Into the hives with Kenneth

Kenneth stopped by on his way home from China and we went into the hives yesterday.

The old hive bottom brood box

First we looked into the new hive.  Not much going on in the medium super or top brood box.  There were a lot of bees and brood in the lower deep box.  We couldn't find the queen.  It had been over 4 weeks since I had put in the drone frame.  I has intended to take out the frame every 3 weeks, or so.  It takes 24 days for a drone to mature and hatch.  The frame was mostly hatched today and there were a lot of drones in the hive. We even saw a couple of drones hatching.  We just left the old frame in place.  More below about the drone frame that had been in the freezer.

Looking in the nuc

Then we took a quick peek into the nuc.  There was quite a bit of comb drawn and also nectar.  The nectar was clear because it probably came from all the sugar syrup they are drinking.  They're going through almost a quart a day.  When Maidi and I were out of town in Boonville and Mendocino with Laura, Cathy took care of filling the feeder. (While in Boonville, we met a couple of nice young men.  One of them, Brooks, makes Bite Hard Cider.  We bought a few bottles.)  We didn't look at more than one frame in the nuc.
We left the old hive alone and took a look into Olea's hive.  I was very careful this time to cut the brace comb before removing the bars and didn't break any combs off.  We saw capped brood but didn't see the queen.  I remembered that a new queen will be shy, and this hive swarmed just 8 days ago, so the queen is new and even may have not yet started laying.  I'll have to take a look again in a week or two.
The bees had not yet rebuilt the comb I broke.  The bees were hanging in chains which they do to build comb.

Yum! Honey!

 I had brought the drone frame from the freezer down to the apiary to have on hand if I wanted to swap out the one in the hive.  The bag it had been had a lot of honey in and on it.  I left it on the steps.  I put the drone frame on top of the old hive.  When we were all done and went back to the house, there was a small cloud of bees around the plastic bag.  I moved it to the top of the recycle bin where the bees continued to feed.  Better already processed honey than nectar.  There was also a lot of action on and around the drone frame.  Some honey had dripped onto the porch and the front of the hive, and the bees were slurping it up.

I discovered the bees on the Moraea.  I didn't know they liked them.
Here is a video of a bee getting pollen from a rose, Touch of Class.  Look how she rubs her fuzzy body on the stamens.