Beauty and the Beast

Or the Tale of 2 Hives...

Opened both hives today and they could not have been more different. Hive 1 has exploded in population! This was the hive that was working vertically. Not now! Bees cover all of the frames, have drawn all the frames in the first honey super and have filled it with nectar. Honey, nectar, pollen and brood is now in the upper deep (pic 1-3) and the lower deep has some nectar
but is definitely open for her to come back and fill it with brood. There wasn't a drone cell in sight.
he bees were incredibly gentle and easy going and the hive was an absolute pleasure to work. What a great hive this has been this season! I hope it keeps up! After dusting the bottom 3 supers with powdered sugar, I replaced the 4th super on top and sprayed all of the frames with Honey-B-Healthy to try and get the bees to hurry and draw out these frames as well.



Hive 2 is confusing me. Looking at the the top honey super shows bees drawing comb across all 9 frames (I usually 9 frames for honey, 10 for brood). The next honey super is the small cell wax foundation in wooden frames. I think I added this super 3 or 4 weeks ago. Now it is fully drawn and loaded with nectar and some capped honey (pic 4). There are a couple of drone cells on one of the frames.



The remaining 2 supers are the deeps. These have brood but are still loaded with drones cells. I destroyed many of the drone cells and (not surprisingly) found them loaded with mites. I still haven't seen the queen but there is brood and the bees have started several supercedure cells and several swarm cells. I dusted the bottom 2 deeps and put a queen excluder on top of the 2nd deep. I replaced the 2 honey supers and decided to add a 3rd, moving a couple of frames from the 2nd honey super into the new box, again spraying HBH on the new frames to help motivate them to draw comb. I have 2 new queens coming July 1st from Vermont queen breeder Michael Palmer. I can't wait to get one of those into this hive.