Day 29: Weekly Inspection and Mean Bees

Wax frame with new capped brood (bottom center),
pollen (in the ring around it), and capped honey (the
white cells in the upper right

It's getting difficult knowing what day it is in beekeeping. I guess I'm going to have to keep a spreadsheet so I can just look up the date and the corresponding bee day. Okay, spreadsheet made, yesterday was Day 29.

I suited up fully for my hive inspection as I knew I'd need to remove the entrance reducers and put in the boardman entrance feeders, and all that futzing around was likely to make even the calm hives a bit more agitated. Wow am I glad I did! Yesterday was an overcast day about 70 degrees at 5:00 pm when I went into the hives. Zaga wasn't able to be there so it was my first day doing a full hive inspection by myself. Armed with a loaded smoker, I filled the new boardman feeders with the leftover sugar water from last week, arranged my tools, and went out into the gloaming drizzle. In order to more accurately track what I did and what I found, I took my phone and used voice memo. The problem with the voice memo is that I was out there for an hour and 15 minutes to capture everything I did, I need to listen to the whole memo... Thus the bees take up two hours and twenty minutes of my day. There must be some way to speed this up.

Another picture of the same frame as above, but from
further back.

Ah well. I listened to my loooong memo and transcribed the details about hives, frames, beetles, queens, etc., into a spreadsheet. In my own obsessive compulsive kind of way, I think I want to have a blank form to use for each hive examination with check boxes indicating finding the queen, hive beetles, treatments, frame status--honey, pollen, brood, nectar, etc. That way I can capture the details without either having to talk to my phone or have Zaga take notes. On the plus side, I can condense the status of each hive into a couple of sentences!

Hive #1: This hive is chugging right along. I'm continuing to feed it as the larvae looked a bit dry and the feeder was dry. Saw a hive beetle, no beetle B Gone strips (like dryer sheets with no fabric softener on them, the beetles feet get tangled up in them). I need to add one next time. I did find the queen, and she was quite busy. Long Live the Queen!

A foundationless frame--the bees made all the comb from
scratch, though it looks like they reused wax from the
frames that came with the nuc as some of the cells are the dirty
brown of used brood comb. New brood in the yellow capped
cells, honey along the top in the white.

Hive #2: This one was the package so it started with no frames of brood or nectar or pollen, and it still has about as much brood and food stores now as the first hive which had the greatest headstart of all of them. I think I'll go with all packages next year if I buy more bees. There was some syrup left in the divider feeder when I replaced it with the frame and put in the boardman feeder. I didn't find the queen and I was a bit concerned because there seemed to be fewer larvae in this one. Will need to check carefully next time for larvae and queen.

Hive #3: Four full frames of brood, nectar, honey, larvae and pollen in the middle, a couple more drawn out frames, three not drawn out yet and added a new one. I found the queen. Long Live the Queen!

Another foundationless frame, this one is less drawn out than
the one above, but it shows how the bees build rings of
hexagonal cells and then connect them.

Hive #4: I am beginning to hate this hive. I have been stung twice now--both times by bees from this hive. This time I got stung all the way up by the house, through my hat and hair at the very end of the hive inspection. These bees are just angry. They might be angry because they are over-crowded. This hive is full, full, FULL! It was impossible to do a good inspection as there were so many bees surging around the frames and the hive body that I couldn't move anything without risking squishing them. the hive is definitely more than 90% full so tomorrow I am going to have to put another box on the top. But do I do another brood box which would hold a mix of honey, brood, and pollen, or do I put on the Flow super?

The one thing that was super cool about Hive #4 is that it is the only one in which I used foundationless frames--frames with no existing wax or plastic for the bees to build their cells on (also known as drawing out the comb). They create everything from scratch as they hang from the top of the frame. They did one complete foundationless and a third to a half of another. There might even have been one more foundationless in there, but I didn't record anything about it in my memo. By the time I got to it, the bees were super pissed off and I just needed to be done.

A couple of notes about this inspection. Because of the temps, the weather, and the time of day, there weren't many bees out foraging which made the inspection--especially of Hive #4 more difficult. I need to remember to inspect on sunny still mornings so most of the bees will be out hunting for nectar or pollen.

Today I went to Home Depot and bought some little test jars of paint in a range of colors with which to decorate the white painted hives, and I also got some white paint to paint the new TopBar and the unpainted shallow boxes I will need to add soon. In spite of being stung twice so far and the difficulties I am having with Hive #4 (leading to me no longer beekini beekeeping), I LOVE MY BEES! This is a really great experience.