Day 8: First Official Inspection

At last, after several days of watching the hives from a distance to make sure bees were still flying in and out of each of them, we got to open them up for our first official observation. We started with Hive #2--by the next post we will have actual names for our hives. I'm leaning towards famous buildings like the Taj Mahal, Casa Batlló, Notre Dame, and the Prince of Wales Hotel. But I could be talked into stars, planets, cities, National Parks, or some other theme (like US Presidents!--trust me, there will NEVER be a Trump).

So the Hive #2, the Langstroth that got the package of bees last Saturday, was buzzing with activity (heh), and after I gently smoked it, I opened it up, removed the empty package and replaced it with five foundation frames. Zaga filled the divider feeder which was completely dry--we should have filled it more last time. Even though I'm not supposed to go in for another week, I am going to check on Wednesday or Thursday to make sure there is sugar syrup in the hive. We examined every frame and though they were covered with bees, we didn't find the queen, and we didn't identify any brood cells. I'm going to look again Wednesday. There were a lot of bees in the hive, I didn't see any queen cells, and the workers were busy drawing out new comb on at least two new frames.

Hive #3 was next--we saved #1 for last as we wanted to swap the frames into a new box and didn't want to be near it afterward. Hive #3 is the hybrid which got one of he two big new nucs. We removed the queen cage, which was empty, and we quickly spotted the very busy queen bee. There was lots of brood,  as well as a good quantity of pollen and honey. The bees had built some major protrusions out of the sides of the frames where the queen cage had been so I scraped those off (they were honey, not brood) and put the hive back together with all the frames nice and snug against each other. Last week I had left the queen excluder between the Top Bar side of this hive and the Langstroth side and I had put the divider behind one top bar. This week, based on how full all of the Langstroth frames were, I moved the divider back one more bar so there are two bars for the bees to draw down. I am curious to see what the bees make of the Top Bar side as they have foundation frames in the Lang side, but only the bars with wooden wedges in the Top Bar side.

Then it was time for Hive #1. This is the hive where I had to borrow the deep box from Zaga because my nuc frames wouldn't fit into my shallow brood box. First we smoked the bees, then I lifted the whole bood box and Zaga swapped out the bottom tray. Then I put the brood box back on the new bottom, and we opened it up. As with the previous hives, the divider feeder was empty in this hive so Zaga filled it up--not full, about 1/2 as we only had one gallon of syrup for all four hives. We'll make more for Wednesday. After she filled it, she put it into the new brood box which we had set on a cooler next to the hive stand. Then I pulled each frame one at a time and looked at them. This was the hive installed from the oldest nuc which had a queen in it--not in a queen cage. We immediately found the queen in this one too, along with cells of brood, pollen and nectar. We examined each frame and put them into the new box with the heaviest frames of brood and the queen in the middle. Then we put the inner cover and the top on the new brood box, lifted the old box down to the ground--there were still a lot of bees milling around the inside of that box--and put the new brood box on the bottom tray on the stand.

And at last we were on to Hive #4, the Flow hive which got one of the two newer nucs installed last Monday morning.When we opened up this hive we also found a lot of comb being drawn where we didn't want it. The first surprise we had was when I took off the inner cover and found a long oval piece of comb attached to it and hanging down into the space between the frames holding the queen cage. The Flow is only an 8-frame box, unlike all the other which are 10-frame boxes. The divider takes up one spot, then I had a Flow frame (which is foundationless), then the four frames from the nuc which were packed with pollen, nectar, and brood from the nuc, and then we had one more foundationless Flow frame. The bees had seriously packed the original four frames, but they had not begun drawinf=g out on the foundationless frames at all. We also didn't find the queen in this hive--though we did see one big bee that looked like a queen, but she wasn't marked or clipped, which mine was supposed to be. I'm not sure if this was the hive or not, but one of the nucs I got had several queen cells in it and I'm wondering if the queen in this hive was superceded already. I am going to check this hive out again more closely on Wednesday when I check the feeders.

When we were done we doffed our beekeeping gear and headed back to our houses. I was almost to my front door when I realized I had left the pitcher we used to pour the sugar syrup into he feeders out by Hive #4. I went back out and picked it up and as I was walking away from the hive, I was chased by a big that dive-bombed me and stung me on the top right of my back. My first sting! Zaga asked me what it felt like and I said it was a frisson of fire followed by a little electrical zing that went down my arm. I told her it was over then, but for a half hour or so here would be little zips of pain in that area. Now I don't feel it at all--and I'm still breathing so go me!

At the end of it all I'm not sure what I really saw quantitatively, but I think it will be better next time because we won't actually be moving the frames around anymore as the package and all of the queen cages are out. I still need to figure out some way of easily logging my weekly data. One way I could do it would be to makepictures of of frames that I could use to do a quick sketch of what I see--I think they would be more accurate and easier than trying to estimate quantities in words. That way I could document brood and store numbers, type and placement of frames, etc., and I could store that data to graph out. Right now I'm trying hard not to be overwhelmed just looking at the seething mass of bodies that is a bee colony. It's not like they're going to sit still and let me count them or move away from the frames so I can get a completely accurate picture!