Sorry, it's been a few weeks since we updated the blog, but we have been fairly busy and hadn't had a chance to get it done.
Well here's our latest update on our hives, for June 22nd, 2008.
We opened up hive #2 first to see how its progress was going since we had added the second hive body to it.
We started out by pulling the top hive body off of the hive and setting it out of the way so we could check the bottom hive body first.
It looks full...there is still plenty of capped worker cells and very few drone cells and it looked like we have had a population boom.
There were also lots more bees in the hive than was the last time we checked them.
So far the frames in the hive body on hive #2 are looking really nice and the honey flow seems to be on...The bees were capping honey in the top hive body and it is looking nice too.
Makes me want a sample, but this is their honey for winter and we can't touch it. Hopefully in a week or two we will be able to add our supers if the bees get the hive body frames filled by then.
It looks like we have around half of the frames in the top hive body, either capped or in the process of being capped. We were also able to find the Queen in hive #2; she was on the last frame that we checked in the bottom hive body.
After putting everything back together on hive #2 we took a short break before moving on to hive #1.
As soon as we got done with our short break, we pulled the top hive body off of hive #1 and set it to the side as we had done with the first hive.
The inside of the hive looked almost identical to hive #2 with all but maybe one or two frames empty or partially filled. There were also quite a few worker cells capped in the frames that were filled. We also noticed that this hive also showed very few drone cells, which is nice.
This hive must have the elusive queen...We couldn't find her again, but there are signs that she's still there. This makes the second time out of three that we were not able to locate the queen in this hive. There are still plenty of fresh cells so the probability that she's missing is very difficult to say. Hopefully not, we will just have to wait and see.
That’s all we have for today. At least we got done before the thunderstorms moved in to the area this evening.
