
I sneaked outside today to check the hive. It's been two and a half weeks since I was there last so I expected lots of changes. Not many, really. Pretty much the same as the last time.
Lots and lots and lots of bees. Didn't seem as aggressive today as last time, but then again, I wasn't as nervous from the abundance of population as I was last time.
Oh, the last time. There was an enormous population explosion during the third week of bees. I opened the hive and each built frame was so heavy with bees, brood, etc. that I had a hard time lifting them! (An empty frame by contrast feels like picking up a piece of paper!) There were so many bees that I got a little spooked and made some mistakes. First, I was nervous that bees were crawling on my hands. There were so many that they were just spreading out, I guess. The first time, I flicked my hand behind me to get the bee off and she whipped out into the grass a good distance. The second time I flicked a bee, I didn't do such a good job and she got mad. And her friends got mad. They started swirling around me and their buzzing significantly increased. Kinda got a little more scared. Then I felt a bee crawling up my leg inside my pants just under my knee. I froze and I felt it crawl up and up, slowly, slowly until I was insane a la the tell-tale heart and I went running in and took off my pants as fast as I could. No bee! (Now I put rubber bands around my pants legs!)
So today was much like last time. I squished three hive beetles. Not bad. I saw one of them because it was on the run with a worker bee chasing it down. I let it run onto my hive tool and then I squished it :)
There were four of my frames not built out at all and one frame that was built on one side. The bees had started storing pollen there since the last time I saw them. I'm pretty sure they should be doing more building but I bet it's because there's not much of a flow going on.
No queen cells, no drone cells. Lots of capped brood. The open cells contained larvae. I have some cleaning up of burr comb to do but I'm not sure how you hold a frame of bees and scrape off wax at the same time... There were a number of bees with their pollen baskets full and even a few with their bodies completely dusted yellow with pollen.
I saw the queen after going through the frames a second time. She didn't seem to be moving very quickly and then I realized it was probably because she was carrying a worker bee on her back. So I can't really judge her harshly for that.
The American Bee Journal finally had something useful in it - a checklist for inspections. I'll reproduce it here and fill it out after each inspection. All in all, a good looking hive.
By the way, that's not a picture of my hive. It looks kinda like that, though. You can see the capped brood in the upper left corner.
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