Guest beekeeper

For our July 29th inspection, we had a guest beekeeper. Our niece from Ohio came for a visit and helped with our inspection this week. The bees were very cooperative and offered a nice demonstration.

The #1 hive still seems to be stuck in suspended animation. No activity since last week that we could see. The upper super remains almost untouched.

Hive #2 has made some good progress since last week. This hive has three medium supers for the hive-body instead of the deeps. The third (upper) super is now about 80% drawn comb and is filled equally with brood and capped honey. We'll be adding our first honey super this week - hooray!

July 21 Inspection

IMG_4274a
Originally uploaded by D.Broberg

We checked the hives today and found little progress since we added the second super to Hive #1. There was some drawn comb, but no honey that we could see. It seems strange that we found one frame where the girls seemed to be packing pollen. This back-lit photo captured some of the colors of the pollen (and the bees!).

It seems that there is plenty in bloom lately and the bees are working the flowers long and hard, but what are they doing? Where is our honey?