Friday, May 8, 2015

Something for all four hives

A busy day today for the bees.  I did something in each of the four hives.
Olea's got two more bars.  First I had to cut some comb to remove the last bar.  There was honey and some cross-combing to the adjacent bar.  I put an empty bar between each of the two bars at the end and turned the last one (with the honey and cross-combing) 180 degrees.  Olea's seems to be thriving and most likely will give a comb honey crop.
#1 simply got a second deep box.  About half of the new frames have drawn comb.  The others are pristine foundation, which comes coated with wax or foundations that I covered with new wax.
#2 had the old drone frame removed and replaced with one of the coated frames that I prepared the other day.
The top box of #3
#3 was carefully inspected.  There seems to be a good number of bees.  I got the impression that the proportion of drones had decreased but I have a strong bias to want it to be so.
I did see larvae.  I remembered a hand lens and I did see some eggs.  I did not spot the queen.  The pattern of eggs and larvae was not a strong pattern.
I did see this:
An empty queen cell from which a queen as emerged!  You can tell she emerged by the sharply chewed edges of the opening.
What is going on in #3?  I wish I knew.  It does look like it is doing ok.  In another couple of weeks I will look again and I hope to see lots of capped brood.

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