Accidental Winner

Thanks everyone for your tireless photo scanning abilities as well as your multitude of guesses. So what was the magical winning number? It was 13 and a large number of people came very close to the answer. The one thing that people seemed to forget is that free loading men aren't exactly ones to follow orders. The thirteenth drone was this one stubborn guy who just had to get back into the hive, and he was furiously working on that goal. All you could really see is his very large thorax and abdomen. Here is a picture in which I have placed a red dot on each drone in the picture.


The winning guess was 13 actually done so in a humorous, non-serious manner saying there were 13 as proven by a submitted photo shopped picture but, unbeknownst to them, they were actually right. I'd like to congratulate Goran for his humorous, yet accurate guess. He will receive my last full mason jar of honey. Mmmmm mmmm good.

People are always curious as to how my bees are doing. I did a quick inspection on Thursday when the weather was nice and am happy to report that taking full advantage of my feeders and have filled the entire upper box with capped winter stores. It appears that they should have plenty of stores for winter. With the future forecast looking very good, I believe it will be a while before I actually get around to having to wrap my hive with roofing paper and putting some insulation on top. I also need to decide whether or not to move my hive into city limits.