiparasites, forming haustoria on the roots of a broad range of host plants." 

Queens are laying!

Checked all the hives this morning:
Both the splits from Lloyd's hive had eggs and hence their queens must have mated properly and returned!
The queen right split will need a new box in a week or so.

The queenright split from the Observation hive was booming, so I gave them the second box.
The swarm from the observation hive had several queen cells (from the brood I gave them last Sunday) so I guess they didn't like the queen that came with them.  Will check again within 3 weeks to see if they end up with a laying queen.

The OH queen started laying yesterday!

All is good in beeland.

Queen cells!

Saturday, April 28th, I check the hive that I'd made queenless a week earlier.  Found queen cells on 2 frames, so I split them between 2 hives.  Hopefully not destroying all the queen cells in the process.  Gave the new location some extra frames of brood from the queenright split from the previous week.

So far the new split isn't flying, of course, but no robbing either.  I worry about queenless splits.  The OH that was split Wednesday took 2 days for its first queen cell to appear and 4 days for the second (and several more.)