Hive Inspection

The girls appear to be having a great time in their new home. Their bee line is a bit screwed up - they aren't interested in flying straight through the forest verge and prefer to loop around behind the hives and hit the cow pasture to the west, but it doesn't seem to be hurting them.

This afternoon I cracked open the hives. The first hive, Nefertari's, is BOOMING. That's the bearding hive that I mentioned in the last bee post. They're having a fantastic time.

I'm going to have to fiddle with them a bit toward the fall, I think, because they've honeyblocked* their top brood super, which they will need for their bee cluster over winter - they can't cluster properly on honey so I may have to move some brood frames up into that central space and move the honey down and to the sides. Lots of time to worry about that later though.

I gave them a new medium super with foundation to work on, since they were building out comb onto their inner cover, which usually means they've run out of space for their business inside. I checked all the supers and they were at capacity, so I gave them theirs, (and my), very first honey super! Woo!

I actually put it below the honeybound super - I'm kind of hoping they'll use it that one for brood and I can harvest the honeybound super that they've already filled instead.

The Nefertiti hive, on the other hand, is pretty quiet. They have only just started building out comb in the super I gave them two weeks ago, and their work force is much smaller than the one in the Nefertari hive. It's very likely that I will take a frame or two of brood from 'Tari's hive and give it to 'Titi's girls. Because the hive is doing so much more poorly than 'Tari's hive I worried that Nefertiti might be dead. But I found capped brood, and plenty of it. I also found eggs, correctly placed in the very bottom of the cells and alone in their cells. If the workers had started laying eggs (which they would do if their queen was dead) they would be laying multiple eggs in each cell and often on the sides instead of anchored to the bottom. So I'm sure Nefertiti is alive, she's just not thriving the way Nefertari is. I will have to keep a close eye on her - and like I said I'll probably give her some of 'Tari's babies to raise as her own, to buck her up a bit.



*Here's the thing - once a super is pretty much full of honey, the queen won't move onto it or through it. It's called honeyblocked or honeybound because it blocks the queen below that super. So you don't have to worry about the queen laying brood in any honey supers once she's blocked. But like I said, I'm worried that they blocked their top brood super with honey, and I'm hoping that they'll build out the comb in the new super I just gave them and use that for brood so I don't have to fiddle with their frames too much this fall. I'm sort of flying blind here so we'll see how it goes.