What a Mess!

Another lesson learned. I should not have placed a spacer between the hive top feeder and the hive box. I did it to make room for the pollen patty I put on top of the frames in each hive when I installed the packages. Guess what...bees don't like empty space and fill it with comb (look under feeder in 1st pic). What a waste of the bees' time and what a major mess it made when I opened the hives today. They had drawn out a large area of comb and had been storing honey in it. Gayla scraped it off as I held the feeder and our friend Stephon took the pictures. We ended up scraping it onto the top of the frames, Mistake 1 as it coated numerous bees and trapped them in the honey. Mistake 2 was not leaving it in the hive box for them to clean up. We took it thinking we'd melt the wax. We were amazed at how much honey was in it. Very light in color and taste. I thought it might be from the syrup but I haven't seen bees drinking it this week. Both hives built the comb on the bottom of the feeders. Don't know...

Hive Notes:
Both hives are building comb corner to corner on the plastic frames.

Hive One has built out 4+ frames on the black Piercos (Pic 2). There are all stages of bee larvae (Pic 3, nice shot Stephon!) and many capped cells. There seems to be 2x the number of bees in Hive One when compared to Hive 2. No comb was drawn on the drone frame or any of the 4 outer most frames. I rotated one of the outer frames into the center. I left the last 1/3 of the pollen patty in the hive, did a sugar treatment, removed the hive top feeder and placed a 2nd hive body on top with an inner cover and the telescoping top. I want to leave them alone for 2 weeks and thought it best to add the 2nd hive body. We still haven't seen the queen, though it is obvious she's quite busy.

Hive Two still has a hive top feeder on it though I did remove the pollen patty and spacer. They didn't seem too interested in the patty. There are 3 frames well drawn out on the white small cell Mann Lake 100s, lots of various stages of larvae, the queen was easy to identify. Overall, there is less action in this hive. The comb attached to the feeder was much larger in this hive compared to Hive One. Nothing was on any of the outer 6 frames. Tho' there is not a spacer, I may open this one next week to see if they are still trying to build on the feeder.