Oh, oh...

Memorial Day Weekend was exquisite! The weather was perfect and Monday proved to be a great day to open up the hives. Being fairly lazy and getting tired of acting like a Sherpa bringing my bee toolkit, smoker fuel, an unused medium super (upon which I place the supers I remove from the hives during inspections) sugar for treatments, cameras, etc. back and forth from the basement to the apiary, I first installed my new storage unit (pic 1) behind the hives. Now everything can just stay out there (sans cameras) and I can make 1 trip instead of 3 or 4.

From the outside, both hives have appeared quite calm and the bees have simply been doing their thing. Hive 2 continues to have significantly more bees than Hive 1 and is much more active. Opening up Hive 1 showed a very relaxed and extremely busy colony. If there isn’t brood, pollen (pic 2) or capped honey in the bottom 3 boxes there is nectar. They have yet to start to draw out the plastic in the top medium but I think that will soon change. There were 3 frames of brood in the 2 deeps, which I spread out a bit by placing a frame of honey in the middle of the brood frames so they move it and use it for more brood. They are still very vertical. I also moved the green drone frame from frame 1 to frame 3 to see if the queen would start laying on it. As mentioned in an earlier post, it is a great way to reduce the mite load of a hive.

After sifting 1 cup of sugar over the bees, I closed them up. They remained incredibly calm the entire inspection.

Hive 2 has completely drawn out the wax in the first medium and now has most of it filled with nectar with 3 or 4 of the frames having a significant amount of drone cells. Bees are in the 2nd medium and are starting to fill the older frames with nectar while leaving the newer Piercos alone. Going into the 2 bottom deeps showed some brood and more drone cells. I have not seen the queen in weeks and looking for eggs on white frames is not easy (note to self: use only black frames in the brood box and white in the honey supers). There is some larvae but I’m starting to wonder if I have laying workers which only lay unfertilized (drone) eggs. The supercedure cells are gone from 2 weeks ago and several swarm cells–tho’ empty–are present. Hopefully, I have a new queen on a mating flight. The swarm cells concern me, especially since I have already reversed the hives and added another super. I did observe lot of bees doing late afternoon orientation flights around this week (see slow mo video) as new bees are starting to venture out and are first familiarizing themselves with the hive location. As this opened up previously occupied cells, I’ll check next week to see what is going into those spaces. I’m wondering if the queen is spreading drones across the cells so I swapped a frame of capped honey for a green drone frame. Hopefully, she’ll fill this up and leave the remaining frames for brood. Meanwhile, I did a crush and strain collection of some absolutely delicious fresh honey! This is the first honey we’ve taken and it’s fantastic!

During the inspection, I destroyed many of the drone cells. As I pulled them out, I found numerous mites on the larvae. After sifting a bit more than 1 cup of powdered sugar over the frames, I closed up the hive. It was about 2 hours later that I became more concerned about swarming…