Saturday, July 5, 2008

Bee check-up

A hot, humid afternoon is never a good time to open the hive, but with the schedule I have been keeping, this was the only time I had a chance to see what the girls were up to.
After a ten minute battle with the smoker, I was finally ready to make my trip into the hive. The majority of the girls were home when I came to call and they were not happy to be disturbed.
Everything seemed rather unchanged from three weeks ago when I was in there last. The upper hive body has four and a half frames drawn out and one of them was full of honey, the others have brood and honey stores in them. These three are the brood frames I moved up when I added the second hive body in an effort to encourage the bees to draw out the comb. It looks like the only thing they have been doing is propolizing everything together. I scraped about an ounce off of the three frames I pulled out, the inner and outer covers, and the hive body.
The way they look now doesn't lead me to believe that they will be producing any extra honey for me this year, but that's fine. I have no problem with letting them have everything they produce this winter. I just hope both of the colonies survive the winter.

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