Inspection #3

Ten days have seemingly flown by. I can't believe it will have been a month since I picked up my bees in a few days. Just goes to show that there's not really a whole lot of work when it comes to keeping bees, definitely a whole lot of opinions though.

This morning I headed out to the hive site and met up with Alexis, she was also another classmate from Patty's course. She wanted to see the hive and help out. The weather wasn't the greatest to do an inspection, it was sunny out and there was quite the wind. However, the next few days are suppose to be really rainy so I need to get it out of the way. I had a few things on my agenda to do. First was to see how the bees were doing with the second super, second was to scrap off the burr comb on the white Mann Lake foundation that the bees had formed into sort of a flattened mushroom shape, and lastly I was going to do it all gloveless.

Upon opening the hive I see that the bees hadn't really done much with all the foundationless frames I added up top. I had arranged the frames up top as such. 111232111. 1's being foundationless, 2's being black Mann Lake, and 3 being a fully drawn brood comb I moved up when I added the second super. The frame I had pulled up looked really good with nice brood and pollen/honey stores, we even got to see the queen and I pointed her out to Alexis. One of the Mann Lake frames looked really good, the bees had drawn it out properly and there was only a small patch of chalkbrood but not bad enough to be concerned about. I am starting wondering if I might have added the second super too soon. The other Mann Lake frame was a disaster, the bees had drawn it out much like the other frame I needed to scrape but the cells were much larger and there were already brood in it. I felt really bad about scrapping off this comb because it had brood so I rearranged it in a manner that hopefully the brood can hatch out and be replaced with honey and pollen, at which point I can scrape it off.

The lower box was really looking good and the single foundationless frame I had put in place of the brood frame I swapped was drawn to perfection. Very beautifully done and snowy white new wax. I'm really wishing that I could have started with all foundationless frames because the bees really know what they are doing and draw nice comb. Noticing that the bees weren't doing much in the upper box, I decided to flip the supers, moving the lower box and putting it as the top box. This would allow the bees to build down on the untouched foundationless frames below.

Overall I wasn't really impressed with how I performed the inspection today. I took too long with decisions and the bees really let me know. There was a noticeable change in hum tone about half way through the inspection so I'm sure the bees weren't very pleased. Either that or, heaven forbid, I managed to squish the queen. I don't think I'll be getting any honey this year at the rate the bees are building up. Mario says his hives are also on the slow side, so maybe it's just something with the way crops are blooming. Unfortunately my photographer wife didn't come out today, so there aren't any pictures. Furthermore, even without gloves, I didn't get stung today despite my debauchery.

My next series of "in between inspection" posts will be about the differences in wasps, bumblebees, and honey bees. I got the chance to go check out a bumblebee hive at a friend's house and found it most intriguing. There was some confusing on their part as to what type of bees they were dealing with and so that was my inspiration to clarify things in a series of educational posts. Check back soon for the first installment: Yellow Jackets.