Did I Say No Honey?

After a quick trip to Germany, I'm a week late posting the progress as of last weekend.

In the previous post I wondered about the lack of honey and pollen stores. There was lots of brood but nothing to keep 'em going. They must have heard me! They've gone into serious honey production and both hives have frames of just capped honey as well as frames mixed with brood. We added mediums with excluders to both hives as the top deeps had 7 frames mostly filled out. We have continued to feed and will do so until they are building comb in the new supers. We used a lot less smoke this time and I was stung 3 times on the left hand. Made for an itchy and puffy left hand for about 3 days.

The best part of the inspection was watching 2 bees hatch (pics 2 & 3). While watching the 1st one start to come out another started breaking through the cap. Based on the activity of each hive, LOTS of bees are hatching! I'd estimate 40-45,000 bees are now in residence in each hive. Busy queens!

Hive Notes:

Hive One has a lot of activity happening in the top deep. I put the 2nd deep on when the 1st had 5-6 frames filled out. I was leaving for Hong Kong for 10 days and I thought it would be smart to add it so they had room. As it worked out, it seems all they did was move upstairs. There are 4 empty frames (including the drone frame) in the bottom so I exchanged 2 frames of brood from the top with 2 empties from the bottom. We still have never seen the queen in this hive. She must be small and similarly colored as the workers but she is definitely a prolific layer. It appeared the bees were building a queen cell in this hive. I scraped it off since I moved 2 empty frames up and added the super. If they were building the cell because of space, I've hopefully solved the problem. If I see another this weekend, I'm going to leave it and assume they know something is up with the current queen and let them superceed her. Definitely makes me wonder what's up because she's laying. I sugared the bees for mites and filled the feeder. They've hardly touched it this week.

Hive 2 is definitely taking syrup. Now that the supers are on, Gayla made 1:1 syrup without Honey-Be-Healthy so not to contaminate the honey. Overall, this hive has come on strong and is now almost even with Hive One. The bees do seem more relaxed in this hive. sugared the bees in this hive, as well.

After not opening the hives for 2 weeks, it was very difficult to pull the frames out of the top deeps because the bees built burr comb between the bottom of the frames in the top deep and the top of the frames in the bottom deep. Using my hive tool, I was able to pry the frames loose. I scraped off the burr comb, leaving half of it for them and taking the other half for us to eventually use to make candles.